Why do we do what we do? Are our industry’s best practices really that, or do we merely say they are because as a PM we are expected to say so?

As Will writes in the comments:

“There’s a saying … fish discover water last … which alludes to the fact that fish can’t see the water because they are so heavily immersed in it. We have accepted tools like the Gantt chart because we hope that whoever invented them figured out how to make them work and help us deliver the project – and they are popular… (eg ms project) BECAUSE they work. But what if all that (or most of it) is wrong? What if the Gantt chart is popular for other seasons?”

Jonathan Whitty from University of Southern Queensland creates fascinating articles and lectures around this theme.

Why not start with this mindshifting article, “The PM BOK Code“:

“… in order to socially survive in the organizational environment, individuals are driven to put on the performance of project manager as an actor would perform project scenes in the theatre of organizations.”

If you don’t want to read, here is a video presentation of the topic.

You can check out the comments here and here if you want to know more about this topic.

So, why is this important to know?

In communication we use our own assumptions, stereotypes and believes to interpret any message we receive. When we know more about our own mind, it gets easier to open our minds to other peoples intent of the message.

In the end it’s about effective communication.

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. - Fish Discover Water Last: Why Do You Do What You Do? is a post from: Project Shrink.

As projects start and end within organizations the demand for employees fluctuates. It seems that in certain times the workforce is just too small to handle all tasks, and in slow times many employees are doing nothing. With change and with projects come the tidal movement of need of labor force. Most projects will be done in times of change, when economic forces are up or down. Times of stability don’t call for much projects.

Hibernation: After Busy Times, Leave Them Alone

Photography by Akk Rus.

Businesses go in cycles and each cycle demands a different caliber of staff; like each season imposes different demands on fish ponds. Fish hibernate during winter and it is not recommended to feed them during hibernation. At water temperatures below 50 degrees fish become almost motionless, hibernating in the deepest and warmest part of the pond.

Businesses go into hibernation and for long spells sometimes. Do we expect employees to hibernate during this people? Some employees will have low resiliencies and will tend to hibernate any way. Fish hibernate for purpose.

Many fish pond managers make mistakes that are repeated by many business managers.

“During their hibernation period fish should not consume food at all. Too often an odd ball day occurs where the pond water warms a bit with a spell of unseasonable weather. The fish get a little active around the surface of the pond so their owners feed them. The net effect is when temperature returns to normal the fish begin to float on their sides on the pond surface in an attempt to process the food that their bodies cannot handle.” (source)

Transient time may tempt some managers to make the wrong decisions and actually to kill their businesses. Employees are more stressed during change, during projects the intensity of work is increased. True project people know the cyclic effects of projects and take that into consideration. They go full throttle when needed, because they know they can rest later. Management should know: after busy times, leave them alone. Don’t keep them busy with stupid tasks, give them leisure, pleasure and relaxing time. Everybody will win this way.

Recruit During Economic Winters

Photography by FiskFisk.

Before you can make use of employees, you first have to recruit them. Stocking your pond. Timing of populating a fish pond is a crucial factor for the survival of fish in a pond. Stocking a pond in mid-summer should be avoided. High water temperatures and low dissolved oxygen may weaken fish being transported. Sudden temperature changes can cause fish to go into shock and die. When stocking fish, transport water and pond water temperatures should be equalized by slowly adding pond water into the transport container. It is the conditioning of fish that adapt them to the new environment. Better still, is to add the fish to an experimental tank for some time before transferring them to the fish pond to ensure that the fish are healthy. An unhealthy fish is not expected to interact with other fish and its environment in a healthy way.

The economic conditions under which you are recruiting can have a large impact on the quality of the new employees. Fish can be conditioned into being adaptive. The conditioning of employees is not different and should follow similar steps. “I think that conditioning your employees to expect change, to live in an era of change, and to embrace it in a positive way rather than fight it, is an important theme in almost every industry,” Marc Hebert, executive vice president of Sierra Atlantic, said.

These facts and the image provided by the Fish Pond Metaphor prompt us, the authors of this article, to propose a different recruitment and keeping pattern of staff. When business goes down it might be a better idea to recruit or keep staff that have been conditioned for hard times. Experiences in meeting suffocating problems are highly desirable in such situations. This conclusion is reinforced by the observation that the single constant in business is resistance to change. We are all creatures of habit and will continue doing the things that we are doing unless those habits are reformed in some manner. People who have the ability to survive hard times and business downturns are always needed because no business will avoid occasional lengthy downturns.

