"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." -Kurt Vonnegut

Projects are about humans. I know; it says so on my blog. Projects are people working together.

Problems in projects are people problems. I know; research says so. And my blog.

Currently projects operate in complex, mobile, global, on-demand, around the clock, instant and diverse environment. I know you know.

THE question is how we can mold Project Managers in such a way that they can operate within this context? It sounds to me that we should focus on people, people working together, complexity and globalization. And of course another zillion aspects.

We should be getting PMs using all three parts of their brain (left, right and heart). That might not be the "pure" Project Management discipline curriculum. Who cares. If it is what we need, you can call it whatever you want, as long as you educate yourself along those lines.

We need to educate ourselves as Project Managers. But not in new checklists or new procedures. We need to learn the fundamentals, the "why's". It will last longer.

"Give a Man a Fish, Feed Him For a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, Feed Him For a Lifetime" - Lao Tzu

This year, I learned that you cannot jump from the PMBoK directly to topics like "mental flexibility" and "emotional intelligence". I am sorry to tell you, but most people cannot make that jump that fast. A path to "project enlightenment" has to be defined. Conveniently, I think I have one.

In Buddhism teachings are presented in Turnings of The Wheel Of Dharma. Each turn builds upon the previous one and brings the student to a higher level of consciousness. I love this as a metaphor. It provides a great analogy for my path to "project enlightenment"…

The Four Dharmas Of Project Management

I assume that you already have basic knowledge of Project Management (again, there is nothing wrong with that, it is just that you need more). The four steps you take from there are:

First Turn: Flow Of Stakes
Second Turn: Structure For Resilience
Third Turn: Global Pool
Fourth Turn: Mental Flexibility

In this post I will provide a short introduction to every turn. In the next months I will give this wheel a good yank and let it spin: explanations will take place, but also heavy interaction with you and all other readers. This an ambitious undertaking, and as with all other projects, I cannot do this on my own.

First Turn: Flow Of Stakes

What I really want to tell people immediately after they finish their PM course, formed the basics for my book "Surprise! Now You're A Software Project Manager". That of course, would be the first turn of the PM wheel. The two major concepts addressed in the book are:

• The Flow Of Stakes
• Project Potion

The Flow Of Stakes

The most important aspect is the mindset of the project manager. He should focus on one simple mental image of the jobs he has to perform instead of trying to cram 500 pages of charting and calculating into his head. He should know the flow of stakes:

• Stakeholders have stakes
• Stakeholders communicate their stakes by expressing their expectations, and these are more formally defined by means of requirements to the process or product
• Project management should make every stakeholder a winner by accepting and creating requirements that continually satisfy the stakes of individual stakeholders and do not conflict with the general process or the product
• Project management should give continuous feedback to the stakeholders on the state of the stakes
• Based upon this feedback, the expectations and requirements might change, and in this way a new cycle begins.

For a lot of people involved in projects, one inescapable conclusion still comes as a big surprise: project management is a people business. It’s all about keeping everyone associated with the project happy by supporting his or her stakes. The trouble with stakes is that no one tells you what they are. You have to guess, negotiate, anticipate, and manipulate to get past the requirements and directly through to the fears and wishes of people. Software project management is more about psychology than technology.

Project Potion

Different project circumstances require different approaches to ensure optimum effectiveness. As mentioned above, it is the people who largely determine these circumstances, and you have to tailor your software approach to the particular situation. For this you can make use of techniques and tools from different existing methods by simply mixing and matching everything together in such a way that you brew the right Project Potion for the occasion.

Concocting a Project Potion consists of the following steps:

• You analyze the stakeholders and their interests and expectations (Stakeholder Analysis).
• You analyze the products (technical stuff) you have to create.
• You determine the potential risks that might exist (Risk Management).
• You create a project approach that reduces those risks, and for this you have three main tools:
• Strategy: What are the steps taken in the project, and what are the sequence and time frame?
• Organization: How is your project organization constructed?
• Feedback: How is the feedback to the stakeholders on the status and content of products and processes organized?

Second Turn: Structure For Resilience

The first turn addressed the link between individual stakeholders and the effect of these stakeholders on running the project. In the second turn you will focus more on the interaction of people.

Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal. During this endeavor they laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks and have all other kind of behavior towards each other. If you are lucky they even work to reach the final goal. If you take everything away, and put people in the center of what a "project" is, you will see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other, just like any other group of people would do.

Just to make things easier on our lives, we call the result of all this behavior “the project”. In this sense it is nothing more than an abstraction. If we say "the project is late", this doesn’t mean that some creature or entity from outer space showed up later than expected; it is the result of the project people working together that wasn’t finished on the time we predicted.

Social Interactions

If we look at the interactions between the stakeholders, some categories may come in handy to divide up the beast we are trying to concur; it is always easier to cut a complex issue into smaller parts when trying to make some sense of it. For this purpose I will use three dimensions for interactions in teams: the power structure, the task structure and the information structure.

The power structure can best be viewed as the hierarchy that exists, it is, if you want, a vertical dimension. The task structure is the structure that consists to perform the actual work; these are interactions that are needed to finish or start a certain task. If the previous dimension is vertical, you can think of this one as horizontal. And the last structure concerning information, are the interactions based upon the exchange of information. This dimension goes from left to right, from top to bottom, so in fact, going all over the place.

The power structure will contain subjects like hierarchical control and planning, the way people are instructed and how the boss is treated back. Concepts like authorization and responsibilities are handled within this dimension. The task structure can be viewed as the actual production chain, it contains all needed interaction to perform task and to create the products. And finally the information structure, subject within this dimension is how, what and when information is provided when the project people are communicating.

