“I have wrecked my brain on how to create project cultures. Cultures are the rules how things are done within a group. Rituals, rules of engagements, language and visual clues that identify this specific group.

A culture can be awesome. It can that turn a collection of individuals into a tight and focused group. A group with a purpose. A group that feels special and a little different from the rest of the organization.

But how do you “create” a culture?

….

You throw stuff to the wall and see what sticks. If it catches on, awesome. If it doesn’t, forget about it.

This is not really management.

It isn’t pure leadership either.

I propose we call it Freestyling.

Oh. And it contains an awesome video clip on how to start a movement. Must see.

Click here to read the entire post.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Freestyling. The Art Of Bootstrapping Culture. is a post from: Project Shrink.

Sometimes our natural tendency is to increase our grip, be more present, making sure everyone is there and knows what to do. Communicate to the max, even if it is just through the “two cans with the string” of virtual communication. We’ll talk to people, again and again. Collect every single piece of information. Over and over again.

I am not quite sure why this happens. Perhaps we want to make sure people do the right thing, are not goofing off. Possibly we fear people cannot make the proper decisions or make promises the team cannot keep. It might even be a desire to shield information, making sure a stakeholder gets the “proper” information. What ever the reasons, this is where a paradox comes into play.

If you tighten your grip, increase your presence, you make things worse.

Here are four reasons why it makes matters worse.

One.

If you are the central point for information gathering, communication and decision making, you become a bottleneck. You need time to read, process, make up your mind and ask for clarification. When there is a lot going on in the project environment you get a lot of information and you need to make a lot of decisions. You suffer from an “exploding mailbox”. When delays get serious, this has huge negative impact on team performance. When information only gets available long after the facts have taken place, your team is in trouble. “Just you” creates a bottleneck. No matter how good you are, delays in information flows are not good when you have to respond quickly to changes.

Two.

Another problem is lack of different perspectives if you remain the principal point for interpreting information. In his famous book “Three Blind Men And The Elephant” David Schmalz tells the story of three blind men that are describing an elephant by just touching the animal. The first one feels its trunk and thinks it is some kind of rubber hose. The second one is standing at the side of the elephant and imagines some kind of massive wall. The third and final man is located near the tail of the elephant. He figures its a rope. The moral of this story is that while everyone is “looking” at the same thing, different perceptions create different views. Although individually they might have it wrong, collectively they could derive a proper observation. If it’s “just you”, you miss out on the diversity of minds in your team.

Three.

When intervening your team, you are changing their behavior. By asking them over and over again how they are doing against the plan, you are changing their responses. By being too much “in their face” you might distract them and make it difficult for them to get into a productive flow. As my good friend dr Ali Anani explained to me: “Employees live in complex organizations, complexity imposes unpredictability of the future and only a turbid picture of the future may be sensed. The direct control of the employees will stress them and the employees will act and not behave normally. If a manager wants to see the real behavior he has to do it indirectly and from a distance.”

Four.

And last, but most importantly, people like to have influence. Being recognized as knowledgeable and use their creativity. Being able to make decisions about ones own activities is a huge motivator. By remaining the central point for everything, you miss out on a big opportunity to engage your team members.

More leadership means less “you”.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - More Leadership Means Less “You” is a post from: Project Shrink.

Yesterday Derek Huether explained in a great post how he relates agile approaches in terms of the PMBOK to get acceptance from stakeholders:

“I would propose that you make sure you can communicate with stakeholders in a language they understand. If you start using terms like Sprint, ScrumMaster, and Burndowns, when they understand contract periods of performance, project managers, and EVM reports, you may lose that essential stakeholder buy-in.”

I agree. By changing your language you can also improve the relation with a person. By talking “the same” you appear more similar, and the more similar you are perceived, the more attracted you are to your conversation partner. It doesn’t matter if you have a job interview, talking to a project sponsor or trying to get a date. Like attract likes and language is a huge influencer in that process.

But!

If you are using Scrum, you are using Scrum. There is amazing power in using a method properly. Everyone knows what to expect. All are using the same rules of engagement, you create alignment. If you use a “standard” rule set by it’s name, like Scrum, XP, Prince2, you really have to use the entire set that is covered by the label. PINO, as in Prince In Name Only, or SINO, Scrum In Name Only, is worst case. People will assume they are working according to a certain set of rules, when in reality they are not. Total misalignment.

If you are using the labels PMBOK for sponsors and Scrum for team members, you create a big mess.

So!

So?

I know. It’s somewhere in between. It depends.

But how far is somewhere?

