“If you are a Project Manager that operates for a short period of time in a foreign organization, with a global team you don’t know, in a domain you would not know, using virtual communication, high uncertainty, limited authority and part of what you do out in the open on the Internet, how do you make it all work?”

Yes, I know, I tried to put as much difficulties as I know of into this question. But it’s the question we are dealing with.

The Medina Of Fes

It all started three years ago with my trip to the fabulous country of Morocco. When I was leaving the medina (Old City) of Fes through the gate I felt overwhelmed by this great illustration of human complexity.

Standing on top of a hill you have a great overview of the entire medina. It really consists of thousands and thousands of streets, but from above you just see one massive, silent brown and green landscape.

When entering the medina you get proper feel of how big and busy this maze actually is. People are crawling through every possible opening. These openings are called streets, but actually that is not the correct expression. A more appropriate description is space between houses. From the hilltop you have no idea what is going on in this enormous network of spaces between houses.

The city itself contains complete small eco-systems between houses. Out of sight from the street level, but visible from the roof gardens of surrounding buildings is this part of town dedicated to making leather from skin. It is a specialized small city within the larger medina.

These small specialized parts are not the only hidden secrets. All houses within the medina look very dull from the outside. Almost no way to look inside from the small streets. But when entering such a riad one has to be amazed by the size of the internal gardens that make up the center of these large houses.

The Connection With Projects

For me Fes illustrates that a society is multi-layered. Depending on which scale you are looking at you see different things happening. But all levels are connected. The streets make up the city. But the development of the entire city determines where streets are created or used.

If we are studying projects, we cannot do this without looking at the individual stakeholders and team members. We cannot do this without the organization where the project is conducted. We have a tendency to look at individual elements, and we know somewhere there are some connections, but mostly we treat every scale individually.

But all things are interconnected.

Interactions Between Members And The Project

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 to 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.

In this sense the word “project” is the same as “economy”. If our economy is improving, there is not some kind of energy force that is doing better than before. The whole system of people working, people buying and people living that is better off in some way than in the past. We need this kind of abstraction, just to be able to cope with it; it is easier to talk about the economy than about 100 million individuals.

But the interesting thing is that this abstraction influences the people that make up the underlying system; if the economy is doing better, people will spend more, if a project is late, people will work harder.

Influenced By Panarchy

How to analyze today’s complexity? I found my answer in Panarchy. Its origin is in ecosystem management, where it is used for assessment on how ecosystems, social systems and economic systems are interacting.

One of the essential part of this ecological framework is the notion of three system levels that interact. Let me illustrate the ideas with an example.

For a long time, firefighters used the wrong strategy to attack forest fires. The approach taken was to extinguish the fire as soon as possible, as small as possible. If a small tree is on fire, put it out immediately. By solving the problem at the “individual tree level” you didn’t have the issue on a larger scale, “the forest level”.

After decades of using this approach, it had worked overall pretty well, however, when a fire broke out, it seemed almost unstoppable. Once the fire was active on a larger scale, forest or landscape, it went on a rampage. Before the “put out before the tree is on fire”-policy was used, smaller areas burned once in a while. The burning of the smaller forest area made the newly grown trees more fire resistant. It also created more natural open spaces; areas that have no plants or trees, so the fire hits on a barrier.

Two lessons here:

• You can view a system on different scales or levels (leave, tree, forrest, landscape / person, team, project, organization, society), and
• The different levels interact.

In terms of Panarchy, three elements are considered: the focal system (in our case “the project”), the higher scales (e.g. the company, or professional group, or society) and the lower scales (e.g. individuals or teams).

Panarchy provides us a wide angle lens to look at projects. This powerful concept lets us capture the project, the individual team members and the embedding organization in one go.

We can look at three levels at once.

Although I think this actual model can help us further, I am using it for inspiration, as I think I have a better answer to the original question I started this post with.

But the notion to look at multi levels at once that interact, is a concept I will borrow happily as it addresses my main problem with alternatives.

