In order to have a “happy project,” a software project manager should respect the flow of the stakes…

• Stakeholders have stakes.
• Stakeholders communicate their stakes by expressing their expectations, which are more formally defined by means of requirements to the process or product.
• Project management should make every stakeholder a winner by accepting and inventing 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.

Easy as pie.

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The Flow of the Stakes

“Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction?”

Do you know this quote? If you do, we have something in common, we both like the “Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy” enough to know some of its text by heart. I would even assume we have a similar taste of humor.

When interacting with people you have just met, you can use this mechanism. Drop a quote from your favorite movie or book, and see if people respond. If not, that’s fine. If they do know its origin, you just created a short cut to connecting on a more intense level. You just established that you are both “the same”. At least, for some part.

Dave Prior and I discussed the use of verbal clues, or tokens as he calls them, in the second part of our recent podcast.

It’s about using quotes, or language in general, as a kind of “social marker“:

““Social markers” is a term created by Hugh MacLeod whose blog, GapingVoid, defines social markers as “ a prime form of social shorthand, that people use to STAKE OUT the ecosystem they’re occupying”. A brands social marker can be either good or bad. It is tagged by the conversations of those that have experienced the brands product, service or culture.”

By dropping “social markers” you give “your kind of people” an opportunity to identify themselves.

It’s not limited to language. You might wear a hat. Or even a duck, as Havi Brooks explains:

“I have a duck. I am a biggified blah blah expert whose business partner is a duck.
People who get it and think it’s cool are totally in.
People who think it’s stupid, or suspect that she’s — ewwwwwwwwwww — some kind of marketing ploy, are out. But not because I have to ask them to leave or anything. They just self-select out. They don’t stick.
Having red-velvet-rope Selma around (and let’s be honest, I don’t do anything without her) turns out to be a great way to help people find their way in or out.”

The use of social markers is something that fascinates me. It’s useful to anyone working for short periods of time with people they don’t know and might almost have no authority over.

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Social Markers. Here I Am, Brain The Size Of A Planet.

If your project has a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, one that is life changing, one that makes your existence worthwhile, one that makes you feel powered up like an energizer bunny, it’s almost difficult to be not motivated. Being part of something bigger, using the coolest, latest, state-of-the-art technology will light everyone’s fire.

It’s what transformational leadership is all about.

“Transformational leaders motivate others by engaging their intrinsic interests (e.g., being associated with a particular cause) as opposed to engaging their extrinsic interests (e.g., salary or pay).”

But you don’t have to be the next Do-Gooder.

An awesome project goal makes things easier, but this also works for, uhm, lets say, normal projects.

Somewhere between the Millennium-bug and Euro-conversion projects, I worked with a small team creating interfaces between information systems. A lot of interfaces. Basically, the same work over and over again. It’s hard to stay motivated.

At this time XML was just discovered by tech marketers (let’s say it with me: HYPE!).

So, there was this way cool new tech, that everyone was talking about, and there we were, building interface after interface with our old school stuff.

Ping.

What if we could use the new shiny stuff to build our programs? Functionality would be the same, costs identical, but the development team could learn and use new technology. They would be excited to be involved in something “state-of-the-art”.

Instant motivation.

This story is not telling you to keep on switching technology. This story is telling you to be creative within your own circle of influence. You will be amazed about what you can accomplish.

Giving team members a role they desire, instead of what it says on their functional title.

Crazy.

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What If Your Project Goal Is… Well… Uhm… Dull?

Dave Prior talks to Thushara Wijewardena from Exilesoft on how to make sure you aren’t the cause of your Agile offshore team failing.

Click here if you can’t view the video.

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Working With An Agile Offshore Team

If you spent too much time using social media, don’t worry… it’s legit. You might be working on your next gen leadership skills.

Social media will allow you, personally, to develop your social skills, get over fears of online expression and dealing with transparency. By developing your own personal skills, by creating your digital reputation you can effectively train your ability to lead virtual and resilient teams, and online communities.

At least, that is how my argument goes.

In “The Ability to Lead Remote Employees Will Become the Next 2.0 Skill” Dan Pontefract argues:

“Whether small, medium or large in size, organizations have been or are set to grapple with remote based leadership issues. (…) the bottom line is that teams are going to increasingly become virtually segregated and leaders need to act differently. (…) Leaders must shift their thinking, they must re-think their style, they must suspend past assumptions.”

So, you have the opportunity to train your skills, you have the need to train your skills, but what is the style you need to learn?

An answer can be found in “Can Being Virtual Benefit A Leader?” by Surinder Kahai:

“Since virtual teams are supported by technology and technology tends to filter out vital nonverbal cues, can a leader be effective in virtual contexts?”

(Researchers) “found that the effect of transformational leadership on team performance was stronger in virtual than in face-to-face teams.”

“Transformational leaders motivate others by engaging their intrinsic interests (e.g., being associated with a particular cause) as opposed to engaging their extrinsic interests (e.g., salary or pay).”

So.

Let’s Tweet! Uhm. For a better world?

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Should Transformational Leaders Tweet?

You are stressed out. You are looking for a book that provides you tips on how to deal with the situation. You find two books.