BTW If you are interested in the question: “How do you convince an organization to use Scrum or another agile practice and really adopt it?” I recommend this post.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Schizophrenic Use Of Methods is a post from: Project Shrink.

You got to love Tom Peters. This management Uber-Guru is passionate when it comes to the topic of leadership, organizations and, of course, management. The co-author of the 80s-classic “In Search Of Excellence” published a report titled “Project05: “PSFs” Are “Everything,” CEOs Are Idiots, MBAs Should Be Abolished, Lord Nelson Had All the Answers, and More”.

Image by vxla.

In it he paints a picture of organizations that are nothing more but vehicles to facilitate talent coming together to achieve a certain purpose. The talent is everything. Or, more in Peters style: EVERYTHING! Companies should go overboard in nourishing and treasuring the professionals.

He raises an excellent point: how do organizations get the best talent? If you want to get and keep talent, you should make your projects worthwhile. Something people would love and enjoy doing. Peters even has a name for this: WOW! Projects. If you see the project, if you hear about the project, if you participate on the project, there is only one thing you can say: wow.

I always thought people were important. Good people that is. I knew the power of doing something you like. But the Project05 report influenced me so much, I started chanting the same thing. Talent is EVERYTHING! And you need WOW! Projects.

Hot Causes And Cool Solutions

This observation is not unique. Although Peters rants are one of a kind, the need for fabulous people with a cause is an observation done by more leading thinkers. In the book “Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations“ by Hayagreeva Rao the concept of “Hot Causes and Cool Solutions” is used to illustrate how to activate crowds.

“A hot cause like deaths from tobacco or medical errors can be used as springboards to raise awareness, spark motivation, and ignite red-hot outrage. … But creating the heat isn’t enough; the next step needs to be cool solutions. This doesn’t just mean identifying technically feasible solutions, it also means finding ways to bind people together, to empower them to take steps that help solve the problem…”,

as Bob Sutton explains.

Tribes

More of my favorite authors have toyed with this idea. Master marketing blogger Seth Godin wrote in 2008 “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us“. According to Godin, Tribes are groups of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other. The central element of a tribe is the leader and the idea, the goal. You need a leader who can inspire, one that can present Big Audacious Goals that seem to rock the world. Al Gore is a prime example. He has collected a huge global tribe around the concept of “Save the planet” (or “global warming awareness” if you want).

The overall suggestion to allocate a group of great people is to have something worthwhile.

“Worthwhile” doesn’t mean the same for everyone. My example of Al Gore generates always discussion with people who don’t agree to the cause and the leadership. What seems exciting for the first person, might be perceived in absolute boredom by the next (so boring). I love the web. Love it. Adore social media. Adore it. Although I am not unique in that sense, I know personally some lovely people who could care less about my new shiny technology discoveries.

A cause is only a cause when it resonates with you. “WOW” is a scream of excitement. Not everyone will be wowed by the same project.

The pursuit of something worthwhile is The Quest. Be A Freestyler. Bootstrap Your Team Culture.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Wow To You Too! Or Don’t Look At Me I Am Boring is a post from: Project Shrink.

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.

Yet, he has a goal to reach. And he only has a couple of months to reach it. A short period of time before he moves on.

How do you get your job done?

First of all, the goal is reached by the team. A team with a leader might be ineffective at worst, but a PM without a team is, well, useless.

As Anthony Mersino once wrote:

“Project Management is Getting Work Done Through People!”

The only way I know to get such a complex task done in a short period of time under these circumstances is by means of culture.

Create goals, create an identity that the organization members want to be associated with. Create rituals, rules of engagements, language and visual clues that turn a collection of individuals into a tight and focused group. A group with a purpose. A group that feels special and a little different from the rest of the organization.

I am personally fascinated by how this works in a global and virtual world. There is no denying that the digital online world is playing an increasing role in our lives. Private and professional. Communicating through digital channels is different and at the same time it is familiar. Human interaction is still human interaction.

However, the visible clues we provide by what we are, what we think and, more importantly, with which groups we are associated are becoming more persistent (the web never “forgets”) and more dominant (it’s more obvious and in-your-face).

I thought about naming those clues “tags”, but I am not quite sure about that now. But still, as I explained:

“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.”

I will never suggest that you need to do all your project work online. But I will state that hybrid operations will emerge more and more, mixed teams, mixed communication channels, offline and online.

And I am happy to tell you, no worries. Mechanism is the same.

Culture.

The observable traits or characteristics of an organism are called “phenotypes”. Your entire digital footprint is a phenotype. And so is the parrot on your shoulder if you associated yourself with being a pirate. So tags are phenotypes. Rituals are phenotypes.