The idea of placing fish in a tank prior to their transfer to the fish pond suggests another dimension for time management. We need enough lead time to select the appropriate employees and to put them under test to monitor their healthiness and readiness for the job. Rather than adding employees directly to projects or business we may consider putting them first in a simulation chamber to monitor their behavior. Only candidates who perform well may be later added to the “work pond”.

The key to successfully developing such a program is to follow a proven recruiting process for the positions you need to fill in a timely manner and in a way to prove that performance of recruits would meet future challenges.. Resist the temptation to omit steps, because shortcutting the process can shortchange your results.

Questions

These are two lessons we see in The Fish Pond. But what is your opinion on this matter?

• Do you hibernate or do your people get rest between jobs?
• What is the best time to recruit?
• How do you “condition” new employees?

Please share your thoughts and opinion. It is highly appreciated and helps us to make the material more valuable for everyone.

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas de Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.

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. - Lessons From The Pond For The Project Workforce is a post from: Project Shrink.

Photography by The Gold Guys.

Do we make a Gantt Chart because it a really good thing to do, or because we are expected to do so?

As I wrote almost a year ago: We radiate to the outside world our icons like Gantt Charts, two-digits precise risk assessments, large documents that seems to cover every little aspect imaginable. If you are a member of our group, you ooze control. I once told my wife that I was unable to comply to her request. She smacked me on the head telling me that she was not my customer. So, I assume that we also have a specific language that sets us apart from other mortals. By adopting our symbols, our rituals and speak newbie PMs try to affiliate themselves with the group called Professional Project Managers.

Craig Brown over at Better Projects revamped my interest by digging up some great and intriguing reference from Stephen Jonathan Whitty: A Memetic Paradigm of Project Management.

Craig writes:

“The question it raises for me is how much is project management knowledge constructed to solve real problems, and how much of it is self-repeating, self-sustaining behaviors that act mainly as a way for PM professionals to establish and maintain their importance in their professional community.”

Of course the answer of this question might be difficult, as it would be it depends. The real power of raising this question is not the final answer, as there is none in my opinion. The power of this question is to proceed with caution in accepting stuff that you are told by trainers, teachers and bloggers like me.

In an even more mindshifting article, “The PM BOK Code“, Whitty writes:

“… in order to socially survive in the organizational environment, individuals are driven to puts on the performance of project manager as an actor would perform project scenes in the theatre of organizations.”

And this is becoming more and more an obsession. It is fueled by the actual recruiting process that stimulates complying to The Professional PM Code:

“The process of recruiting project managers seems almost reduced to the question, “Are you PRINCE2 certified?”

I live in Europe, so I guess the American variant of this question is, “Are you PMP certified?” Who cares about a master’s degree in PM? Who cares about your experience? Do you have the stamp of approval?” I wrote for TechTaget in November last year.

Sticking to The Code has also other “benefits”: It assists in people’s tendency to prefer to fail conservatively.

“The idea behind this is that people would rather choose an option that they know, that they have done in the past, EVEN if the outcome is likely to be unsuccessful, than trey something new, where the outcome may be positive, but unsure. An example is the use of the waterfall approach. Although the outcome will almost be guaranteed not to be the desired one, because it is an accepted approach, people will prefer it above agile approaches that are unknown to them.”

Go through the references in this post. Make up your mind. Do you do what you do because you are supposed to, or because it seems the right thing to do? And let me know your honest opinion on this matter.

Suggested link on the same subject: “Magic Beans” or credible alternatives by Glen Alleman.

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 Management Code: Why Do You Do What You Do? is a post from: Project Shrink.

In this posting we will introduce a view on organizational structures using The Fish Pond. It provides an alternative perspective in answering the question whether we should have flat organizations, pyramidal organizations or something in between. We will use the process of pond stratification as illustration.

Photography by Cubbie n Vegas.

