by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

As a Project Manager you are now more than ever faced with the fact that part of your team is at the other end of the world. Different cultures, different time zones, different languages, different customs. You hardly see them, let alone know them. A part of the team (and stakeholders) may permanently be on the move. They are multitasking beyond compare. It is rare if someone is dedicated fulltime to one project. For most of them you dont have fulltime tasks. You need more and more different specializations for every new project you take on. More people doing more fragmented tasks.

Globalization has affected the work environments in many ways. Now, we refer to the networked world as a small village. This has led to many new aspects of project management such as self-organizing teams, risk management, information poverty, virtual teams and project management, information economy, and many other aspects. The question in mind is to find a suitable metaphor that fulfills these requirements. What other systems that lived within a large space and then moved into small space? We find that fish ponds provide a suitable metaphor. We transferred fish from rivers, seas and oceans and accommodated them in tanks, jars or ponds. We have also gained experiences in monitoring the behavior of fish in ponds. What are these lessons? How may we relate them to project management? What changes are necessary in managing projects? These questions and others are the theme of this work.

The new trends of the global business and their associated tensions have been ably summarized as follows:

• Globalization: Global versus Local
• Diversity: Heterogeneity versus Homogeneity
• Flexibility: Flexibility versus Stability
• Flat: Centralization versus Decentralization
• Networks: Interdependence versus Independence

A summary of these concepts is given.

• Globalization- Globalization is a converging and diverging force at the same time. Companies merge and diversify products and services while having at the same time to tailor these products to the tastes and needs of each local market.
• Diversity- Globalization has increased the diversity of employees in organizations. Never before groups of different cultures, have backgrounds, specialities and ages been put to work in the same place. The tension on how to deal with diversity of people necessitates the acquirement of communication skills to a degree that has been never experienced before.
• Flexibility- Established work norms are in tension with new ones. Self-organizing teams, flexible working hours and deviation from long-established procedures create tension because of peoples tendencies to reject and resist change. But to stay competitive in the global markets people need flexibility to produce new products and services while maintaining a minimum structure to hold the company together.
• Flat- It is the fastest who wins and not the strongest. Information and its communication need circulate fast in organizations nowadays. The swing from pyramidal organizations to flat organizations is creating tension from those who are on top of the orthodox pyramidal organizations and from managers who love to manage by controlling others. Self-interest is conflicting with organizational-interest and this is creating tension.
• Networks- Networking enhances flexibility of organizations as well as reduction of fixed costs. However; these benefits are in tension with the need to control distantly positioned teams to keep the quality of products and services.

We propose a new metaphor for project management: that is The Fish Pond Metaphor. The reasoning behind selecting this metaphor is to provide a fresh look at projects that cover the realities of todays business climate and that assist the practisioning Project Manager in his daily work life.

We need a metaphor that fulfills the following requirements:

• A live metaphor. Water in a pond is subject to variations and is not static. Growth of algae, draining, response to changes such as temperature and acidity fluctuations affect water and make it a live metaphor as fish that live in this water are affected too.
• Use of different scales of the metaphor to allow for experimentation on different conditions, sizes, times and environments.
• A metaphor that allows for use of the extended mirrors in that we may not only visualize, but also experiment on a small scale to see behind the boundaries.
• A metaphor that is communicative, adaptive and sensitive to changes.
• A metaphor that allows to study the effect of the environment on individuals, groups and external changes.
• A metaphor that is sensitive to minor changes that affect a host of dynamic balances to allow the study of responses to such changes.
• A metaphor that is sensitive to location because it lies on the boundary of different climatic zones so as to optimize its selection and to promote the potential of success of the project.
• A metaphor that doesnt provide a very gloomy view of the world, but is realistic enough.

We live in a world that is changing continuously. Change creates tension and tension is stressful. Globalization has created five major tensions. The fish pond metaphor reflects these stresses:

• Global Vs local or big seas Vs small ponds
• Diversity- We may diversify the fish ponds by adding to the pond aggressive fish, food-greedy fish, hibernating fish, and contaminants, toxic materials (toxic employees) and different plants that increase the competition for space.
• Flexibility- fish may gather in schools as a way of self-organizing. How flexible fish are to changes and how they cope with them. Some fish hibernate while others die. Big fish might eat small fish like big competitors eating small competitors.
• Flat- Fish use different communication channels depending on where it is located. Electromagnetic signals, voice and body movement that conveys messages to other fish are means of circumventing communication barriers. Fish lure other fish to capture them and feed on them.
• Networking- Communication skills mean maximizing interactions among fish.

The concept of the fish pond metaphor lies in viewing the fish pond as a miniature for the global world. Globalization has increased the interconnectedness of countries but at a price- the social and political powers also got reshaped. Poorer, 'peripheral', countries have become even more dependent on activities in 'central' economies such as the USA where capital and technical expertise tend to be located. Globalization involves the diffusion of ideas, practices and technologies, and fish ponds involve the diffusion of oxygen in the pond and of communication. Ponds may easily become muddy and globalization is thus hindered. Communication, availability of food and space affect social relationships with far greater magnitude in a fish pond than in an ocean. Small local muddy area in a pond is expected to have far greater effect than the same muddy spot in an ocean. Globalization has revealed that such a trend really exists. Anthony Giddens (1990: 64) has described globalization as 'the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa'. This involves a change in the way we understand geography and experience localness.

Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas de Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of www.SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.