“For The Stressed And Overworked And Unprofessional Project Manager” and
“The Relaxed PM”.

Which title would you pick?

Content is the same.

The first title might even be an actual description of your current state of mind.

The positive, future oriented second title definitely has my preference.

Book titles matter. No matter how the actual story is, if the title puts people off, you don’t sell a thing.

Master marketer Seth Godin wrote a book called “All Marketers Are Liars”. In a recent version of the book, he changed the title and cover:

“The original cover seemed to be about lying and seemed to imply that my readers (marketers) were bad people. For people who bothered to read the book, they could see that this wasn’t true, but by the time they opened the cover, it was too late. A story was already told. I had failed.”

I once worked for a client who wasn’t used to projects. He perceived “risk” as a bad thing. A disaster. Something so negative, you don’t want to think about it. And I just keep hitting him with “risk reports” over and over again.

Create an email in which you write that “… if you read this sentence, you get a free lunch.” Put this part in the body of the text. Now write a highly controversial subject title for this mail, and press send. See if anyone gets beyond the title.

Do people read your mails any way? Or your reports? Or documents?

Just curious if you made it to the end of this post?

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The Relaxed PM

“Project Management” is a concept, an idea. It’s a tag to a unit of information, a meme. Same goes for “Agile”. Or “Rudolf The Red Nosed Reindeer”, as Jurgen points out in his recent post about “memes”.

Memes travel from one person to another. Memes influence each other. “Project Management” and “Web 2.0″ merged into the “Project Management 2.0″ meme.

I recommend reading “The Success Of The Agile Memplex” for a great explanation.

Last week, my friend Ali Anani looked at how emotions “travel”, how they influence each other.

The concept he introduced is very interesting and exciting. It is also very counter intuitive. It is a bit similar to memes, where ideas are separated from the people to have a ‘life’ of their own.

It’s very interesting to see what happens when you look at the interactions between emotions itself. My first thought was that it isn’t enough, a lot more variables are into play when humans are interacting and so, but, as he points out, all other variables are already included in the emotions, either direct or by proxy, so why not just focus on the emotions?

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Memes and Emotions

Wouldn’t it be great to have the latest updates of The Project Shrink (blog and video stream) in your Facebook newsfeed?

You don’t have to visit this blog, you don’t have to remember to login some closed network.

You get the information there, where you already are!

I would love it, if you subscribe to the Project Shrink Fan page on Facebook.

It will be worth it. In March I will hold book give-aways. And you can get invitations to live presentations.

It will be a real Shrink Fest!

Awesome!

I’ll hope to see you there… ehr … here.

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How to offer flexibility and time box creativity

This is a guest post by Alicia M. Benjamin (as The Creative) and John P Vajda (as The Project Manager). For more information, see the end of this article.

What! Time box creativity? You can’t put a time limit on being creative! As a project manager, you’ve likely heard this many times from the creative people on your team—from coders and developers to writers and designers. Well, they’re right; creativity doesn’t come with the snap of your fingers or at any given time. You can’t say, “Sit here and come up with a creative idea in an hour.”

Image by re birf.

Creativity happens when the brain has time to really mull over and think through an idea. Call it the eureka moment, if you will. Project managers often hear from many creative counterparts that their best ideas come when they can roam freely and stimulate their minds with experiences that have nothing to do with the creative problem they are trying to solve (read: the project set forth before them). For instance, a UX designer may want to escape to the book store to flip through splashy magazine ads. Hey, it happens. After all, sometimes creative ideas speak to us through our subconscious, manifested through our dreams. Other times, they leap off the page of a favorite magazine or grow roots after what appears to be idle chit-chat in the break room.

So, what if you, as a project manager, could harness this creative energy, and still make your deadlines on a project? Here in lies the challenge. You have to offer that creative freedom with the use of what I call “creative time boxes.”

What is a creative time box?

Simply, it’s a set time in which you and your creative resources agree can be reserved for their creative “roaming.” It can be a few hours each week to read in the park, the chance to meet with colleagues at a local coffee shop, or the use of music at project meetings and brainstorms to inspire the team. The method you choose should be decided by the “creatives.” If you don’t fully understand why a creative person needs this, that’s okay. Respect it. It’s only going to benefit you and the project in the long run. Oh, and if a creative needs a mid-afternoon nap to recharge, that’s okay too.

You are probably shaking your head and saying aloud right now, “Naps? Really! How do I convince upper management to let the team take naps? How can this possibly help get things done?” The easiest way to convince anyone of anything is with results. Regardless of creativity taking time away from the computer or away from the office, you can justify this with what you deliver and how you deliver it. If you make your deadlines and your team does amazing work, a good manager will recognize the value of what you are doing for the creative team. Also, you can always reference numerous studies and articles that speak about creative results and how they are obtained. This may seem unorthodox to you; but if it works, it’s worth it.

Why Creating & Respecting a Creative Process Matters- Two perspectives Revealed: The Project Manager’s & The Creative’s

From the PM:
Talk to your team about what their creative method is. How do they come up with new ideas? When do they get ideas? What can you do to help them find the time to be more creative? Help foster this.

