I love to write and talk about Project Management… uhm, Leadership… or “The Thing That A Project Manager Does To Move His Project In The Proper Direction, Related To People“.

I want to share new and exciting stuff and hope it challenges your thinking, enhances your mental flexibility and provides you with useful information.

I really appreciate the audience (hi!). Although I sometimes say things excited and full of passion (“you need to…”), it’s always an invitation to look at the information and consider it for your own use. If you like it, great! If you have no use for it, that’s cool too. Because I appreciate you, as my readers.

Luckily for me, the internet is a huge place, I mean, BIG! From billions of people, a handful of them (hi!) take the time to read my ideas and thoughts about “The Thing That A PM…”

I need an audience to share my thoughts. So does everyone.

But what if I tried to do my thing limited to one building with one Project Manager? The chance that this one PM likes talking about Bobsleds and Pirate Ships are zero. And even if, one person is not an audience. (yeah, yeah, I should learn humility… I know).

I either stop doing my thing. Or I look outside the building. Or I turn into myself and become weird.

If you want to nurture information leadership (calling it “thought leadership” would be too much, would it?), you have to make sure there is a big enough audience. Keeping things limited to one part of the organization might be counterproductive sometimes, just because of this reason.

What I recommend (kindly suggest) is to go through this presentation about Knowledge Management in Enterprise 2.0. It explains why knowledge sharing in most companies doesn’t work. Hint: this is the exact same argument, but better presented.

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. - Size Matters: Without Enough Audience, No Leaders is a post from: Project Shrink.

This post is an early draft of a concept I am working on. It will focus on the supply and demand of information to nodes in social networks. People have a need for information (demand), some people have a need for an audience for their information (supply). I will use the notion of leaders (supply) and followers (demand). Inherent to social networks is the fact that you have way more followers than leaders. The system maintains this balance. Problems occur when boundaries make it difficult to ensure this balance.

Image by James Cridland.

Yes, this is a simplification of reality. It’s a model. It’s not The Real World… argh … don’t get me started about The Real World.

It needs references. It needs some examples and clarification. I am working on that. But I also was kind of hoping on your feedback

20% Holds 80% Of Information

Within social networks information is not distributed equally. A few have a lot. A lot have few. I think that information follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the information is held by or accessible from 20% of the people.

When looking at the flow of information in organizations, you will find the existence of a few hubs: nodes in the network that are highly connected. In organizations not everyone has a relationship with every other employee. There are a couple of employees that know a lot of people, and most people in the organization know these few so-called “hubs”, leaders in information brokerage.

In networks you find many more followers than leaders.

In human networks you’ll find more people listening than speaking. Looking at the online world, we’ll see the 90-9-1 principle, which says that “in a community, the rule of thumb is that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and 1% create it.” Few people create, lots of people consume.

A person can be a leader and a follower at the same time, but for different topics. Leading in Project Management and following in SOA technology.

This is not some evil plot. It’s inherent to the social system.

From the information input perspective, you don’t want to be swamped in information. You limit the amount of sources. You want these few sources to be “the best”. “The best” being measured in popular demand skews the choice of information hubs towards a limited few. You want your sources easy to find, which also turns you to the more popular hubs. It’s similar to “the rich get richer”. If you are a popular hub, you become even more popular.

From the information output side you get a similar view. Leaders need demand for their information. A higher demand means larger influence, more recognition, a larger reputation. Leaders will behave to maximize the amount of followers. They need to be a very small minority.

Leaders are born with this urge. You really want to be a hub.

Within social networks there is a balance for the distribution of leaders and followers. There is an “natural amount” of hubs within a network.

Blue Ocean, Red Ocean

Once a follower has found a good source, it will remain connected as long as the need for the information exists. The relationship from follower-to-leader remains mainly stable.

What does a leader do without followers? It’s going to look for them throughout the network. Hubs move around to stay hubs.

For example, a couple of years ago a blog about Project Management was almost alone in its category. You could have quite a following with your blog. As more and more blogs come into existence about this topic, it gets harder and harder to build up your audience. Lot of leaders and not enough followers. An imbalance between supply and demand of information.

So, hubs start to move. They are leaving the red ocean, in search for a blue one. “Blue Ocean Strategy” is a business strategy book written by Kim and Mauborgne, that promotes creating new market space or “Blue Ocean” rather than competing in an existing crowded industry (Red Ocean).

In the case of Project Management blogs, you are trying to differentiate yourself. Looking for a different or more specific niche. Change the medium by adding video, audio and presentations. Looking for your fresh, blue ocean.

Next up:

What happens when boundaries prohibit movement and a leader cannot move throughout the network? What if you shrink to ocean into a pond (moving from organization to project)?

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. - Leaders And Followers In Social Networks is a post from: Project Shrink.

Photography by Dylan Parker

A couple of years ago I was asked during a sales presentation what I thought was the most essential ingredient for a successful project. My answer was “mutual trust”. People
in the room were staring at me like I was some kind of Softy Oozy New Age Treehugger. I switched very fast to the normal “plan-and-control” crap to get happy faces again.

Today I would provide the same answer to that question. Trust is essential to doing successful projects, and therefor a core concept for Project Management. But to avoid this “Treehugger” image, let me give you a view on how trust can be modelled, so we put some hands and feet to this rather abstract idea.