Resilience To Cope With Change

In this view a project is a human system working towards a desired goal. However, the project is running within an environment that is changing continuously. The project needs ways to deal with these changes and still keep performing its function, that is, reaching the desired goal. The project needs "resilience".

"Resilience is… the ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to re-organize and still have the same identity (retain the same basic structure and ways of functioning). It includes the ability to learn from the disturbance. A resilient system is forgiving of external shocks. As resilience declines the magnitude of a shock from which it cannot recover gets smaller and smaller. Resilience shifts attention from purely growth and efficiency to needed recovery and flexibility." (source)

Resilience can be found in the individual members of the group, and within the interactions between the members. For the individual person adaption is created by having an open and flexible mind, and having the proper social network.

Third Turn: Global Pool

Interactions between people don't "just happen". We live in a big world and you and I don't know everybody else. But somehow, for some reason groups of people emerge, interactions are created. In the third turn called "Global Pool" we address why people are getting together and how and why certain interactions emerge.

Economic Clustering

Like the oceans are all connected to each other and provide us with currents, so are the economic forces in constant flux and alternating over the globe. Work moves around. If it can be produced cheaper, more efficiently or better, it gets relocated. Talent moves around. If one area on the globe is more exciting and thrilling than another, people relocate. Work moves around and people that perform the work move around. Not necessarily dependent of each other.

Regional population changes rapidly. Asia gets a booming population growth. First world nations have a enormous amount of seniors coming towards them as the baby boomers are getting old. With regional changes in the populations, the demand for work shifts.

But one remarkable aspect is that work seems to be located around certain topological centers like a harbor, a place rich of natural resources or just cities. Work is not spread out evenly over the planet. There are concentrations of it. The same goes for the other current, that of talent moving around. The most incredible, creative talent is looking for great places to live. Places where tolerant stimulating locations provide company of like minded people. Both currents have as a net effect that people are clustering, one gets clusters because people have the need to satisfy their economic needs.

Social Clustering

Suppose the map of the earth doesn't reflect countries, but they represent ideas. Or they would represent religions, world views, life styles and other concepts. Imagine a spatial representation of concepts. People will not be spread out evenly. What you will see is that people are cuddling up next to each other. As their social needs by definition can only be fulfilled in relationship to other people, the association needed with groups ensures the clustering will be a fact when using a conceptual map.

The removal of trade and other barriers, the ever increasing availability of cheap communication are what puts the village into Global Village. The impact is not only economic. Globalization also has its effects on social needs:

By the end of the twentieth century, if not before, globalization had turned world order into a problem. Everyone must now reflexively respond to the common predicament of living in one world. This provokes the formulation of contending world views. For example, some portray the world as an assembly of distinct communities, highlighting the virtues of particularism, while others view it as developing toward a single overarching organization, representing the presumed interests of humanity as a whole. (source)

How Projects Emerge

For a project to form we cannot simply wait for people to float by. You have to enforce the clustering. Software projects are ideal conditions for using labor from all parts of the world and using technology to let people work together. Even the main output of the endeavor (software) is digital! If you are trying to get on board a fabulous project team, you are competing with the rest of the world. Why should the project manager pick you? Why should the organization pick you as a PM? Why should they have even heard of you? "Self promotion, Baby!" What makes you "you"? Why are you more suited for the job then the rest of the crowd?

And reverse: why should people want to work on your project? Because you have a project that is life changing, that is worth their effort. Because you provide an awesome creative and inspiring environment. You provide leadership that inspires people to rise to the occasion, to become larger than themselves. You give trust, and you can be trusted.

Fourth Turn: Flexible Mind

Change is the norm. Change is happening fast. The projects you are managing are not your daddy's projects. To be able to handle the ever morphing environment, you need to become agile, flexible as you have never been before. To cope with the environment you need a brain that can use many mental models to look at reality. You need to be able to throw away your pre-programmed belief and adopt a different mindset in the blink of an eye. The essential part of becoming a flexible Project Manager therefor starts within the comfort of your own head. In this final turn I will outline the three steps that should guide your journey:

Self-Aware

The first step is to become aware of why you do what you do. Do you perform tasks because you are expected to do so, or do they really solve a problem or mitigate a risk? Are you aware of why you have organized the project in a certain way? Do you know the benefits and drawbacks of every procedure you installed in your team?

Emphatic

After becoming self-aware you can start guessing why others are doing what they are doing. First you guess, later you ask. This is the same process to become self-aware, only this time you adopt different assumptions, take on a believe system that is not your own. If you are used to run a country and you have a communist background, you probably are trying to regulate, centralize and formalize as much as possible. You want to control every individual behavior in order to control the whole system. When you are raised with a more laissez-faire world view, you can adopt a reign that is totally governed by the free market. Nothing is centrally controlled, everything will take care of itself. If you run one country, to become more emphatic, you will use the other mindset for a while.

Holistic

Free at last. Free at last.

In this final stage you are able to use all kind of mental models. You are aware of what triggers what. You can mix and match from different world views. You use an Agile planing within a Prince 2 organization. And you know why you use it! You get to know how to look at dynamic-complexity without getting into a spasm. You come up with all new kind of weird mental models.

Bas is the editor of SoftwareProjects.org, a website dedicated to all those people who make up IT projects. He holds a masters degree in Business Informatics and currently lives with his wife in the coastal town of Zandvoort, The Netherlands. His latest book, "Surprise! Now You’re a Software Project Manager", was published in September 2006.