From the The Creative:
Yes! We appreciate you, as a project manager, trying to understand our work styles and how we’re driven to complete projects. Time away from the desk and meetings off-site for a coffee pick-me-up isn’t a hindrance; rather, it’s fuel to tackle the critical stage of being creative. We understand deadlines; we just hope you’ll understand that quality of deliverables often increases exponentially when you let us be us.

From the PM:
Organize and prioritize what you need your creative team to do. You can’t drop 20 things on a creative person’s desk, saying, “Get this done by the end of the week.” You have to help them understand the priorities and get them the information they need to understand the project so they can start to formulate it in their minds. Yes, they are creative, but they can’t read your mind.

From The Creative:
It’s hard to get things done when we don’t know the outcome we’re striving for—or where to go to find out any answers we may have along the way. Also,where does this fit among all the other things we need to do? Helping clear things “out of the way” for us to focus on more time-heavy creative tasks with higher stakes will only benefit everyone, including the project manager.

From the PM:
Remove distractions from their work day. Have you ever tried to work with your young child asking you a million questions? It’s not easy. Same rule applies to a creative person. The more interruptions to their creative flow, the less likely their creative ideas will grow. Make project rules of engagement that reduce the amount of interruptions to the creative team. Schedule and stick to meetings, so they know when they need to go into meeting mode and leave creative mode.

From the Creative:
A child asking a million questions is a child being himself. However, nothing is worse than having to switch directions 542 times a day, then still being expected to deliver top-notch projects. We need to focus; we need to tune into the highly creative parts of the project (and our brains), because they’re often the most time consuming. Expecting us to be able to “turn on” at any time and not respecting our schedules is extremely frustrating—and so inefficient. Instead, understand how we like to work. We get that you’ll need to talk to us. We’re open to that. Most often, though, give us a head’s up so we can mentally change gears.

From the PM:
Offer them creative time boxes. Set time aside where they will be available to roam creatively, trust them to leave the office and understand this time is critical to maintaining their creative mojo.

From the Creative:
True, you can’t snap your fingers and immediately have the right idea or approach to a project. But if we know we have some time just for thinking, exploring, mocking up designs, writing and re-writing during a block of the day, our brains will anticipate that and get ready to “plug in” to that elusive part of the mind that makes us so great at what we do. If Thursdays are Think-Tank Days, we’ll show up energized, caffeinated and happy. You just need to let us have that time!

From the PM:
A creative workspace is critical. Let them listen to music, use headsets, and decorate their work space. Lighten up at meetings, and try playing some music. Or have these meetings off-sight in a creatively conducive location. Remember when your university professor held class outside? Yeah, that was cool.

From the Creative:
Music, color, graphics, stuff! Yes, we charge and re-charge our minds so many times a day, in so many different ways. Maybe it’s a break to read an article online. Or maybe we put in the earbuds to rock out to our favorite music. And sometimes it’s just a quick walk outside. But we’re very sensitive to our environment, and the more we can claim it as “ours,” the more comfortable we’ll be — and that means it’ll be easier to slip into the creative process and get things done. Honest. It may not make sense to non-creative people, but I bet all my creative friends out there are nodding vigorously in agreement.

From the PM:
Hold the creative team accountable. It sounds “managerial,” but with great power comes great responsibility. If you give people the power to creatively roam, they also need to deliver. Make sure you set realistic goals, deadlines and milestones that the team agrees to meet. Make sure to track progress so that you don’t miss critical deadlines and hold them accountable. Make sure they aren’t abusing this new-found freedom. It’s all about trust.

From the Creative:
We get that we have a job to do. And if we’re given the time to be ourselves and perform our best, which involves time to create, we will respect the deadlines and the project manager all the more. Especially if we can collaborate on these time lines. Nothing kills creativity more than being told when to do something and how to do it. By allowing us to participate in setting deadlines, we are invested. And we are okay with being held accountable. After all, who else knows more about the time it takes to create and deliver than those of us who are creating and delivering? Yeah, exactly. Trust is definitely key, too. Mature and experienced creatives won’t abuse this wonderful, free-roaming process.

From the PM:
Evaluate and re-evaluate. Make sure this process is working; ask the team if it’s helping, or if they need more or less from the process. Make sure you don’t give up too much by adding risk to your project trying to pursue the creative sweet spot. An office of white walls, glass meeting rooms and repetitive keyboard clicking doesn’t foster much creativity; but on the flip side, too much freedom can lead to being taken advantage of and missed deadlines.

From The Creative:
It’s all about trying it out. Saying no from the start is easy; adapting a new approach to meeting deadlines can be scary for managers. But try it. I’ve been lucky to work with teams who value creativity and respect a creative’s need to “pursue the muse.” After all, if you really want high quality projects done, you need to make time for high quality creativity. Otherwise, you can probably check off that you met your deadlines, but you may not be able to say that your team gave it their best.

Finding what that best is takes some time. Start small, of course. As creatives, we like to know we can pack up the cubicle and hit the open park if we need to. Trust me when I say that our brains are always working on the project. Requiring us to be physically present during operating hours looks good on paper, but does it really deliver the results that are going to impress and please those you need to be impressed and pleased? Exactly.