As a starting point we take the Prisoners Dilemma (PD) as discussed in this posting. In essence it is a situation where

• 1) if people cooperate both have success,
• 2) if one person is taking advantage of the other (defect) this person has an even larger benefit, but the other suffers a loss,
• 3) if both persons defect they loose both. In a situation like being in prison, you have only those two options, cooperate and defect.

However in more general circumstances, like projects, you can have a third: don’t play, walk away, just exit. For this posting I will simplify a project to a series of prisoners dilemma’s where the strategies can be cooperate, defect and exit.

Earlier I talked about the idea of “iterative PDs” where an enormous series of PDs are performed behind each other and the choice of strategy is based upon the outcomes of the previous iterations (remember Tit-For-tat? ). History plays an important role in choosing a strategy. Central question is “Do you trust the other party to cooperate?” “Trust” is defined as “have confidence or faith in” but also as “reliance: certainty based on past experience”. Based upon the things that happen in the past, you adapt your strategy.

Having Only One Shot

But what if you haven’t done a zillion 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”. 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 my 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.

The only question remaining is: do you trust this model?

This posting is largely based upon THE EVOLUTION OF TRUST AND COOPERATION. BETWEEN STRANGERS:. A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL

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. - Treehugger Project Management: Is Trust Important? is a post from: Project Shrink.

When I got my first class on computer networks, I was hooked. I loved the idea of small packets of information hopping from one computer to another. Amazed about how the information always seemed to arrive at the right spot, even if there were a gazillion computers connected, like on the Internet. Although I never worked in that particular field of information technology, I still remember an important lesson from the routing-algorithms that could be used. To find out which way another computer was located within the network, you can use one single computer as the main guide; that host has all the data needed to locate the computer you want to send your information package to.

This sound very effective at first, and it even is, if not too many PCs and mainframes are connected to the network. However, when you are thinking about the Internet, forget it. The information is just too much, and always outdated if you try to have a single map of the net. You have also a single point of failure in this scenario. If this one computer crashes, not one package will arrive at its destination. In search for alternatives, my mind was fixed on needing a map of the network. As it turned out, you can also have algorithms without the need for a image of the entire network; if you get a data package, you just give it to a computer you are connected with, and that accepts it the fastest. I never forget the new: the hot-potato-algorithm. After a while, the package will end if with its destination.

Social Networks

People in small and large groups can be viewed as networks. In this particular, social networks. Every person is indicated as a dot, and any relationship between dots are drawn as a line between the dots. The person is the computer, and the relationship is the network cable. As networks are a particular type of graphs, the official terms are edges for the dots and vertices for the lines. The field of social networking analysis can provide us with some insights, structures and definitions when looking at stakeholders in groups. “A social network analysis examines the structure of social relationships in a group to uncover the informal connections between people.” [1] What exactly makes up the connection, the relationship between the people in the graph, is a choice of the analyst. Communication, awareness, trust, decision making and interactions of any kind. The social network analysis might reveal a pattern that could point to, or explain the occurrence of, a problem.

Being The Bottleneck In Your Project

Suppose you work as a Team Lead for a development group. The teams performance is not what you would have expected if you consider the experience of its members. You know just the problem: they are lousy programmers, despite their experience. You just do it yourself and leave those incompetent fools to their own devices. If I would visit your project as a Project Profiler, aware of “a” problem, not aware of your opinion, I could try to plot a network of the communication of bug-reports and requirements. This should not be too difficult as most software projects have requirements and issues logged in a database, with some kind of work-flow who is assigned to the task. Great resource of information. I will see requirements drip in from user groups, to project manager, to team lead, and further. A social network is a nice visual aid, and I will make the arrows of information flow thicker if more information is passed to a particular person.

Guess what? All big fat arrows are pointing towards you in the network. You have a very high centrality. Centrality is the extent to which a person is in the center of a network [1]. It seems that all information about requirements flows through you, and very little information flows from you, especially towards your team members. The reason why you do this, remains to be discovered, but you are caught. You are identified as the problem. Another great day for the Project Profiler.

Sitting Close Together

Not every stakeholder is interacting in a group the same with all other stakeholders. Sometimes people will talk to each other every hour, e.g. when they are in the same room and part of the same team; in other cases people will never see or speak each other at all during the course of the project (the lonely tester and the financial director for example). When viewing stakeholder as a group of interactions, not every pair will be the same; in the corresponding network there will be no line from every dot to all other dots in the network. You will see some form of clustering; smaller groups that have a high degree of interaction. People that will communicate more with each other because of the fact that they are closer located, or in the same team, or need to because of their tasks. Looking at the most simple form, you will see that stakeholders from the same group are more tighter nit together. A group can be defined by having the same or a closely related role within the project (see table).

Among certain members a higher level of interaction will occur. Here the term “density” is used. “It is a proportion that indicates the number of actual ties present in the group relative to the number of possible ties in the group (i.e., if everyone had a relationship with everyone else in the group).” [1] If certain parts of a social network have a higher density, that can indicate the formation of so-called “sub-groups” or “cliques”. People that connect sub-groups together are called “hubs”. If we take a look at projects, you can image that the Project Manager is some kind of super-hub.

[1] Inside Social Network Analysis, Kate Ehrlich and Inga Carboni

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. - Using Social Network Analysis: Are You The Center Of Your Stakeholder Network? is a post from: Project Shrink.