Stratification of fish ponds (click here for illustration) means having different layers or levels of water type (level of oxygen, density, e.g.). These levels are not fixed as the environment of the fish pond changes during daytime and seasons. Depending on the circumstances this layering will change. The environmental conditions demand differences in layering to create a stable eco-system in the pond. In other words, the stratification serves a purpose. However, if certain circumstances take too long, negative consequences can occur. Also tinkering with the ecosystem to eliminate some layering can have negative consequences.

The management lesson provided: there is no ideal fixed hierarchy or organization structure, only one that should be adaptive to environment.

Unlike sea water, fish ponds do not allow for the free flow of water resulting in the stratification of their water. During summer, the heat and relatively calm weather causes pond water to stratify into layers. There is a less dense, warm, upper layer that is exposed to the sun and atmospheric oxygen, a very thin layer where temperature and density changes rapidly, and a cold, denser, lower layer that receives little sunlight and does not mix with the upper layers. Because it does not mix, the bottom layer has no incoming oxygen to replace what is used by bacteria that are decomposing dead animals and plants on the bottom of the pond. This process is called stratification.

As the summer progresses, the lower layer usually loses its oxygen. If a storm carrying cold rains causes the pond to turn mix suddenly, the de-oxygenated water in the lower layer can reduce the oxygen level of the pond enough to cause a fish kill. This stratification is particularly severe in ponds with dense growths of blue-green or “scum” algae on the surface. The colder water may become oxygen- deficient due to interaction with certain elements in the pond bottom and lack of
photosynthesis by phytoplankton at greater depths.

“Pond stratification with turnovers can become a problem in ponds because the deep bottom water has no to low oxygen levels. When the barrier breaks, the oxygen-rich surface water mixes with the oxygen-poor or even oxygen-deficient bottom water. This can result in severe oxygen depletion with a fish kill. Pond turnovers happen quickly, and you should be prepared to handle a low oxygen situation.” (source)

Too much layering in a small work pond will deny the lowest layer with oxygen.

There are two complementary problems addressed in this case: the lack of oxygen, and the sudden addition of oxygen.

Aeration of fish ponds to supply the lower layer with oxygen to support life, for example by pumping, is essential; otherwise a self-kill phenomenon will be experienced. The worms and bacteria, which help keep a pond clean cannot live and the pond’s nutrients are then recycled from the sediment. This forms a layer of dirt at the bottom which serves as a fertilizer for weed and excessive algae growth. It could also cause large fish kills (source). In this case the lesson is clear: lower level employees need aeration to survive in a work pond much more than they need it in a copious working space. Unless this condition is fulfilled, mass destruction to the organization where they work might happen. By making the analogy to the Filter and Drainage story, too much layering (or shielding the team of from outside influences) disturbs the needed flow of “fresh” trust entering, and the building up of toxins.

Adding oxygen might be beneficial as indicated. But this should only be done if the mixing will not make oxygen deficiency all through the pond. Normally, the bottom layer is prone to oxygen deficiency. Flattening this deficiency by mixing all layers will be counter productive if deficiency of oxygen will make the new emerging homogeneous layer oxygen-deficient. This will lead to mass kill.

This means that we may have multi levels of organizational structures and each level must have assignments in parallel to the prevailing work conditions and their possible changes. The integration of these levels and the flow of information must be initiated to satisfy the prevailing work conditions. The issue is we may tolerate few layers to distribute our resources even though one layer will be deficient. Trying to distribute the resources equally will make the whole organization deficient leading to its killing.

In conclusion, sometimes layering is needed for protection, making sure that deficiencies or not spread all over the place. Sometimes layering is just adding handicaps, like limiting the flow of information and trust.

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas de Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.

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. - Stratification: Organizational Structures In A Pond is a post from: Project Shrink.

We call this effort: The Fish Pond: Complexity of Management.

In essence, we believe the answer to adapt successfully in our new, ever morphing world is to have a flexible mind, a brain filled with many models of the world. We would almost claim that being open minded is the key to survival. To help you create some new and exciting ways to look at the world and business situations, we introduce the Fish Pond Metaphor. We opt to go for the fish pond as a metaphor for the new world.

The Managers New Brain

Every project is unique. Circumstances are always different. Different people. Different goals. To lead a project to success, you need to tailor your approach to the situation. To be able to do this you got to have a flexible mind. One that can switch from one world view to another; one that can use one set of assumptions right now, and an entire different way of thinking in a couple of minutes.