Parting Thoughts

PM’s Parting Thoughts:
Creative work takes time and requires the right environment to develop. As a project manager, you can do a lot to help your team find their creative mojo, thusly making your project more successful. Don’t be afraid to break the mold or rock the boat. You expect your creative people to think outside the box, so why shouldn’t you?

The Creative’s Last Word:
Try it. I mean, what is there to lose if your team trusts and respects you? We’re not misbehaving imps. We’re professionals, and we we take our work and our craft very seriously. We just need something most other people don’t, and that can be scary—or just plain illogical—for others to embrace. You may not understand why I might need to skip out to an art gallery in the middle of the afternoon. But I know what I’m looking for; and when I find it, I’ll be more than happy to bring that passion, perspective and creativity back to the office.

About the PM:
John P Vajda: PMP, CSM: works as a Project Manager at Oracle Corporation*, and has finally found his creative mojo. The statements in this blog do not reflect that of Oracle Corporation, and are solely those opinions and thoughts of John P Vajda.

Follow John on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pmmashable

About the Creative:

Alicia M. Benjamin is a creative strategist, multimedia copywriter and social media fiend who’s passionate about riling words and creating branding and marketing campaigns. She loves when teams collaborate and thinks the world could use more talented project managers.

Follow Alicia on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leximaven

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Who Killed the Creative Process?

This a very early draft of a chapter from “Tags: Living In A Virtual World“. I use this blog as a notebook for drafts, so you can provide me with feedback in an early stage. Comments are, as always, appreciated.

I have more faith in a friendly clean-cut doctor in a white coat, than one in a jeans with anti-social behavior. Although. For anyone remembering Dougie Howser, MD, the 1990 television series that starred a teen aged child as clean-cut white coat doctor, I would not want him to be my physician. I would prefer House, the grumpy but brilliant doctor, who “doesn’t do white coats”.

Why do you think a certain person is more “trustworthiness” over another person? This is a relevant question. Not only when dealing with television doctors but also when operating on the Internet, or working with people you have never met.

Image by Sister72.

Let me illustrate this situation with a game called The Prisoners Dilemma. In this mental exercise two inmates are planning two escape from prison. They are unable to communicate to each other as they are located in different cell blocks. Both prisoners have two options: if they work together they have a chance of escaping together. If one of them tells the guards that the other prisoner is going to escape, he will have a very high probability of escaping while to other one is almost certain to be caught. If they both decide to defect and tell the guards, they are both caught.

Facing a certain situation, a person has to select a strategy to interact with another individual. They have two options: they are going to cooperate, or they are going to be egoistic (defect). In The Prisoners Dilemma the outcome depends on the strategies chosen by both parties.

In essence it is a situation where

• if people cooperate, both have success,
• if one person is taking advantage of the other (defect) this person has an even larger benefit, but the other suffers a loss,
• if both persons defect they loose both.

If you play this game over and over again with the same opponent, you can let your selection be determined by all previous games. If a person always plays defect, you can base your strategy on your mutual history. If you know someone for a longer time, history can provide you with enough experiences to draw some conclusions.

But what if you haven’t done multiple iterations? What if you meet a person for the first time and you are confronted with a Prisoners Dilemma? Researchers call this the “one-shot prisoners dilemma”. Michael Macy and John Skvoretz, two professors of sociology, model this game by introducing the notion of “telltale signs”. In a situation like this, people are trying to determine the “trustworthiness” of others. They are trying to read “telltale signs”, look for behavior or other marks that they identify with trustworthiness. This might be as simple as being friendly and saying “hello” every time you see someone down the hall. Perhaps you have automatically more trust in someone wearing a suit, or a person with PhD behind his name. The idea is that you are trying to detect signs of trustworthiness, whatever that may be for you.

Next to this detection, the projection of your own intentions plays a role in the decision of the strategy; if you want to cooperate you are more likely to be biased into “seeing” the other as trustworthy. So, we use projection and detection as a mechanism to compensate for the lack of history one has in one-shot Prisoner Dilemma’s.

How people detect the tell-tale signs of trustworthiness is not only based upon behavioral markers that society associates with it; it has also to do with the similarity of the other with you. Persons that are more viewed as being equal or “the same” or more likely to be considered honest and sincere towards you. Translated to terms of social networks: people closer in social networks are more likely to consider each other trustworthy than people further apart.

This is not a one dimensional thing, people are associated with multiple social networks and groups. And every social group has its own rituals and signs that communicate its uniqueness towards the world outside the group. If you have a lot of aspects associated with a certain social group, you will more likely be considered trustworthy by members of the same group.

In short, “trustworthiness” is in this view determined by association and similarity.

Association: is what I expect the other to be like.
Similarity: is to be like me.

Telltale Signs Of A Project Manager

This makes me wonder if Project Managers, as a professional group, have tell tale signs of “trustworthiness”. If you have never had any experience with a certain person, what are the labels, the social markers you associate with a professional Project Manager?

There is no way to avoid talking about and in stereotypes when discussing this topic. And not all stereotyping is the same. Signs determined by professionals, colleagues are different from the general public.

In 2007 I asked visitors of The Project Shrink blog, project professionals, this question: “If you have 10 minutes, how do you judge a Project Manager?” Although this was by no means a scientific experiment, it provided some interesting clues.

