In Paris I tried to order some croissants in a bakery. I spoke slowly "six croissaints", pointing to the crummy broad. The woman behind the counter looked at me like I was insane. After 7 times repeating this act, she responded "Ah… croissants!"

Photography by LongHornDave.

I went to a customer a couple of years ago and I tried to explain him the steps to be taken to install his new system. The guy worked for over 30 years in this industrial company, and had worked his way up from bottom to the top. I rolled out my A3 Gantt chart. He looked at the sheet, tore it apart, took a small piece of paper and a pen, asking me: "what do you want me to do?"
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Reality is difficult to analyze. Project Managers still have to eliminate root-causes to major problems though. How to analyze today's complexity? I found something worthwhile exploring: Panarchy. Its origin is in ecosystem management, where it is used for assessment on how ecosystems, social systems and economic systems are interacting. How complex do you want to go?

Photography by Tscherno.

"Panarchy is a conceptual framework to account for the dual, and seemingly contradictory, characteristics of all complex systems – stability and change. It is the study of how economic growth and human development depend on ecosystems and institutions, and how they interact." (from SustainableScale.org)

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This week Project Shrink is a year old. Yah! During this year (and actually in the 5 years before) I am obsessed with this Project Management riddle:

Photography by kk+.

• There is a large bucket of Project Management methods and techniques
• We face a world of infinite complexity
• A Project Manager only has one pair of eyes, one pair of ears, one large mouth and a small brain.
• How are you going to pull the right rabbit out of the bucket to take on the project world?

My answer so far:

• By having fabulous eyes and ears.
• By reducing the size of your mouth.
• By utilizing the full capacity of your brain.

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My monthly column at TechTarget.com is up: "Software project managers should allow for experimentation" (original title: We Have No Clue. So What To Do?).

Photography by Ctd 2005.

"The solution is so simple. But somehow, "experimenting" lost its appeal. Management (with a capital "M") doesn't allow uncertainties. The whole quality hype didn't help us either, with its "zero defects" and "doing it right the first time" crap. It just means we should think before we do something. It doesn't mean we should kill everyone that needs a second attempt! Heck, even Frederick Brooks wrote in his classic The Mythical Man Month "the management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that." His advice? Plan to throw one away."

Read the entire article.

[sarcasm]

The professionals enter the building, their suits, hair and shoes all shiny and stuff. They roll out their charts, the flashy binders, and difficult words. They are very expensive, so they must be good.

Photography by AnyJazz65.

They try to avoid too much contact with the users; the dinosaurs that perform the "normal" work, not the divine "project" tasks. When talking about the users, the professionals always lower their voices, they almost whisper. "They are all nice people, but not as smart as us."
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Change is all around us. It always has been and it always will be. As a Project Manager you have to make sure your project team satisfies a defined business goal. Change within a project and its surroundings is a given. The PM should not question change, he should not resist change and he should not blame everything that doesn't go to plan on change. When change is all around us, this means within the project, the surroundings and also the Project Manager self. Change is not a separate entity. It's part of nature. And so are we.

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