If you are trying to run a country and you have a communist background, you probably are trying to regulate, centralize and formalize as much as possible. You want to control every individual behavior in order to control the whole system. When you are raised with a more laissez-faire world view, you can adopt a reign that is totally governed by the free market. Nothing is centrally controlled, everything will take care of itself. Needless to say that both world views have drawbacks and advantages.

In our world every country has its own customized version of one of the world views, or something on the gliding scale between them. The successful Project Manager can look at his project and assess the situation using different world views, one in which control is the answer to everything, and one where let it go is the holy grail. And if he trains his mind enough, he can even use a mental slider to get to the spots between the two extremes.

Why A Fish Pond

The Fish Pond Metaphor is not one coherent picture of a particular pond. It is merely a collection of narratives and analogies centered around a common theme, the fish pond. We choose the Fish Pond for more than one reason, but mainly because it is an ecosystem. An ecosystem let us describe our main problem with reality called dynamic complexity. In our normal line of thinking, we think about an event A that happens, and that causes something else, say B. The occurrence of B might trigger some event C. A nice linear cause-and-effect chain. With dynamic complexity this is exactly what is not taking place: cause and effect are not close in space and time, and therefor, very difficult for us to see.

Our Postings

Introduction to The Fish Pond at University of California Extension Santa Cruz
Recommended

Complexity of Management
The first post we did in this series, which explains the effects of dynamic complexity, how best practices can become worst practices under changing environments, and how the fish pond illustrates both.

Our Need For Metaphors
To be able to handle change you need to have a flexible brain. Metaphors, like the Fish Pond, are a great technique to train the brain. However, not every metaphor has positive effects.

The Fish Pond Metaphor
In this post we connect the global trends that are taking place in our world to the Fish Pond. What is happening and why does this make a fish pond a proper mental image?

The Big Pond: Global Village
We are approaching projects and organizations as groups of people interacting together. It is a complex adaptive system in which the agents are formed by people. In this article we look at why people interact in the first place, and how this leads to the emerging of groups. The themes discussed are why people behave the way they do, and the creation of economic and social clusters.

Filter And Drainage – Trust Running Through The Team
This is a good sample of a specific narrative surrounding the Fish Pond metaphor. It makes the analogy between the filtering and drainage of a pond, and the need for trust and elimination of toxic employees in a project.

Indirect Control By Just Looking
Just looking at employees or fish can already have an impact on behavior. Again the similarities are striking.

Fish And OODA Loops
This posting is an introduction to the two following articles about OODA loops. It was written after these postings as it was apparent that some additional explanation was needed. We really urge you to read this, and the next two OODA articles carefully as they form an essential part of how to adapt to changes.

Driving On The OODA Highway
Grap a chair and read this one when you have a clear mind. We make the connection between the availability of information and the use of the OODA loop as an essential skill to adapt to the environment. The OODA loop was first conceived by the US military as a way to structure the process to adapt on a battlefield.

Social OODA Super Speedway
In a traditional OODA loop your mental models of the world are used. Your view of a situation, with your experience and history. But because humans are social, a large part of our mental constructs are connected with other peolpe. Religion, economic relationships or even just being married create a shared construct. It is impossible to look at humans as individuals, we have to make connections with the larger groups.

Swimming Upstream The Information Flow
In this posting we are connecting the notion of grouping together (fish schooling) and the flow of information as control and adaptive strategy in the fish pond.

Management And Meditation
This is the first posting that goes into the subject of “How-to”. I tried to avoid it. But in this case I can run, but I am surely unable to hide. I have to make the connection between training your mind for adaption and meditation.

Stratification: Organizational Structures In A Pond
In this posting we introduce a view on organizational structures using The Fish Pond. It provides an alternative perspective in answering the question whether we should have flat organizations, pyramidal organizations or something in between. We use the process of pond stratification as illustration.

Lessons From The Pond For The Project Workforce
As projects start and end within organizations the demand for employees fluctuates. It seems that in certain times the workforce is just too small to handle all tasks, and in slow times many employees are doing nothing. This article provides two insights: 1) Hibernation: After Busy Times, Leave Them Alone; 2) Recruit During Economic Winters.