A summary of the responses is given by this statement: “If they just use jargon from a handbook, I put them on the lower end of the scale. If they talk about the importance of stakeholders and people in general I put them on the high end of the scale. If they talk about stakeholders, they must have been in the trenches.” Note the importance of language.

If one has only ten minutes appearances do matter. The respondents hesitate to admit this, because it sounds very superficial, but it is true; people are looking for visual clues of competence, confidence and calmness. Clothes have some importance in the first impression; dress with taste, clean cut and similar to what your client is wearing are the advices in this area.

It is a cliché that a Project Manager should be a good communicator. So this is the area that gets to most attention. In the interaction the new PM should good listener, a good conversationalist that doesn’t dive immediately into “shop talk” but can converse with confidence and respect about life, the universe and everything. He should under no circumstances have a loud-mouth, heated discussion about a topic. Knowledge and opinion is one thing, in control and respectful are considered far more important.

About the messages that are exchanged in the first ten minutes people are short: people are looking for words like “you”, “we”, “our”, “team” and “support”, and are absolutely allergic to buzzwords. “Plain English Please!” as one of the respondents wrote.

Artifacts can also function as telltale signs. We all have seen people spending days behind MS Project to create a proper Gantt Chart. I have witnessed adults getting all excited when they could inform me that their project “had a risk profile of 18%”. I smelled the sweat of humans trying to fill every box in a project plan template, relevant or not, just because it is in the template. People have seen me polishing up a nice, shiny Chart. I spent 3 days creating this Monster Gantt Chart that I had to plot on A2 to get it printed. I rolled up the paper and went to my client. This client was an senior sales person just before his retirement. He was old school, but one heck of a salesman. I rolled out my wallpaper-size plan, and guided the customer through the steps. All the time he was silent, he didn’t say one word. After a while he took the plan and threw it in the garbage bin. While taking his pen and paper he looked up and asked me: “What is it that you want me to do?” Point taken, Gantt is a Project Management icon, and not every one seems to be a PM.

Different people have different associations with tags. Because it’s all about perception, there is no “truth”.

How does this work online?

Online, the situation is not very different. Our LinkedIn profile has a picture, keywords describing what we do, associations with companies and professional organizations and badges of the LinkedIn groups you are a member of.

• Do you wear a suit on your picture? Or do you have an image of you going through the jungle?
• Is your name followed by a enormous string of credentials (MSc, PMP, LIVR)?
• Do you have a normal function description, like “Accountant”, or do you have one that sounds more deviant, like “Master Of My Universe”?

It would be fun if you would do this short experiment. Go through your LinkedIn or Facebook connections. Skip through the profiles and write down what determines a “good vibe” with that person for you purely based upon the information provided.

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Trusting People You Don’t Know

This a very early draft of the introduction to Tags: Living In A Virtual World. I use this blog as a notebook for drafts, so you can provide me with feedback in an early stage. Comments are, as always, appreciated.

If you are a Project Manager that operates for a short period of time in a foreign organization, with a team you don’t know, in a domain you would not know how to spell, I would say you have some challenges.

Think about this Project Manager as a person in a huge network of interacting people. The PM can interact only with a few of them (his team, the stakeholders). The stakeholders interact also with others. People the PM knows, but more likely with people invisible to the Project Manager.

Because of the size of the network, because of limited visibility on the network, because of the complexity of the network, the PM is getting partial information, always.

For the same reasons the PM has only partial influence. He cannot interact with “everyone”. He has no “power” over everyone.

How do you get your job done?

The same problems arise when you operate on the internet. Lots of people you don’t know, huge amount of partial information. By looking at how this works in the virtual space, we get insights that can guide us in our projects.

Well, on the Net it’s all about Tags. And the things people think they represent.

Tags. Yes, Tags!

People can catalog almost everything on the Internet. You can add words to photos on Flickr that describe the picture. At Amazon, users can put labels on the products, labels they associate with the object. It’s called “tagging”.

Users from the bookmarking site Delicious add tags to the webpages they find interesting. If they put “project management” and “best article ever” to one of my webpages I’ll be delighted. If their tag reads “this sucks”, well, that sucks.

Image by dominiekth.

Tags are the little labels we put on everything on the web. There is no overall top down structure. Everybody can add tags. The tags can be any word or couple of words. Whatever your association is, it’s your tag.

A collection of tags describes a picture, book, products or blogger in a short and effective way. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or false. It’s about the perception of community.

After three years creating The Project Shrink, blog, podcast and persona, that’s how I view living online: a struggle with tags.

On Twitter I exchange short messages with other Project Managers. We have a secret handshake. Every message contains the letters PMOT, which stands for Project Managers On Twitter. By using these letters, you label yourself as a PM. And a cool one. One that is On Twitter.

The blog Project Shrink started out about “Project Management”. But I experienced that under that label humans don’t play a role. (At least, that’s what I’m told.) In “general management”: yes. In “human resourcing”: yes.

So I adopted “Project Leadership”. Now that is a lovely area in which you can throw any human topic you can imagine. The drawback is, nobody really knows what it is exactly. It may be a safe tag, but it’s not an effective one.

