During the summer of 2007 I asked myself two questions (well, some more, but who cares about my favorite pizza):

1) why is the most popular way of doing Project Management plan driven?
2) why did agile methods pop up during the mid-nineties and not earlier or later?

Red Square - Moscow

The answers resulted in two papers published last year at PMWorldToday and spurred the birth of "Project Shrink" (yeah, this blog).

You have to read them to see where this blog is coming from

How Male Machismo Shaped Project Management
Why Agile Popped Up on the Radar When it Did

On "Project Shrink" a recurring theme is "globalization". The following postings are among my favorites within this topic:

The Big Pond: Global Village

"Until now we didn't touch on the current trends that are taking place. The world is shrinking. But what does that mean? The world is getting flat is a statement we hear a lot. It reflects the effect of globalization on economic needs."

Tiananmen Square - Bejing
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If you are looking for a great starter to discuss cultural diversity within teams or diversity in general, this fabulous short story from Pixar "For The Birds" is a good help.

The animation is 3 minutes long and you can find it here on YouTube.

Other postings that get you started:

Deviant Behavior In Project Management
Do You Know Why Every Manager Wears A Suit?
Project Sociology - Part One (video)
Project Sociology - Part Two (video)
Change Perspective: Working In Bangalore

Currently I am tracking 103 blogs related to "Project Management". Last month I found the following postings highly remarkable and interesting…

Is it Time to Panic?

"As you look at your own firm and your own situation, it is not a time to take foolish risks. Frankly, it’s never a time to do that, so nothing has changed. It is a time to adopt a philosophy that seeks to find opportunity in chaos. It is a time to carefully evaluate your strategies and check your assumptions. It is also a time to consider making some hard calls on your future. Working for a firm in the post 9/11 world where the board and leadership had the courage to invest in reinventing the firm’s core offerings at a time when our competitors were scaling back R+D efforts, was a brilliant learning lesson. "

Foolish Productivity: The Hobgoblin of Creative Minds
What Does Creativity Create?
Was This My Idea, or Am I Being Brainwashed?
Is the Downside of Telecommuting the Specter of Outsourcing?
Financial resilience - Taleb and Mandelbrot reflect on crisis
Are You a Socially Intelligent Leader?
Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers (Q3 2008) Yay! Nr 57! Yoohoo!
Effective Status Reports
What are the right conditions for agile adoption?

You can get my daily recommendations of great postings by subscribing to this RSS feed:
http://www.softwareprojects.org/reader

Read this for more information.

"Planning and implementing organizational systems and practices to manage people so that the potential advantages of diversity are maximized while its potential disadvantages are minimized" (Cultural Diversity in Organization by Taylor H. Cox)

Our communities are like rainbows, every color is unique, every color is pretty when used right but it can appear quite ugly when misused. A diverse, multicultural work environment is the same; it needs to be handled well to be effective just as the rainbow looks pretty in the order it is, but if you put colors together without considering their individuality or their role in the whole, the end product would be signify chaos instead of perfect beauty.

Here are 23 tips for working in a multicultural team:

1. Flexibility is the key to working in a multicultural environment; the work environment always demands flexibility on your part, but in a multicultural environment the adaptation becomes all the more important. The flexibility that is so important in dealing with anything that does not confirm to our own beliefs ensures your coworkers feel you are not judging them by religion or race, in a work environment, and as humans, their personal qualities and the value of their work matters, never the color of their skin.
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