“For years I thought I hated rules. But I realized, I absolutely adore them. …

… before you can bent rules, you have to study them. Learn them. Know them.

And I love studying them.

Rules provide you with a sense of expectations.

And meeting stakeholders expectations is the essence of … well … being stakeholder centered…

Study the rules. And you study the expectations.”

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. - Rules Rule. is a post from: Project Shrink.

Here is the slidedeck for one of them: The End Of The Human Cannonball: Project Leadership In Today’s World.

“Sometimes you end up doing everything in your project yourself. You become the center of control. But sometimes changes happen so fast, it’s hard to keep up and in control. It seems lately “sometimes” is more often then we would like.

In this presentation he will present the alignment of goals and approaches between organization, project and individuals as the central task of a Project Leader.”

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 End Of The Human Cannonball: Project Leadership In Today’s World is a post from: Project Shrink.

By giving them detailed instructions what to do, by giving them very fixed and tight constraints, you can drive them into a funnel of efficiency.

It’s like a bobsled track.

The less room you have to move sideways, the faster you go.

But what happens if you have a big obstacle on the tracks? What if your path is blocked and you go fast and efficient, but without any room to maneuver?

You could hit all the brakes at once.

Suppose you are real lucky and stop just before the obstacle. Suppose.

You could order the team to get inside the control room, ask them a gazillion questions, order them to lay new tracks around the obstacle, and continue their downhill race.

You could also make the tracks a little wider.

Give them room to step aside, adjust course.

You could also let them make the decisions themselves. Without providing you with all the information. Without having to wait for your, possibly misguided, opinion.

Creating self-organized teams is hard work.

You need Project Leaderships skills to enable the team to get self-organized.

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. - Having Enough Room To Step Sideways is a post from: Project Shrink.

One set of rules for everyone. Everyone should know the same set of rules…

Humans … have “rules” about how we do things “around here”. It is not hardwired however. For us it’s software, an operating system called “Culture” that can be upgraded or switched entirely. It is the culture of a group that determines what we think is important and how we interact with others.

A clear choice between an agile or a plan-driven project approach is a choice in culture. It sets the ground rules for “how we do things around here”.

Image by jlwelsh.

If the entire team uses the same rules on how to conduct meetings, which artifacts to create, which rituals to perform, coordination without central control will become possible.

The means, the rules of engagement, must be these 3 things…

Simple.

And short. And sweet. If everyone should hold the same view of the rules, the threshold for learning should be low. Scrum is short and easy to explain. The entire PMBoK itself is too large, a subset is needed, always.

Accessible.

Team members must be able to reference the rule set quickly in case they need to look something up. If it’s available on the web or intranet, people will use it. “Accessible” means an easy search function, not an glossary with a gazillion entries and links.

Label Must Fit.

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.

Johanna Rothman recently wrote a great post that is related to this topic:

“One of the questions people have is: Can we do this partway? No, not Scrum or any other agile lifecycle. You either do it all or you’re not doing agile.”

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 Rules For The Rules Of Engagement 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.

Image by jlwelsh.

Humans also have “rules” about how we do things “around here”. It is not hardwired however. For us it’s software, an operating system called “Culture” that can be upgraded or switched entirely. It is the culture of a group that determines what we think is important and how we interact with others.

A clear choice between an agile or a plan-driven project approach is a choice in culture. It sets the ground rules for “how we do things around here”.

PINO, as in Prince In Name Only, or SINO, Scrum In Name Only, is worst case. It signals a split culture. The mouth says something different than the mind thinks. The rules of engagement don’t have to be lengthy or detailed to the lowest level. But they have to be shared!

That is why Jessica suggests successful virtual teams first agree on how they will interact and when.

That is why Jurgen implemented Scrum also for its name. It describes “how we do things around here”. And everyone can read the description on the web.

The first steps to solving the project communication problem is recognizing you can decide your rules of engagement (it’s not hardwired, there may be many choices) and everybody should be using the same set of rules.

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. - You Decide How You Communicate: Rules Of Engagement is a post from: Project Shrink.

How does one become more Agile? The question beckons any project manager worth his/her weight in PMP training books. We all ask ourselves how we can better deal with uncertainty. How can we embrace the unknown and move forward? How can we be more predictive, and better to adapt to changes? Is this just a project question, or is this a question that weights on us everyday as human beings?

The mission statement if you will of Project Shrink is “Projects are about humans, we help you deal with that” This is where I begin my blog.

Image by Glutnix.

We Want A Challenge With Rules

Humans like routine; it’s animalistic in nature to want a repetitive action to fulfill daily. We like the known, the obvious, but we like problem solving. As we problem solve we also like understanding our problems by using empirical data to drive quantitative and qualitative analysis. The bottom line: we want a challenge but want rules to play by. Like a game of Chess, or Risk, we want a challenge but want a framework to work in. We want to know that with every challenge there is a rule book in that game box that we can refer to for “clarification” We ask ourselves “What happens when you roll matching 6s on the dice, does the attacking army win or the defending army?” Without this rulebook this question goes unanswered, and chaos in sues on the game board.

At this point you are asking yourself, “What does this have to do with Project Management in Agile environment?” To answer that question, please turn to page 21 of your Agile rule book. Yes, and here in-lies the problem. Agile isn’t like PMP, where we have explicit processes laid out in front of us, explaining the 44 processes broken down by 9 process areas, fitting into 5 project management phases. Agile isn’t about rules, or if/then statements, or inputs and outputs. It has a framework, but that framework is based on the ability to take information, process it quickly and make rapid change and action occur. All while doing what is best for the project, and considering the customer needs. Oh, the customer we forgot about them, during our study of the processes of project management.

The Agile World

It is critical in an Agile World to take real time feedback, analyze, and apply it immediately. It is critical to keep the team informed, and allow people to weigh in. Taking all this feedback and using probabilistic schedule approach will allow you to move through your schedule with utmost flexibility and efficiency. Social media is the single greatest asset in an Agile World. Crowd sourcing, micro blogging, customer focus groups, face to face communication, real time collaboration, are all critical to the success of an Agile team.

I ask myself is it indicative of human beings to be truly Agile? I think we have to train ourselves to be OK with uncertainty, to embrace change, to allow the “community” to share feedback, and to break the restrictions of a PMP world. How does one do this? By taking everything you know about project management and rethinking how you handle uncertainty and the “crowd”. If you embrace uncertainty, and work to reduce it through your project life cycle, you can truly become Agile. If you find the best ways to extract information and feedback from your “crowd” you can harness the team in new ways. Finally, as you move closer to certainty, you have to be discipline to keep the key ingredients, backlog the rest, and toss the left-overs in the garbage. Humans are pack rats by nature, so we have re-think how we like to horde our supplies for a famine; we have to be ok with reducing scope, or backlogging functionality and moving forward. We have to give up the surplus.

Agile is a frame of mind, and that frame is not yet clearly laid out in front of us in a manual. I think Agile is a different way of thinking for a different software world. Embrace uncertainty, love your community, and become OK with the unknown: Be truly agile.

About the author: John P Vajda works as a Project Manager at Oracle Corporation*, and is becoming more Agile everyday.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpvajda

* The statements in this blog do not reflect that of Oracle Corporation, and are solely those opinions and thoughts of John P Vajda.

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. - Life as an Agile Project: One big game of Risk: A Human’s Nature is a post from: Project Shrink.