A second concept I’ll borrow from Panarchy, is the idea that resilience in projects are determined by the diversity of individuals: resilience is in the interactions. Formulated in the framework itself (*):

“The resilience characteristics of any focal system are in large part determined by the interactions of scales across this panarchy, from the focal system to coarser scales and from the focal system to the finer scales.”

As explained at SustainableScale:

“Diversity is believed to be a key issue in restoring resilience – both biological and social diversity are important to the extent they contribute functional redundancy (i.e. similar services can be provided by some element in the diversity). But as biological diversity is lost, or as human systems and institutions become homogeneous and rigid, then the likelihood of restoring lost resilience declines.”

In the 2008 financial crisis, what you see is that all banks were using the same kind of strategies and constructs, and they are highly connected. So when a huge disturbance hits the banking system, they infect each other by the heavy dependencies and react all the same because of identical structures, lack of diversity.

Next up: The Essence Is Context.

[*] (“Assessing and managing resilience in social-ecological systems: Volume 2 supplementary notes to the practitioners workbook”, can be freely downloaded from the Resilience Alliance – bottom of the 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. - The Context Machine: The Need For A Multi Layered Model is a post from: Project Shrink.

If you are in a room with your team it happens very often that a talk between people in the same room morphs from murmur in the background to a conversation you find yourself all of a sudden eavesdropping on. Remember “osmotic communication“?

The shift from ignoring the conversation to focusing on it is most of the times triggered by a word or topic you didn’t expect in this context or phase of the project.

“Why are they talking about this, now?”

Often it means nothing, sometimes it’s a sign of an emerging problem.

This works fine when you are in the same room. But with virtual communications this gets harder to do. Too many information streams.

Although. Twitter found a solution. On its homepage it displays the real time trending topics. The keywords most often used in the current information stream.

Sometimes it’s expected. Like in December people talk about Christmas.

But sometimes (actually most of the times) I find myself asking:

“Why are people talking about this, now?”

If Google Wave catches on as an online communication and conversation channel, I hope some one creates a “Trending Topics” feature. I would love that. I think we would need that.

We need filters like that. I always thought about this in the context of “information overload”.

Until I read this quote from Clay Shirky:

“So there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, right? Which is to say the normal case of modern life is information overload for all educated members of society.”

So we need to focus on filters.

I want my “Trending Topics”. Now.

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. - Trending Topics In Your Project is a post from: Project Shrink.

Even some well intended interventions can make things worse:

“Seagull coaching (dive in, dump on people and dash off), the most common form of coaching, just makes things worse because it undermines self-trust and confidence and pushes people deeper into their ambivalence (increasing dissatisfaction). Positive feedback (and praise) has the same effect as negative feedback, albeit to a lesser degree.”

The more you are messing with your human system (the team), the more chaotic (unpredictable) their behavior will become.

And you really want predictable behavior:

“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.”

Dr Ali Anani wrote recently a great presentation about this in the context of employee performance. In 2008 we wrote together a series of postings on this blog about “The Fish Pond“-metaphor. Its purpose is to make some sense of complexity, humans, projects and globalization.

In this new presentation “Quality Control on The Uncontrollables” he suggests setting upper and lower limits to performance measurements similar to its use in quality control. Only when boundaries are challenged, the manager is considering an intervention.

Grasping the impact of the information is a mental exercise. But well worth your cognitive time.

Quality Control on the Uncontrollables –

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. - Reduce Interventions: Mess Less With Your Team is a post from: Project Shrink.

1. Systems Thinking: A Technique To Find Project Problems
2. Systems Thinking: Looking For Causal Loops
3. Shifting The Burden And Fixes That Backfire – Archetypes Part 1
4. Limits To Growth And Tragedy Of The Commons – Archetypes Part 2

I started this topic to be able to analyze problematic situations in projects. You will need to try this technique a few times before you really get the hang of it.

To be a good project manager you have to “see” potential problems. Literature provides us with large lists of potential problems in projects. You could look at all those lists to see if your problem is on it somewhere. But wouldn’t it be great to be able to look at problems in your project on a more fundamental level? That would be the best thing that can happen to you, and the techniques discussed in this series, will help you just with that!

Start running small workshops where you discuss the variables you chose (like budget overrun, number of bugs).