If you use a tag, you want it to be clear. You use a word, a word that means something to you. Agile approaches are getting more and more in fashion. Therefor more and more approaches are getting the label “agile”. To piggyback on the success.

Brian Marick believed 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. I am pretty sure that this tag wasn’t taken already.

Tags, or labels, are the social currency in the virtual world.

It’s the stuff we want to collect, get rid off or give online. This is not typical for online interactions. Labeling is a concept from sociology. According to Wikipedia “… is (sociology) the study of the social lives of humans, groups, and societies, sometimes defined as the study of social interactions.”

Online. Offline. Society. Project. Doesn’t matter. The kicker in the virtual space is, you actually use real tags. We see them. We use them as keywords in our filters. We use them in our one sentence pitch on LinkedIn. But still. Always the same principles. It’s about group affiliation and identity.

During your life you are a member of a lot of social groups, by default, by choice or by force. I am a Dutch white male, member of a no-child double income household, Project Manager, author and web aficionado, to name just a few of my own treats. The Dutch white male is something that I am by birth, by default. All other affiliations are more or less done by choice.

The group memberships determine how we see ourselves in the whole of society, it determines our identity. Actually, we have more than one identity. We can choose, we can switch depending on the situation. I like to see myself as a blogger and writer. Within the professional world I emphasize the software project manager affiliation. You have been dealt a lot of memberships, you can emphasize or down play each affiliation to create your identity.

As an identity is how we see ourselves within the ultimate large group of humans, it not something that can be seen on an individual level. It is a group thing. Without groups, the whole concept of identity wouldn’t make sense. We are shaping identities by combining three mechanisms: categorization, identification and comparison [Wikipedia]. Although broadminded people like to think they do not put everyone in boxes, everyone does.

We always put people in categories, we label them. This is done by looking for signs that we associate with a certain group. These signs are the mentioned use of icons, rituals or speak. To be able to associate yourself with a group, we first have to divide society into groups. Identification is the part where you affiliate yourself with a group.

The affiliation is done by taken on the social groups norms and other aspects which are used by humans to label an individual to a category. With the identification you label yourself to the group. To be able to do this, you take on the marks that cause the label. Comparison is looking for differences between groups. With the group affiliation you create your identity, your place in society. For this to work you are also indicating where you are not standing. It is always a comparison between groups.

A Short Writing Project: Tags.

It has been three years already since I launched The Project Shrink. I wanted to see if basic sociology could help me understand problems in projects. As DeMarco and Lister put it in their classic “Peopleware”: “The major problems of our work are not as much technological as sociological in nature.” So, it only makes sense to look at the social sciences.

Writing, discussing, interviewing and being active online provided me with some great experiences. The information and knowledge I acquired from running The Project Shrink form the basis of a small book I am working on: Tags (working title).

The information is applicable to offline situations. The information is incredible relevant for running virtual projects.

The table of contents:

1. Augmented Conversations
2. Trusting People You Don’t Know
3. What’s Your Beef?
4. Living In Networks: If You Build It, They Will Come
5. Transparency: Turning History Into Tags
6. What Happens If You Only See A Part Of Your Network?
7. Do Introverts Rule The Tag Game?
8. Why Your Company Should Help You Tag

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Tags: Sociology In A Virtual World

I started this year explaining why I like the word “awesome”.

“I like to use the word “awesome” instead of “felicitous” as I like to appeal more to people who like passionate words over expensive sounding ones.”

Couple of days later, I tell you

“Although writing in a style that sounds authoritative (“You must do this!”) attracts a larger audience, providing advice that respects the comfort zone of the other is more effective in real life.”

So. True.

And than. In my previous posting I go all “Reputation Space / Project Space” on you.

Big Important Words. Yeah. I know.

So, I am no exception to the social mechanisms discussed

This “Spaces” thing is about how we operate in a world where online and offline are influencing each other.

Instead of Spaces, I’ll talk about “Stadium / Living Room“.

Ok?

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About My Big Important Words.

This is not a story about social media. This is a story about verification.

When I tell you that social media has a purpose for Project Managers, you basically have to trust me on this. I try to make a compelling case. I provide you argumentation that makes the case plausible. Or fail at it, for that matter.

I provide you with my profile. I make video to make a deeper “connect”. I use some personal branding. I use my associations with professional organizations. I use the fact that I am a practitioner.

I use the fact that I have a long history of writing on the web. I use the fact that I have spoken at conferences. I use the fact that I have written a book. I use the fact that I have a lot of people subscribed to my rss feed and newsletter.

And that’s with all blogs, books and other information “out there”.

Some people prefer statistical evidence. Some prefer anecdotal story telling. Some prefer case descriptions.

To you this is all “second hand” information. Which at best is plausible.

The entire collection of “second hand” information makes up the reputation space, as it is primary judged on the basis of the reputation of its source.

The key is that information in the reputation space lacks direct verification by you.

When you get in direct contact with a person, you can “check” your assumptions with interaction. When you experiment with social media in your own project, you can verify its use or lack thereof.

You use benchmarks, prototyping, testing, reporting as direct feedback on how things work out for you or your project.

The key to operating in the project space is that verification is possible.

