Earlier this month Ted.com published a presentation by Howard Rheingold called "Way-New Collaboration". He talks about how the old paradigm of command-control is being replaced by Way-New Collaboration. He connects his story with social dilemma's like Prisoners Dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons. This is the best presentation I've seen that is telling the story I am trying to tell!" Why didn't I come up with this

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You really have to check this out: LiquidPlanner.com. If there is a playground for project management software, this is the cool kid to hang out with. It is Web 2.0, it is cool, it is innovative and it is just what our profession is looking for. Look at their site to see what I am raving about.

I had the opportunity to have a small chat with Jason Carlson, the co-founder and VP of Engineering of LiquidPlanner.

What tools did you use yourself when you were Project Managers?
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Tiger Teams vs. Agile Project Management Practices
"Often times when introducing some of the basic agile project management practices to new teams (for example, the daily standup) some of the more experienced (ok, older) team members comment on the fact that these techniques look a lot like the techniques they used in the past when their projects were in deadline trouble."

Mingle on my Wii: The Purple Cow of Agile Project Management Tools
"The next thing I got working on the Wii was Mingle. I was inspired by the YouTube video of Agile 2007 where Studios was demonstrating Mingle on a Wii to the conference attendees. All I had to do was point the Wiis Opera browser to an instance of Mingle running from my laptop on the local network, and lo and behold Mingle was right there on my Wii."

Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development
"For the last four years ThoughtWorks has operated a lab in Bangalore India to support our software development projects in North America and Europe. Traditional approaches to offshore development are based on plan-driven methodologies, but we are very firmly in the agile camp. Here I discuss our experiences and lessons learned in doing offshore agile development. So far we've discovered that we can make it work, although the benefits are still open to debate."
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By Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

The fish pond represents a complex ecosystem. Being confined in space, a fish pond allows for the observation of what goes inside it. The fish is disturbed if predators are present in the pond or if they are stressed by the presence of parasites, lack of Oxygen or space, lack of appropriate place to hide or if exposed to strong light, just to name few factors. External stress may easily remove the fish from their comfort zone. External disturbance of fish pond by anglers hook compound the stress on the fish, which in turn behave abnormally.

In contrast, watching fish without disturbing them does not added an element of stress on fish and accordingly the fish behave normally. Direct watching of fish in the fish pond is made difficult if the surface of the water is turbid. The wear of Polaroid glasses and by watching the pond from a short distance above the water surface helps in reducing this problem. Read more

People are talking about it. I have said myself in my monthly column:

"Personally I am very thrilled to have tools available that can express uncertainties in planning (e.g. LiquidPlanner.com). The trick is to provide range estimations, for example. Instead of stating that something is finished on date A, you provide a range, between date A and B. The wider the range, the higher the uncertainty of that particular task. For a PM it is a gift from heaven. You can communicate your uncertainty. Death to the one dimensional Gantt chart. Hail to the multi-dimensional Uncertainty Based Multi Range Task Chart!"

I will be posting more detailed information, but for now, check out this movie about LiquidPlanner.com.