• If this variable is going up or down with ever increased speed you have to look for a reinforcing loop;
• If the variable is moving towards a threshold, and either stays on this threshold or starts oscillating around it, you have a balancing loop;
• When a problem symptom alternately improves (the variable goes down) and deteriorates (problem goes up worse than before) you might have a “Fixes That Backfire” on your hands;
• There is growth (sometimes explosive) leveling off or failing into decline, you might start looking for “Limits To Growth”.

Getting familiar with the archetypes helps you looking for the right loops and links.

And there is an additional bonus: when discussing and talking about the problems in this way, the solutions just “pop up” as you are addressing the fundamental causes.

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. - Systems View – Final Analysis is a post from: Project Shrink.

Archetypes can be considered as stereotypes of problematic situations. When analyzing a situation they are the standard patterns you look for.

In this post I will describe two archetypes:

• Limits To Growth
• Tragedy Of The Commons

Image by laurenatclemson.

Limits To Growth

In this case two processes are intervening with each other: a process that indicates growth, and a process that puts limits to this growth (with a delay). If you think about project management a classical sample of this type is the addition of members to a team to increase the total productivity of this team.

Example

To increase productivity of a team new fresh employees are added to the team. However, people need time to learn the ropes within the teams working environment, and with extra members to total communication overhead increases.

Within small teams this may not have a large impact on the productivity of the individual team members, but as more and more new members are put to a team, the productivity gain will drop. It will probably plateau at a given moment, or, when teams are getting too large, too much new members are added simultaneously, etc. it may even drop.

If you have a variable that is increasing and all of a sudden you hit a plateau or it even collapses, you might look for a “Limits To Growth” situation.

Tragedy Of The Commons

The Fifth Discipline archetypes I discussed until know can be considered as relatively simple. Just a view loops that are interacting. Reality will be more complex where multiple archetypes are interacting with each other. The next archetype is such a situation: Tragedy of The Commons.

With Tragedy of The Commons you have multiple Limits To Growth that are interacting with each other. To be more precise, they are interacting on the same limiting process or constraint. The symptoms are identical to a single Limits To Growth, but with increased speed, and not transparent.

Example

Consider the situation where you have two projects (A and B) that are both in testing phase. The growing process is finding new bugs by the test team. The overall performance per project is the number of bugs at a given moment. This will not be increasing forever as the bugfix team will resolve the bugs with some delay. However, the speed of fixing is limited by the capacity of the team.

Normally the capacity is calculated for such situations. But what happens: project A sees that by giving bugs a high priority, the time they get their fix speeds up. Project B concludes the same thing, and does this also. And although the capacity is calculated to handle two projects (but only when using the “real” priorities of bugs) the overall performance drops like a fly.

Next time:

Final analysis.

This a post in my series about using systems thinking for analyzing problems in projects.

1. Systems Thinking: A Technique To Find Project Problems
2. Systems Thinking: Looking For Causal Loops
3. Shifting The Burden And Fixes That Backfire – Archetypes Part 1
4. Limits To Growth And Tragedy Of The Commons – Archetypes Part 2
5. Systems View – Final Analysis

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. - Limits To Growth And Tragedy Of The Commons – Archetypes Part 2 is a post from: Project Shrink.

After extensive research Peter Senge, author of the book The Fifth Discipline, found patterns that were common among the situations he studied; a couple of loops that occurred in multiple situations: the archetypes.

Archetypes can be considered as stereotypes of problematic situations. When analyzing a situation they are the standard patterns you look for.

In this post I will describe two archetypes:

• Shifting The Burden
• Fixes That Backfire

Image by Terry Wha.

Shifting The Burden

With Shifting The Burden a problem is only superficially fixed and not at its root. A problem occurs and a corrective measure is put into place. However, this is a symptomatic solution that doesn’t tackle the fundamental problem. The fundamental solution takes time; there is a delay before its effects will be visible.

Because of the delay the fundamental solution is harder to find, or more costly to implement. But as the symptomatic solution has only side effects (negative) on the fundamental problem, the situation will not be solved, and will even deteriorate.

