Archives for the month of: May, 2009

What Makes Social Media Social?

May 29, 09 //

Why isn’t a document on a shared workspace “social media”?

Social media is all about having a “conversation”. An exchange of information between persons.

You can write your question in a word document. Upload it. Send me a mail. I check the mail. Download the document. Answer the question. Well, you get the idea.

Yes, it’s a hassle. But that is not why this conversation isn’t “social media”.

Photography by From A Second Story.

Social media puts the emphasis on the person in the conversation.

It is not only about the message itself, but also about the persona’s of the people involved in the exchange.

That is why we love big photos of REAL people next to the conversation. That is why it’s important to have an prominent “about” page on your blog.

When we have a conversation the actual content of the message is only a small part of the story. Based upon our perception of the other person we fill in blanks, we create assumptions, we draw conclusions and color the message to a more “detailed” image.

Social media supports multiple mechanisms to help us fill in the blanks.

LinkedIn displays the badges of the groups you are a member of. People see the groups you are associating yourself with and create assumptions based on that. I am a member of the Triiibes group; so I must be cool.

The mechanism works the same as the “I am a PC, I am a Mac” campaign. If you have a PC, people think you are a nerd, if you have a Mac, people think you are cool and creative.

LinkedIn provides recommendations. People write recommendations for other people. Building a reputation. If I need a plumber, I ask my neighbour. I trust my neighbour, so I trust the plumber he recommends. The reputation that is build up and propagated is used by me to build up a mental construct of the persona.

Social media puts the person back into online conversations. That is what makes it “social”.

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Freestyling: Beating Agile, Lean And Plan-driven Hands Down

May 28, 09 //

Last week I got an email asking if I am an Agilist.

Scuze me? I am Dutch. Does that count?

Of course I know about agile approaches. Yes, I know Scrum.

Yes, I know the devastating effects a single minded, too narrow focused, command-and-control fanatic can have on the workplace.

But I also know that you can create a balance between plan-driven and agile approaches.

balance Freestyling: Beating Agile, Lean And Plan driven Hands Down
Image by SuperFantastic.

I also know that humans need to categorize everything just to make sense of the world.

When combining the two statements, it will become obvious that “plan-driven” and “agile” are also some arbitrary concepts created by humans to support the limited mind. There is no natural law defining “agile”, there is no eternal balance putting each of them on the extremes of some kind of scale.

It is just us, making up a context we can understand. You can call it whatever you want. And you can put in anything you like. Or out, if you want.

Brian Marick believes Agile is being dumbed down. So he created Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism. Just to be sure no one would take that name and create it into something else.

Paul Ritchie mentions the emergence of “Sim”: “… because this piece is in Forbes, I’ll bet that smart c-level folks will soon be asking their PMOs about whether they are incorporating this approach into their methodologies.”

People!

There is just a problem that needs to be taken care of. There is just a team that must be managed. Just observe the situation and look for the cause. Don’t get caught up in “finding the right method”.

Find the problem. Find the solution.

We don’t need sexy flexi Agilist. We don’t need plan-driven commanders.

We need people that can use any technique, any mindset, any approach at the right time.

We need: Freestylers!

You need to be Freestyling.

We need our own song!

Agile. Plan-driven. Waterfall. Freestyling.

I did it again, didn’t I?

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The Secret To Boosting Your Effectiveness As A Project Manager

May 27, 09 //

Do you want to boost your effectiveness as a Project Manager sky high?

Do you want to know The Real Secret? (hmmmm, I think I will turn this into a movie and have a following)

ahum The Secret To Boosting Your Effectiveness As A Project Manager

You know projects are about people, right?

You know failure to communicate is one of the biggest causes of project failure, don’t you?

Provide feedback.

The sky opens up, new age music is sounding from the speakers. The Scret to clear and effective communication is …

Feedback.