It’s even by definition. Can you verify it directly, it’s in your project space. If you can’t, it’s in the reputation space. “Second hand” information is always directly linked to your view of the reputation of the source.

We need the reputation space. We cannot experience everything ourselves. In this space, plausible is the best we can do. We can provide context. But no person can provide all the context needed.

By selecting the elements of this context, we already make a choice. And it might be that the essential elements for your situation are left out of this “context”. Life is just to complex to list all elements that might be important in any other situation.

This is not a story about me. Or social media.

This is about you being aware and operating consciously in both spaces.

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This Is Not A Story About Social Media.

We all have Googled someone. Put his name into the Google search box and hit enter.

Just before a meeting. After we have received a mail. See what information we can find about this person.

We can use this information to build up a mental image of this person. Build up context. Guess his frame of reference. Determine what this person is about.

When we meet this person in a face to face conversation, we use the information we found in his digital footprint. If we like it or not, we interpret messages in the context we have build up.

In here lies our challenge.

We have to make use of the information we received from the digital space, but shouldn’t use it as a fixed frame of reference. It is merely a starting point in our conversation.

When we use information from the reputation space into the project space we have to communicate mindfully:

“When people communicate mindlessly, they tend to utilize broad categories and stereotypes to predict behavior. As mindfulness increases, the categories become more specific and typically more accurate predictors. Since being mindful makes us open to more information we are more likely to correctly identify the receiver’s frame of interpretation.”

Information from the reputation space is useful in communication. Even if we want to, there is no escaping from it. Now we have to put a name into a search box. Give it some time, and this information is presented to you in a more frictionless and faster way.

But we should use it to our advantage, and not as a short cut to save time on real conversations.

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Using Information From The Reputation Space In The Project Space

You act differently in the comfort of your living room than standing on the field in a stadium with a microphone in your hand. Conversations in an intimate space are different from those in a public space.

Image by Joe Shlabotnik.

When Facebook changed its default settings from private to public, those used to operating in a closed social space were suddenly faced with big questions:

“If I change my statuses from private to public, then do the expectancies of those around me change as well? What about the interactions between someone who is private and another person who is public?”

Although the basic mechanics didn’t change – friends “talking” to each other – a changing environment created a whole new dynamic.

Transparency Is Good! Ok?

Transparency is good for your project. It keeps people in the loop, involved and provides some protection against any misbehavior. So, deadly transparency, as offered by for example the Internet, would be a good thing? Sadly, no. When transparency makes sure people’s behavior will be noted around the globe, this doesn’t mean you can take the benefits from it in your project or business. Although with a good reputation a lot is to gain, having a bad rep puts a lot at stake. Most people will play things save. They will create low-risk behavior. Humans have a preference to fail conservatively, resulting in the end into mediocrity.

Practices perceived as best practices can become worst practices under changing environments. Assumptions on how things work under certain conditions can have an entire new meaning when other conditions are valid. We base our view of tomorrow on assumptions that may be utterly wrong.

Fish! Yes, Fish!

This is the lesson illustrated by a story about The Fish Pond, told to me two years ago by dr Ali Anani; how the size of the pond influences the entire eco-system.

“The pond depth influences the role of algae: the deeper the pond is, the less role algae have. Algae are just a single-cell plant that grows like crazy when properly nourished with sunlight, nitrogenous waste and water. Here is the dilemma: fish releases ammonia, which is converted to nitrate. Nitrate help algae grow, and fish feeds on algae. But the rapid growth of algae deprives the fish from oxygen. Here is the dilemma: fish produce byproducts that eventually lead to their killing!

In a pond the build up of the nitrate is problematic, but in a sea it is not. The shallower the pond, the more acute the problem is. Here the algae come to play the role of savers!! Algae consume the nitrate and rapidly populate the pond and might easily get out of control. They blossom and compete with the fish for oxygen!”

I know.

Nothing is changing.

Not for Project Management.

But some part of performing projects is.

Communication? Leadership?

Tell me.

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When The Living Room Becomes A Stadium

I don’t do this often. It has been a long time since I endorsed a product. Just want to let you know that this is highly exceptional.

But my good friend and fellow blogger/podcaster Josh Nankivel has created the fabulous WBS Coach training course (affiliate link). This multimedia training package will explain everything you need to know about a work breakdown structure. Since the WBS is one of the core artifacts in any project, this is key information for every project manager to know.

Sure, I make some pennies if you purchase this course. But believe me, I only endorse something when I am convinced it’s great stuff.

For those of you that prefer books: Josh has been working hard over the past few months on his first book.  He received a lot of feedback from people who wanted his WBS Coach training course (affiliate link) in a book format. The pdf version is now available.

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WBS Coach: Everything You Need To Know About The Work Breakdown Structure

This is a guest post by Pawel Brodzinski. He is a project firefighter, team builder and program manager. He runs a blog called Software Project Management where he shares his experience in dealing with software projects in real life. You can also meet him on Twitter. Pawel is a fan and long time reader of The Blog Formerly Known As ProjectShrink which you read at the moment.

There’s much focus lately on communication in projects. Communication is pointed as one of common problems which affect our work. We eagerly try new tools like Twitter in projects. We think about communication in multi-culture teams. We chew communication over and over again.