(note: the hourglass in the diagrams indicate a delay)

Example

Two information systems have an interface running from system A to system B. Short after going live many data records are marked as error on the receiving end at system B.

At first this does the trick, however after doing this for a while the backlog of wrong records is large; one cannot keep up with fixing the data records. Because of the large amount errors are cascading, making the situation worse and worse.

Fixes That Backfire

Within this system you have two loops that interfere with each other: there is a problematic situation that is solved by a short term (quick) solution. However this loop has unintended consequences that only make the situation worse. The quick fix that bites you in the back.

The sneaky part here is that there is a delay in the backfire: you will only see the unintended consequences after a while.

Example

Suppose you have a software system under development. The quality is not good enough and it is not addressing the right business issues. You assume that this is caused by the lack of quality that your user
group brings into the project: they have a hard time formulating the requirements, they have no experience in testing, and seem to resist change in general.

They will not help you out with the important info, and will not accept the system as something they really want to adopt. Which in the end lowers the quality of the system and ruins your chances of reaching the business goals set for the new system.

Next time:

Two other archetypes: Limits To Growth and Tragedy Of The Commons.

This a post in my series about using systems thinking for analyzing problems in projects.

1. Systems Thinking: A Technique To Find Project Problems
2. Systems Thinking: Looking For Causal Loops
3. Shifting The Burden And Fixes That Backfire – Archetypes Part 1
4. Limits To Growth And Tragedy Of The Commons – Archetypes Part 2
5. Systems View – Final Analysis

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. - Shifting The Burden And Fixes That Backfire – Archetypes Part 1 is a post from: Project Shrink.

All these patterns, links and loops are fine and dandy, but you are probably wondering right now how this is going to help you running your project?

Check Out This Example Of The Housing Crisis.

Image by I See Modern Britain.

First have a look at this great example about the housing crisis. Twitter user @jeremyx sent it in reply to yesterday’s post. Thanks!

I recommend to go to this example and click on “2. Trace Causal Loops”. It provides a nice, step by step explanation of the elements of the housing crisis …

“Tracing the CLD (causal loop diagram) will give you a high-level understanding of the relationships between the key components of the underlying model – housing supply, housing prices and demand for both housing and mortgages.

Stepping through the feedback loops really helps to explain the situation in very operational terms. And it’s much easier to understand what’s happening when you’re dealing with one loop at a time.”

And… you’re back!

The behavior of a system can be described using variables. A variable is an element of the systems you are looking at that changes over time, like “speed of service”, “number of clients”” or “number of customers that slap you in the face”. Or in the housing example “housing supply” and “housing prices”.

When analyzing your project using systems thinking, you have to look at a certain variable (like budget overrun, defect rate) over time, and then investigate the trend.

You are looking for patterns of behavior over time. As the systems are reocurring loops that effect certain aspects, patterns will emerge when you view them over time.

The pattern that you might discover is a hint to which archetypes one might look into (archetypes are the stereotypes of organizational problems and will be discussed in a later post). They don’t provide the final answer at once, you might try several archetypes before settling on your final verdict.

But first you have to decide on your variables.

You can start anywhere.

Just pick the issue that is bothering you the most, but don’t try to explain it, yet.

Remember, you are just looking for patterns over time. E.g. Programmer productivity is dropping. When you are doing this exercise with other people, it is always nice to use an element of the situation that can relatively be measured neutral.

For projects you can use:

• Schedule slippage
• Budget overrun
• Programmer productivity
• Size of backlog
• Number of change requests
• Number of bugs found
• Number of test cases performed per day

You get the idea.

Telling The Story

All these elements can rise or fall over a period of time. Try to describe how this element evolved over time and how the current status is. Always use words that indicate movement: goes down, goes up, increases, rises, falls, improves …

Then comes the next step: connecting elements. What is the impact of the movement of the first element on the next?

Because productivity is dropping, the risk of schedule slippage increases. You have to try to tell your story using sentences that indicate a causal relationship. “As this happens, then …”, “This in turn causes …”.

Go back and forth for a while. Make the story as detailed as possible. Avoid being judgemental. Only look for cause and effects. After a while, your loops will pop of the whiteboards!