Go To The Spike And Become Adaptive
The image we like to have of our understanding of globalization is the one popularized by Thomas Friedman, that of a flattened world, in which economic development or potential are equally spread all over the world. Although we would love to believe this, the reality is different. “Globalization has changed the economic playing field, but hasn’t leveled it”, argues Richard Florida is his article “The World Is Spiky”.

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. - Introducing The Fish Pond is a post from: Project Shrink.

By Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

In our previous article we painted the image of people walking on the OODA highway, continuously performing OODA loops, interacting with the environment, in the search for information packages that help them adapt to changes. In this posting we want to extend this notion to the use of social OODA loops.

Image by kk+

Humans are social. A group of people interacting with each other has to be viewed in a social context. (Human) needs are all expressed in comparison of other members of the globe. That is why they are considered social. In this context we also consider the concept of group affiliation. Group affiliation is what it is all about in our lives. During your life you are a member of a lot of social groups, by default, by choice or by force (…) The group memberships determine how we see ourselves in the whole of society, it determines our identity. (source)

If we want to have a proper understanding of how groups of people adapt to different situation, we need to have a look at how resilience is created within a social complex system. Making the system social affects the OODA Highway view at two levels:

• the effects on the mental constructs we use in the observe step;
• as a driving force in our behavior as a goal to satisfy.

Curtis Gale helps us explaining the first aspect by his introduction of social OODA loops. He points out that in a traditional OODA loop the orient phase is assisted by mental models and experiences from the individual person.

Image by PhatIcCommunion.com

But in the context of social systems being affiliated with a certain social group brings a specific set of mental constructs with it. If consider yourself religious, you are guided by a different mental model than when you are a Darwinian. The notion as that these mental constructs are shared among the members of the social group.

Image by PhatIcCommunion.com

The effectiveness of adaption in social complex system can be considered depending on the quality and amount of mental constructs a person has as its disposal. Like people on the previous OODA Highway, who were eating information like PacMan for their survival, our social PacMans must have food too.

We are proposing the concept of social capital as being the central available element that expresses the effectiveness of resilience and adaption within a social system. Although there are a lot of definitions going around for this concept, it provides the notion that a higher value shows better access to other people, to either share, exchange or in an other form influence shared constructs. A definition that comes close in reflecting this aspect: The individual and communal time and energy that is available for such things as community improvement, social networking, civic engagement, personal recreation, and other activities that create social bonds between individuals and groups. This mirrors our observation that people are forming social clusters.

Closely related to social capital are social networks. If you are better connected, you are more likely to have a larger social capital. This turn us to the question on how social capital is distributed among the system. The information OODA Loop and the Social OODA loop interact. E.g. Information exclusion might lead to social exclusion, which in turn affects social interactions. The network effect was ably recorded by Buchanan. This effect leads to the spiky and flattened social landscape, in which agents experience differences in their ability to observe and gather information depending on their location on the landscape network organization. Moreover, a network organization depends only weakly or not at all on the actions or character of their individual members. In other words, your own individual actions have no real impact on the whole, its your place within the network, who you know, that makes the difference.

The question turns into if information is not evenly distributed would they result in uneven social OODA loops? Or, will social networks produce different landscape of interactions than that of the information network? It turns out that social networks behave similarly. If we take a look at how social structures have evolved over the centuries, you can see that we went from a flat distribution to a long tail.

Image by PhatIcCommunion.com

The social network occurs in steps, much like an assembly line. Most systems designed by man are sequential. Branching operations, however, have a more involved structure: they contain feedback loops, branches and bifurcations, and jumps from one linear sequence to another.

Electronic social networks introduce new parameters to the complexity of interactions. The speed of interaction and the removal of the impact of direct feelings are noticeable factors. Feelings impact the quality and frequency of interactions on the network. Good feeling affects actions and these in turn affect outcomes. To get good results you need to create good feelings. A leader who is emotionally intelligent will induce loving feeling among his staff, and this will in turn produce likeable outcomes.

Although we insinuated above a direct relationship between social capital and the level of connectivity in the social network, in reality the dimensions are a little more complex, and we used this sample just for illustration. E.g. the location in the network is a balance between direct bonding and keeping a little distance. Some possible negative effects like too strong bonding, exclusion of outsiders, bullying of deviants and resistance to change are associated with being in a center of a social network and are not contributing to adaptability.

