by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

Times are changing. The world is getting smaller. World orders are shifting. The ocean is turning into a pond. That is the whole idea behind the Fish Pond Metaphor. In this posting we will have a more detailed look about the globalization, into people interacting on a global scale. What is going on in The Big Pond?

What Drives Human Behavior?

Our investigation starts however on the lowest level: the individual inhabitant of our planet. What is driving their behavior? What is determining the way they interact with other people? Our journey has to start here before we can make some sense of the overall result of all those interactions a global scale. Read more

This is a guest post by Craig Brown. He usually writes in a more serious tone about project management, requirements management and business analysts at www.betterprojects.net.

Are they really? Probably not everywhere and probably not all the time but there are force at work that keep our project mangers scowling.

• Other peoples money: Dealing with that responsibility can be stressful for many people. Its good practice to treat your clients money as if it were yours, but really, if you have $5 million, would you waste it on a software project? No wonder our PMs feel the pressure to perform.

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First attempt I will be starting with a few short videocasts like this one to accompany the creation of "The Fish Pond Metaphor".

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

As a Project Manager you are now more than ever faced with the fact that part of your team is at the other end of the world. Different cultures, different time zones, different languages, different customs. You hardly see them, let alone know them. A part of the team (and stakeholders) may permanently be on the move. They are multitasking beyond compare. It is rare if someone is dedicated fulltime to one project. For most of them you dont have fulltime tasks. You need more and more different specializations for every new project you take on. More people doing more fragmented tasks.

Globalization has affected the work environments in many ways. Now, we refer to the networked world as a small village. This has led to many new aspects of project management such as self-organizing teams, risk management, information poverty, virtual teams and project management, information economy, and many other aspects. The question in mind is to find a suitable metaphor that fulfills these requirements. What other systems that lived within a large space and then moved into small space? Read more

Is Project Management Passe?
"Gartner isn't saying that PM is going the way of the Dodo Bird as a discipline or skill set; to the contrary, they are saying it has/will essentially become commoditized as a common element of the general management repertoire ” think more along the lines of gulls and starlings. I have to agree on that point."

Is Project Management a Fad?
"An emerging theme that I have encountered in conversations of late is the perception that project management is becoming the latest management fad. Interestingly, my reaction has ranged from "Is it?" to "Already?" to "Why did it take this long?"

"Stockholm Syndrome" in project execution and management
"What do you think on the Stockholm Syndrome in project execution and management? Did you ever experience or observed it? Did you ever try to help? The Stockholm Syndrome is the behavior of kidnap victims who become sympathetic to their captors. "

Motivation in Virtual Teams: Lessons from Virtual Worlds
"Last week I read a report called Leadership in Games and at Work: Implications for the Enterprise of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMOGs), put out by an organization called Seriosity. Their study investigated the lessons that MMOGs might have for leadership in the workplace, with the suggestion that experience in MMOGs or virtual worlds crosses over to real work and leadership situations."

Small Team Collaboration: Seven Key Beliefs To Work As A Great Team
"What makes great teams be such? Is it a matter of coincidental matters that some teams perform systematically above average or being a high performance team is due to specific traits of those that make the team up?"

Managing IT Projects
"I'm often asked how we manage IT projects. Do we have an Enterprise Project Management Office? A tracking Gantt chart for every project?"

Shameless Self Promotion: Me On Better Projects
Thanks Craig "So I asked Bas, where he sees Project Sociology fitting in to that spectrum, and why is it he seems to becoming an agile enthusiast?"

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

Turn on your television and try not to look at CSI Miami, NYC or Tonopah. It is amazing how popular crime series are, crime series where the technicians will save the day. It must be a universal thing, as the series are as popular in Europe as in The United States. For a Project Manager it is a great inspiration. They find a dead corpse and an FBI Profiler is brought on the scene. He looks around, sniffs the air and creates a nice profile of the potential killer. Gut feeling, combined with a mix of experience and science may transform a dark alley into a rich source of evidence.

When looking daily at the remains of your planning you probably feel like an FBI Profiler, or more appropriate, a Project Profiler. Look at the evidence and know the problem: death by control. Like at the FBI, based upon assumptions a profile is created. New information can lead to new assumptions and a new profile. But also the underlying assumptions steer the direction of the investigation, hoping to find evidence that support the probability of the profile. So, it is not just a matter of information gathering, and presto, you have a clear cut description of the problem. It is a lot of backward and forward reasoning. Based upon some first sparse info snippets assumptions are made, and as time progresses you get a cycle of assumptions leading to the direction of investigation and information leading towards change in assumptions. Read more