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

Why Reality Will Not Stick To Your Plan

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

Project life can be quite frustrating when one day after another turns out not how you planned it. The software should be ready when you said it would. It has to. Otherwise you have people waiting, customers complaining and bosses getting annoyed. It is your reputation and ultimately your job on the line. If you just plan harder, more detailed, than the plan must be correct. Right? Of course not. It is a shock for a lot of people, but you cant force reality in sticking to your plan. Forget it. It is not going to happen. Ever. Looking at management practices in general around corporations around the globe, it seems to be a habit hard to break, a state of mind hard to get rid of.

Having a false mental model of how it all works “ projects, management, people, reality “ has disastrous results. IT Projects have a high failure rate with poor estimating, planning and Project Management as one of the main reasons why. If you think you can predict the future, if you think you can plot the path reality has to take, but in fact you cant, you have the source of the high failure rate of projects.
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What Do We Know

"The capacity of humans to deceive each other is well documented by history and personal experience. Less well known, however, is the capacity of most living things to deceive each other - species deceiving other species, members of their own species and themselves. We are, it seems, not that different from parasites, insects and bacteria in this regard."

Check out the cool collection of audio interviews at ITConversations for more gems like this one.

What do you wish your CEO knew about Agile?

"If you could get the boss to understand one thing, just ONE THING, related to Agile development… what would it be? Why that?"

Accountability: A Self-Check

"I've been thinking lately about the subject of accountability. After communication, accountability is the issue that my clients most often point out as areas that need improvement. As a manager, holding my employees accountable was probably my biggest challenge."

Project Headaches “ More to Come

"Computerworld does an annual Vital Signs survey of IT managers. The number one management challenge identified by respondents is now Managing Projects. This is up from its number three ranking last year."

Project Euler

"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."

Primate Programming

"Humans and higher primates share approximately 97% of their DNA in common. Recent research in primate programming suggests computing is a task that most higher primates can easily perform. Visual Basic 6.0 was the preferred IDE for the majority of experiment primate subjects."

I recently had a chance to read a paper by Allan L. Scherr of IBM on managing highly effective software projects. In brief, the premise of the paper is that creative breakthroughs can be induced by setting a highly aggressive schedule and doing whatever is necessary to meet deadline. Basically the method calls for inviting project participants to commit to delivering quality work on or ahead of schedule.

Photography by fdecomite.

After the project participants are on-board, the idea is to make a declaration pertaining to the delivery schedule. "The project will be completed within 18 months using only the staff on-hand and at 70% of the original budget estimate." Like Babe Ruth pointing to the fences before a homerun, the managers in the organization call their shot. Every member of the project commits not only to the details of the project delivery, but also to whatever else is important to each member of the team (vacation time, limiting overtime, etc.)
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Six months ago I was ranting over the concept of Social Project Management, a term coined Leisa Reichelt. Although I still stand by the content of my posting, I must correct one thing. I finally found the original presentation and wow, she is absolutely right and on the money! I do apologize…

Look for yourself. Skip through the slides and enjoy.

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