In communication you have a sender and a receiver. The sender tries to get a message across. The receiver provides reflection on how the message is received or encourages the sender to clarify the message.

feedback2 The Secret To Boosting Your Effectiveness As A Project Manager

With simple Reflective Listening techniques you can develop your communication skills:

Paraphrasing: repeat the same information, but only in different words.
Reflecting: reply with the same words, only add additional emotion to it (say it more strongly or more sad).
Questioning: ask for more information to have a better understanding.
Summarize: create a summary of the message sent.

(I tried to locate the original source of these techniques, but failed. If you know, drop a comment.)

You can create anything into a habit, just by repeating it, over and over again. Provide feedback for a couple of weeks, and you will experience an amazing boost in the effectiveness of your communication.

Just don’t over do it. It may scare people.

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Filtering Information: Why You Cannot See Everything

May 26, 09 //

I am tired. I am exhausted from all the information that is poured over me daily.

I already stopped watching television (except for Knight Rider). I only listen to non-stop music radio stations.

Sometimes it feels like being hosed down by information.

In the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” Andrew B Newberg, MD states:

“Our brain receives 400 billion bits/second of information, but we’re only aware of 2000 bits/second.”

Great. I seem to be able to use broadband, but currently I am running a 14Kb dial in modem.

I need to neglect information. I have to reduce the input.

Fish have a great mechanism for this, it’s called “front priority“:

“If the fish act upon any piece of information that hits their body the movement of the school gets slow and slight chaotic. By focusing mainly on the fish in front of them, you get this tightly packed movement. The fish seem to swim upstream the information flow.”

If we ignore pieces of information we are better off than having all the information? Can this be true?

Apparently so.

In his book “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term “thin-slicing“:

“… our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones.”

This “thin slice of reality” is a pattern of all things happening in your surroundings. You take the slice and compare it with patterns stored in your mind. When you find a matching pattern, you have made up your mind about a particular situation. This is an unconscious process.

These patterns are dynamic systems in action, a human system seen over a time period. Patterns are trends over time and involve dependencies with other systems.

To spot such trends in projects we use metrics as indicators. If I have the right metrics I can ignore everything around me and focus just on the dashboard.

Can this be true?

We use metrics as indicators, but we need to visualize the data in such a way that trends and dependencies get visible.

The Gantt chart is a bad example. A very bad example.

Tufte presents a design for a Project Management interface that addresses some of the problems with rendering large Gantt Charts. He advocates splitting the chart into two views. At the top of the chart, you see the project timeline laid out in phases, with the current phase denoted with a unique color. On the bottom half of the chart, the local view basically zooms in on the current phase to display more detail.

I am still tired.

But it seems the best thing is to focus on a few things, reduce the input. It will increase my performance. But only if the input is presented in a proper way, in a way that visualizes trends and dependencies.

Can this really be true?

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Role Of The PMBoK Guide In The Project Management Profession

May 25, 09 //

At the PMI EMEA Global Congress in Amsterdam I had the pleasure of talking to Brian Weiss, VP of Product Management at Project Management Institute. He explains his view on the role the PMBoK guide plays in the Project Management profession.

The last couple of weeks were an amazing experience for me: I became a member of PMI’s New Media Council (together with great people like Cornelius Fichtner, Dave Garrett, Elizabeth Harrin, Hal Macomber, Jerry Manas, Josh Nankivel, Chalyce Nollsch and Raven Young) and attended PMI EMEA Global Congress.

Blog postings about the PMI EMEA Congress in Amsterdam:

By Bob Tarne:
PMI EMEA Congress, Day 1
PMI EMEA Congress, Day 2
Final thoughts on PMI EMEA

By Jesse Fewell:
Live From PMI Global Congress Amsterdam – Day 1
Live From PMI Global Congress Amsterdam – Days 2 and 3

By Dave Prior:
Day Two of the 2009 PMI EMEA Global Congress

Thanks everyone for giving me this great experience!

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