This technique is described in detail in “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook”.

Next up…

The Archetypes explained.

This a post in my series about using systems thinking for analyzing problems in projects.

1. Systems Thinking: A Technique To Find Project Problems
2. Systems Thinking: Looking For Causal Loops
3. Shifting The Burden And Fixes That Backfire – Archetypes Part 1
4. Limits To Growth And Tragedy Of The Commons – Archetypes Part 2
5. Systems View – Final Analysis

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. - Systems Thinking: Looking For Causal Loops is a post from: Project Shrink.

“These patterns are dynamic systems in action, a human system seen over a time period. Patterns are trends over time and involve dependencies with other systems. To spot such trends in projects we use metrics as indicators. If I have the right metrics I can ignore everything around me and focus just on the dashboard.”

Image by Kjai.rm

A technique that can be used to find patterns and the real cause-effect-chains in projects is systems thinking. “Systems Thinking” is one of the 5 disciplines described in the famous book “The Fifth Discipline” by Peter Senge (for an overview view my posting “Fifth Discipline: What To Do When All Your Projects Are Failing“).

This is the first post in a series that will describe this technique and how to use it in your projects.

In The Fifth Discipline an organization is viewed as multiple “systems” (or you may think about processes) that interact with each other. The systems are not viewed as linear, but more as loops that keep on repeating, until some change has been done.

In the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook the image that is presented is that of “loops” and “links”:

“In systems thinking, every picture tells a story. From any element in a situation (or ‘variable’), you can trace arrows (‘links’) that represent influences on another element. These in turn, reveal cycles that repeat themselves, time after time, making situations better or worse.”

Car Repair Shop

To give you an idea, consider the following example:

A car repair shop has not much to do. If a client comes with his car, he can be serviced immediately. After a while worth of mouth about the speed of service, provides this repair shop with an increasing number of clients. As the number of clients grows, the waiting time for service also increases. When the service time takes too long, clients go away. Having fewer clients, again, the speed of service is up again.

After extensive research Peter Senge, author of the book, found patterns that were common among the situations he studied; a couple of loops that occurred in multiple situations: the archetypes.

The archetypes are the stereotypes of organizational problems; the sweet girl, the evil stepmother and the jealous husband from organizational theory if you want.

Basic Structures Underlying The Archetypes

However, underlying the archetypes are three basic structures, the components that make up almost everything, the systems DNA:

1. Reinforcing Feedback Loops
2. Balancing Feedback Loops
3. Delays

Feedback Loops In General

A feedback loop is like a boomerang: you throw it away from you, and after a while, it kicks you back in the head. In the sample of the car repair shop the speed of service creates a chain of event (word of mouth, increase in customers), which after a while influences the speed of service. So with feedback loops there is a cause, and after a chain of effects, the cause itself is influenced again: this is why it’s called a “loop”.

Reinforcing Feedback Loops

This kind of loop generates an ongoing rise of growth or fall (exponential, if you are into that kind of lingo). Sales keep on growing and growing with ever increasing speed. The quality of service is dropping of the scale more and more. With a reinforcing loop a small change feeds itself; it starts slow, but will have a tremendous speed after a while, all by itself. You can actually think about it as a “snowball effect”.

Balancing Feedback Loops

Balancing loops have some kind of limit build in them. When this limit is reached, the plateau, it drops, and having reached some lower limit, it goes up again. It is balancing around a certain point. This type of feedback loops have the appearance of self-regulating.

For an example see the car repair shop earlier in this post.

Delays

Not every effect follows its cause nicely in a timely fashion; it doesn’t have to wait neatly until the cause is completely finished before it will start. You can have time issues. Delays can occur in all kinds of loops. Problematic situations can arise when interacting loops have different kinds of timing. Delays make it difficult to “see” cause and effects, because it is not clear what triggered an event if its root happened already a while ago.

One of the main causes of problems within projects (and companies in general) are two interacting processes where one of them has a large delay; this delay causes problems in the other, much faster process.

Let me give you an example:

A fast paced project runs into time and money problems. New plans are drawn up fast to minimize the impact, but as some more time and budget may be needed, an agreement / decision of some higher level is needed (e.g. a steering committee).

