Archives for the month of: August, 2008

A short while ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Maria Gajewski of Never The Same River Twice. You can read the entire interview on her blog. She asked me

2284001599 835d31edbd Interview At Never The Same River Twice

Photography by Ron Almog.

  • How I came to the conclusion that “Projects Are About Humans, Now Deal With That!”?
  • Why it is this so important to have mental flexibility and what is one thing that you can do right now to increase our mental flexibility?
  • How a project manager can help his or her team increase their resilience?
  • What will be happening here at Project Shrink in the next few months?

… and more.

Hop over, read the interview, and while you are there, subscribe to this blog about personal and organizational change.

Whether you are managing an on site project or an offshore one, getting the best out of your team takes effort, planning and tact. More so with offshore projects because of the ‘X’ factor; so much is unknown to you when you step out of your own circle. The offshore team can be based anywhere in the world but it is usually the developing countries that are the most tempting. The biggest motivation behind offshore projects is financial, therefore strong. The challenge is to convert this motivation into a successfully supervised project and we have 25 rock solid tips just to achieve that;

officeworker1 25 Rock Solid Tips to Supervise Offshore Development

1. The most basic thing you can do while managing an overseas project is to understand the culture of your offshore team. There are words and actions acceptable in your culture that may be extremely offensive to your workers. Similar is the sense of humor of different cultures; what is funny to you may be offensive to them and there is not worse way to lose respect in another’s eyes than to appear as if you are laughing at him. Your job as the PM is to learn about the differences in culture, appreciate them and make sure you deal with your offshore team in a manner that does not offend them.
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Andrew Filev is the author of the Project Management 2.0 blog and CEO of Wrike. He has a very interesting view on Project Management, which he describes as Project Management 2.0. He also created an amazing PM Tool that supports his notion of Project Management 2.0: Wrike.

I had a great interview with him, which I will share with you in three parts over the next few weeks. This is part one in which he explains the concept of emerging structures and how this relates to Project Management.

Emerging Structure

Bas: “There are two terms you use when talking about Project Management 2.0 and Wrike: collective intelligence and emerging structure. With “collective intelligence” you make use of your entire organization. But could you clarify “emerging structure”?”

Andrew: “Sure. Let’s say there is a group of people working on something. You may have a top-down approach, when the manager or the head of the group implies structure. In the project management case, it’s most likely a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The project manager spends some time at the beginning of the project and designs a WBS that will stay throughout the project. It will probably be extended a little bit, made more detailed, but there is little chance that the WBS will be changed dramatically. Because that is very hard to do, it would require the project manager to re-plan everything himself, and that’s a lot of hassle.

1384952210 81c119458c Emerging Structures In Project Management   Speaking With Andrew Filev
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The second half of this year will be all about “Tribes”. Master marketing blogger Seth Godin has written yet another book: “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us“. Although details are not known, “according to Godin, Tribes are groups of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other. Tribes make our world work, and always have.”

1199545090 fcbc276b43 Project Tribes: The Goal And The Leader

Photography by The Dilli Lama.

Would this be a useful way of looking at projects?

I think so. It’s always nice to jump on a hype bandwagon once in a while. And it has such a nice ring: Project Tribes.

The central element of a tribe is the leader and the idea, the goal. You need a leader who can inspire, one that can present Big Audacious Goals that seem to rock the world. Your project needs Al Gore, your project needs goals like “Save The Planet”. That’s why people join the gang. That’s why people want to be part of it.

The goal and the leader.

The leader will set some rules of interaction. The leader will keep efforts aligned. Within this context the teams get self-organized and the Big Hairy Audacious Goal makes sure it’s all in the right direction.

So it’s not top down, and it’s not entirely bottom up.

It’s all about tribes.

My column at TechTarget this month is called “Offshore outsourcing projects: Seven things every PM should know

1. Stereotype!

All Americans carry a gun. All Dutch people are cheapskates. All French waiters…well, don’t get me started! We humans love to stereotype. We simply need to. If there is one part in our brain that is “unknown,” if there is a spot in our universe we have no clue about, we go mental. We have to fill in some “stub” information if the real information is not available to us. Even when we know that the information we use is not correct. We are more comfortable with false information than with no information.

2451750096 8f1f42f35d 7 Things You Need To Know When Dealing With Offshore Projects

Photography by Gadongen76.
The other six are:

2. You are wrong!
3. It’s different!
4. Communicate!
5. Embrace overhead
6. Baby steps!
7. Be swell!

Read more.