And we still suck at it.

Messages are misunderstood. People are misinformed. Important data is tweaked. We’ve seen it all. Problems which popped up only because we screwed the communication part. Someone has forgotten to tell someone else, the other guy hasn’t asked and made wrong assumptions, whole situation hasn’t reached an ear of a leader and here it is: a serious problem to solve.

There’s a tool which would help here. The tool you know, but most likely you under-use it vastly. It is actually a set of tools. Ready?

Talking and listening.

Yes, it is so simple. Just go talk with each other more. Listen to what you guys are saying. If there isn’t the right person at hand, grab your phone and call them.

Don’t open your email client to write a poem describing whole process from The Big Bang up to your current problem. Email conversation, although suitable in some cases, isn’t really a conversation. If someone doesn’t agree with you or have important information for you or want to redirect you to someone else you’ll know it… in a few hours. Or days if you’re out of luck. If you used the “talking” trick you’d know it in a minute. Isn’t that a huge time-saver?

And yes, I’m aware that’s not so simple for those of you who work in teams spread over Palo Alto, London and Bangalore. And yes, I still say you don’t talk with each other enough. Are you isolated in your offices? Didn’t think so. Are you going an extra mile for your team and make a call at 7pm from time to time or you prefer good old email ping-pong?

I know many people feel uneasy when it comes to direct communication and there isn’t any more direct way of communication than face-to-face discussion, phone calls being close second. I know since, believe me or not, I have the same problem. I still feel better to drop an email than to make a call. But I just try to talk more. More than I would otherwise. Feeling uneasy shouldn’t be excuse to avoid talking with either a colleague sitting at next desk or a customer.

So forget for a moment about all these fancy tools which get so much buzz these days. When the next problem appears just go talk with someone. And if can’t meet them in person, call them. It will help.

Note: I don’t say all these tools around are bad. No. Personally I could hardly work without instant messaging to take the first example. My point is we use them as an excuse to avoid old-school listening-and-talking approach way too often.

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The Best Communication Tool

If you want to know what is going on at a conference right now, you can follow the back channel chatter on Twitter.

If you want to see the actual conference, you might check out UStream.tv, perhaps a video stream is available that lets you watch the event live.

The web is getting real time. It’s all about what is happening now.

Do you think things will be different if your actions on the project can be viewed by everyone in the world as they happen? How would you operate if your actions can be watched over and over again because they’re recorded?

I am not talking about a Big Brother scenario. But if information streams get real time, this concept will find its way into the project environment, one way or another. And information streams being real time, well, that changes everything.

I know. Because I am experiencing it right now. The experience is in the context of being active in the online Project Management community. I went from static to (almost) real time.

My Path From Static To Real Time

In 2001 I started a static website, SoftwareProjects.org. I wrote some articles once in a while, traffic was provided by the search engines, and the only way I could tell that people actually saw the articles was due to the website statistics. There was no feedback what so ever. That can be a good thing. Without feedback you are always right.

In 2005 I wrote a book. I spent months thinking about the topics I wanted to discuss. Months about how to tell the story. Months getting feedback from an editor and correcting minor details. Months getting it just perfect. Did I mention it took months?

In 2007 I started this blog, after years of thinking about it. When I finally “got it”, when I finally understood how blogs really are different from static sites, I was ecstatic. A blog supports the style I prefer, more emerging, more incremental, refining ideas. Writing becomes more of a continuous flow and you become more aware of what people think about it. Still, you have some moments to collect your thoughts, and you only have to care about the words you write.

In 2009 I recorded my first video interview. Adding visual and voice into the communication is more challenging. You have to pay attention to how you look too. The interviews are recorded and I tape my own parts afterward, to merge them later into the final video. Still enough opportunity to think and reflect.

Recently, together with Dave Prior and Josh Nankivel, I started doing podcasts that consist of real time conversations. We start with nothing but a rough outline of the topics and (almost) no editing afterward. You now have to think about content, words, voice, visual at the same time. It’s like real life, with one exception, if you really mess up, you can cancel everything as if it has never happened.

Next step is live video streaming through UStream.tv. That will be real time. No cancel. Accessible for the entire world to see. Available as a recording until the end of time. I am almost ready.

Almost.

Are you?

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Dear Project Leader, Are You Ready For The Real Time Web?

A central element of ProjectShrink.com are your questions. And I have a lot of them.

So, I better start answering them.

Below is a clip from this weeks Project Potion podcast in which we take on this question:

What are the early symptoms of a project that will fail?

And please, feel free to add your own answer or question in the comments. I would really appreciate that.

In the entire episode we take a shot at the following entries:

• How do you set expectations in such a way that the team member will attribute right priority to the tasks assigned by you?
• How do you manage rapidly shared resources?
• How to bring bad news to a sponsor? Especially when he/she is not a real sponsor.
• How can a project leader overcome his/her fear for bringing bad news?
• What are the early symptoms of a project that would eventually fail?
• How to use effectively online media for communication in projects?

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What Are The Early Symptoms Of A Project That Will Fail?

Created these years ago. Has anything changed in the meantime?

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Software Project Management Cartoons