Boyd and Richerson in Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985) define culture as “information capable of affecting individuals’ phenotypes which they acquire from other conspecifics … by teaching or imitation.”

Providing information and teaching are therefor essential tasks in building cultures.

But this view also provides a different angle. The culture (in this case the project) adds to the individuals phenotype. So, to the legacy of the individual team member. It is not just his resume he is working on, it is larger than that, it is about creating his own identity and life story. His storyline is made up of a sequence of quests he is taking on. And one of those quests might be your project.

The essence of this observation is that culture cannot be separated from the project and the individual professional paths.

In an attempt to create a visual representation of the story I am telling at Project Shrink, I came up with the following.

The quest is the goal of the project. I call it “quest” as it also applies to e.g. online communities.

The small circles are the individual team members. The arrows between them represent their interaction.

The rules of engagement are the set of rules the group agreed upon for the way they interact.

The leader (PM) can use a mix of rituals, badges (visual clues), motivation, facilitation, communication and setting the example to ensure interactions and quest are followed as agreed (explicit and implicit) by the group.

The individual storyline is the combination of the “history” of the person (which determines his reputation) and the profile (a snapshot of who he is at this moment, the current role or expertise). The storyline moves into the direction of a persons ambition.

I hope this provides some structure in a sometimes complex story

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - The Essential Role Of Culture In Projects is a post from: Project Shrink.

Date: April 12 2010
Time: Eastern: 2pm, Pacific: 11am, GMT: 7pm, CET: 8pm
Location: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/the-project-shrink

The number one argument I hear why professionals are not engaging in social media:

“I have nothing to say.”

or it’s twin

“I don’t know what to say.”

In this 30 minute “lunch” session (someone must be having lunch at this time) I will show you ways to start engaging in social media when you don’t know what to talk about. And how to find out what it is you want to say (seriously, you have a story to tell).

The format is fast and simple:

15 minutes presentation
15 minutes Q&A.

And, yeah yeah, it’s free.

If you want to take part in this session, please visit this Facebook event page.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - How To Get Started In Social Media When You Have Nothing To Say is a post from: Project Shrink.

He is talking about a dream some people have. Not necessarily a vision of spending your days at the beach, in your shorts earning a living with your laptop. But nevertheless, this dream is oozing with “freedom”.

Problogger.net is one of the more popular blogs on the Internet. A lot of people comment on his articles.

Every. Single. Time.

They provide positive feedback. They discuss among each other.

Darren’s readers are all on the same journey. Beach. Shorts. Freedom. And, oh yeah. Money.

Darren’s influence is huge. He holds no formal authority over his crowd. He doesn’t pay them any money. Yet, he can make them move.

He is creating a vision. He is teaching by example. He motivates with words. He provides feedback to the crowd.

This is leadership.

Projects need leadership. Teams need motivation. With vision, the right words and positive feedback.

By observing how Darren operates on Problogger.net you can learn a lot about effective leadership. This is true for a lot of blogs and social networks on the Internet.

By participating on the Internet, you can train your leadership skills. The skills you need to create a small online community around your blog, are the same skills you use for leading your project team.

Same.

Well. Almost.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Beach. Shorts. And Leadership. is a post from: Project Shrink.

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.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Trusting People You Don’t Know is a post from: Project Shrink.

That is why I like this presentation by Lasse Koskela performed at Oredev a little over a month ago.

“… teams are dropping Scrum to go Kanban. We see good ideas in all of these methods and are adopting them with an evolutionary approach. This session presents Scrow, a mashup of those very ideas.”

Click here to watch the presentation.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Mashup Of Scrum, Lean And Kanban: Scrow is a post from: Project Shrink.

“Oh yeah, by the way, you need to tailor this to the situation. You don’t need everything. Sort of. Kinda. We guess.”

Hate it. Hate it.

People put labels on methods. They give it a name. We need to categorize everything just to make sense of the world.

If you call things Agile, Lean, Traditional, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 54.8, ISO77658, your audience already has a lot of assumptions. Even without knowing the background, the problems addressed and the circumstances for its use.

That’s cool. That’s natural.

Descriptions and labels make it difficult to know what a method or technique is about. Let alone being able to use it with the right intent.

This becomes obviously hard when you try to mix and match approaches. You need to find essences and compare stuff.

It sounds like fun.

At least, that is what Dave Prior and I thought.

So, we started a new podcast, called Project Potion. Meshing Up Projects.

We talk about different approaches, topics and techniques, put them in a blender and see what comes out.

We never know.

But we learn. A lot.

We hope you do to.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Project Potion. Meshing Up Projects. is a post from: Project Shrink.