If the project starts adopting the new plan, pending the decision, on the assumption that they will get the ok the situation can occur that when the ok comes, everything is already finished: you can call it “Retrospective Decision Making”.

Next time:

All these patterns, links and loops are fine and dandy, but you are probably wondering right now how this is going to help you running your project?

This a post in my series about using systems thinking for analyzing problems in projects.

1. Systems Thinking: A Technique To Find Project Problems
2. Systems Thinking: Looking For Causal Loops
3. Shifting The Burden And Fixes That Backfire – Archetypes Part 1
4. Limits To Growth And Tragedy Of The Commons – Archetypes Part 2
5. Systems View – Final Analysis

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. - Systems Thinking: A Technique To Find Project Problems is a post from: Project Shrink.

In this post I will describe rule number two.

Use Technology to Simulate Reality

What the authors found is successful virtual teams use technology to mimic real life group processes. The virtual workspaces can be regarded as a room. If two people in a room are whispering to each other, hiding their conversation and actions, this does not enhance trust with the rest of the team.

One-on-one exchanges of information can make people feel left out. Same thing happens when in a virtual team people are using email. No visibility.

Spam-O-Tronic: CC!

Some smart people would now jump up and scream “Use the cc-function”. But this isn’t a solution. This would be the same as having the one-on-one conversation in the back of a room and broadcast it continuously through a speaker system.

The virtual workspaces, and in our case social media, provide discussion groups, forums that allow people to have conversations on topic, make it transparent for the entire group, but don’t dominate the overall group information exchange. And because it’s all digital, archived and always available “… the workspace was where the group was reminded of its decisions, rationales and commitments,” explain the authors in the HBR article.

It’s like sitting in a room, have casual conversations, and if needed go to a meeting room to have a break out session.

Video Conferencing

Much has been said about the benefits of having visual contact with the people you are talking to. Video conferencing can be a good tool for virtual teams. But the authors of the HBR article have two additions: 1) it only brings benefits when the amount is members in the conference is small and 2) when it’s use is no hassle, when there are no technical glitches.

Rules Of Engagement

To make it all work, to let technology mimic reality, the members of the team have to agree upon certain protocols, agree explicitly on how they are going to communicate. How quick they are supposed to answer a question, how are meetings prepared and followed up, e.g. Of course, in co located teams the rules of engagement are important too, but for virtual teams this is essential for success.

For example, conference calls are not used for status updates. Status updates are only written down in the virtual space. The calls are used to discuss disagreements. It’s a simple rule, but it makes a conference call effective and engaging; it becomes a can’t miss-event.

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. - Great Virtual Teams: Rule 2: Use Technology to Simulate Reality is a post from: Project Shrink.

Six weeks ago I released the first draft of my ebook “Project Shrink: Linear Edition“. The reason for publishing unfinished work is to get early feedback. I am very happy to receive a lot of usable comments that will improve the material in the next releases.

Hal Macomber of Reforming Project Management made me aware that releasing the ebook in this fashion makes it an unbook. From now, it will be called my unbook. Sounds way cooler.

What Is The Main Theme?

The number one question I get about the, uhm, unbook is: “what is your main theme?” Just yelling “Projects are about humans!” is not going to cut it.

Recently, one reader (thanks Amos!) pressed some more on this topic.

Alright, alright, I’ll have a go at it!

Partial Information, Partial Influence, Partial Capability

Think about a 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.

The Project Manager is running his project by interacting with his team and stakeholders, but the actual behavior of the project organization is determined by the sum of all interactions, including from the part of the network invisible to the PM.

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.

If the information is the input and the influence is the output of a PM, his mind can be regarded as the transformation process. Because the amount of knowledge a brain can hold is limited, the PM is using partial capability.

How does a Project Manager run a successful project when he has partial information, partial influence and partial capability?

This is why I am focused on Project Management in a global, mobile, virtual and multi-cultural world. This is the context in which the image I just painted comes to life, is more visible.

Does This Make Sense To You?

I would love to get your feedback on this picture!

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 Partial Project Manager is a post from: Project Shrink.