The process of social interactions is complicated and may bifurcate into new directions. These interactions might unfold novel ideas. The Long Tail Distribution is an outcome of these positive interactions. To give one example, a publishing company might have a book that is selling very well (a spike) and another book that does not sell very well. By recommending the low-selling book (flat sales) to the readers of the high-selling book customers might be tempted to buy the book and spur its sales. Social interactions are impacting our economic lives as well. The landscape of the emerging social communities is having an impact on the economic landscape. However; all interactions are based on observing (information collection), which leads to visualization of the new situation (orientation) and then to decision making and acting.

This OODA loop has a long tail distribution, and accordingly social interactions and economic interactions are likely to have the same distribution.

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas de Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.

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. - Social OODA Super Speedway is a post from: Project Shrink.

Help out this student by taking his survey

This week I got an email from Matthew Miller, a student from Loughborough University, with a request to put out the word about his questionnaire.

“This dissertation aims to investigate the level of success within IT projects within the last 3 years . The results will then be analyzed to find any common factors to success and failure, to see if some projects are destined to fail and to see if certain industries, type of projects or methodologies/models are more likely to fail. The final outcome will be statistically supported advice for IT project managers. This research is about both project success and failure. It is through understanding failure that we can begin to improve. As such, please do not view failure as a negative in this context and please include projects that have failed as these are very relevant to this study. “

If you participate, you will get a copy of the results.

Take the survey:

IT Project Managers
Anyone involved in an IT 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. - Way-New Collaboration: What I Meant To Say is a post from: Project Shrink.

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.

And the funny 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.

Figure: the interactions of stakeholders “make” the project. The properties given to the abstraction “project” influence the stakeholders.

If you try to define a project from this point of view, the best definition I know of comes from Doug De Carlo (2005) in Extreme Project Management:

“A project is a localized energy field comprising a set of thoughts, emotions, and interactions continually expressing themselves in physical form.”

In case you are wondering at this moment what the role of the Project Manager is in this context. He should steer the stakeholders in such a manner that the resulting behavior (the sum if you will) reaches the desired business goal. But that will be the main focus of the entire book, so relax, we will get into this later on in much detail. For now, just hold on to the thought that the stakeholders make up the elements of the project as a system. They are independent from each other, but their social interactions affect each other.

The following postings provide additional information about viewing a project as the result of interactions:

My Current Model For PM
Complex Adaptive Systems
Projects As A Complex Adaptive System: Why Bother?
The Sims As A Project Model
Sims Project Model: Tiffanys Lust
Sims Project Model: Berts Lack Of Recognition
Reality Refuses To Follow Your Plan
Explaining PM Approaches
Four Mechanisms In PM Methods
Why Societies And Projects Fail Or Succeed
Project Profiling With Systems Thinking

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. - Why Projects Are Nothing More Than Social Interactions is a post from: Project Shrink.

In the first episode of this series I used a very simplified model of how stakeholder behavior is determined:

• Stakeholders have needs
• Based upon there needs and their perception of project reality they will choose a strategy that benefits them most.
• The execution of this strategy is their behavior.

As I will progress in the series this model will of course be refined. The first item I want to add is the use of anticipated needs, strategies and behavior from other stakeholders. When determining the strategy a person will also weight in the expected behavior of others. This is very obvious in the subject of this second episode: the reluctance to commit to something.

The best way to illustrate this is by using a quote from Frederick Brooks legendary book The Mythical Man Month:

¦ the reluctance to document designs is not due merely to laziness or time pressure. Instead it comes from the designers reluctance to commit himself to the defense of decisions which he knows to be tentative. ˜By documenting a design, the designer exposes himself to the criticisms of everyone, and must be able to defend everything he writes. If the organizational structure is threatening in anyway, nothing is going to be documented until its completely defensible.

If the anticipated behavior of other is threatening some of the important emotional needs of a stakeholder, he or she may choose strategies that avoid some kind of confrontation. In this situation we are talking about needs like:

• Recognition among peers and within hierarchical organization
• The threat of not being admired, appreciated or in control
• But also some material needs like fear of loosing ones job or not getting a raise.

The stakeholder can use several strategies, which are all targeted towards avoiding a confrontation on the subject he or she is handling.

Delaying: pushing a possible confrontation to a later time frame, hoping it will go away; or be better at that point in time.

Creating smoke screens: by raising other subjects, by trying to bring other items to the agenda, the stakeholder may try to get the focus of his problems, and hoping to stay under the radar. When I was young I had to go to bed at 8 o clock in the evening. When this time was approaching, I just got silent and watched television, in the hope my parents wouldnt notice me.

Keep on giving counter arguments: this is actually a form of delaying, but so widely used it deserves an entry of its own: Just keep on raising questions or arguments why a certain task cant be finished.

No written testimony: avoid having something on paper, email or any other medium that is fixed after you have released it. In this way you are keeping things vague and they are impossible to measure. This is the one used in the earlier quote from Brooks.

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 Sociology – Part 2 (repost) is a post from: Project Shrink.

This is a repost of the original Project Sociology article/video. I removed the old one a while ag o oops.

In this first episode I will discuss how project people look at each other to measure them selves.

Projects are all about people. Its the human element that determines the success or failure of this temporary organizational endeavor. In my book Surprise! Now Youre a Software Project Manager I use this as the central point to explain to new project managers how to manage software projects.

The central argument goes something like this:

• The behavior of the project stakeholders determines the course of the project;
• Stakeholders are guided by their needs (their fears and wishes) in their behavior
• By examining the needs, expectations and behavior the PM can spot potential problems
• This examination provides the PM with clues which process component (method or technique) to use to resolve the potential problem.

In this way, there is a direct link between the social complex of stakeholders and the tools and techniques a project manager has up his sleeve. This subject not only consist of project management, but leans towards psychology, sociology, complex adaptive systems, social simulation and economics. There is a lot of research available, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there. Some of it in the context of projects, most of it in entirely different contexts.

The the real challenge lies within understanding the behavior of humans within the project context (therefor I coin the phrase Project Sociology “If you look on Wikipedia you will find the following definition: Sociology is the study of the social lives of humans, groups, and societies, sometimes defined as the study of social interactions. ). If we have a better understanding of how people operate, and more important why, the how an project manager can throw its toolbox towards the stakeholders, will be the easy part. As in many situations: Understanding is half the battle.

In the presentations I will use the term stakeholders very often. A stakeholder is anyone that has something to do or is somehow affected by the project. From users to sponsors, from testers to developers, from marketing to production. The all one thing in common: their personal needs are affected by 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 the 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 life, 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 doesnt 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 wasnt 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. And the funny 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.

In the end, what is the role of the Project Manager in this context? He should steer the stakeholders in such a manner that the resulting behavior (the sum if you will) reaches the desired business goal.

With every thing I will ever tell you, keep one thing in mind: it is a way of looking at things. It will never be THE ONLY WAY. So, it will never be the only truth, it may not even be the truth in certain situations. I will only show you ways to look at the project you might have never done before; to provide you with a different perspective that can be beneficial at a given moment while you are running your project.

At his moment I will use a very simple model of how stakeholders behavior is determined:

• Stakeholders have needs
• Based upon there needs and their perception of project reality they will choose a strategy that benefits them most.
• The execution of this strategy is their behavior.

Needs are fundamental. We are born with it. In various degrees, each according to his or her own unique nature, we each have a natural emotional need to feel (taken from Eqi.org):

In this episode we will look at needs in which stakeholders measure themselves with other people. Their reference group. Software engineers tend to compare themselves with other software engineers, not only within their own company but also in a wider range, even internationally. Management members mostly compare themselves with other people within their companies hierarchies. Stakeholders use the reference group to formulate their own interests: I want to earn as much as Big Shot Shirley. I want to be as good as Leisure Suit Lenny. I want to have more power than Head Honcho Harry.

The reference group is used in different ways:

• A reaction from the group can feed a personal need (think about recognition)
• Or as a yard stick, to compare a persons ranking (the need to feel important, the need to feel competent.

This kind of ranking is a relative thing: the most important people dont have a need for being important, they already reached that level. It is the feeling of being MORE important the makes up the need.

Anyway, people will look at their effort (what they bring to the table, hard work, good skills), and how their effort is rewarded. And in this sense the reward is the fulfillment of an emotional need. They will compare there own situation with that of their reference group, persons that they consider comparable. If they think they are better of, there are just happy; if they think they are the lesser fortunate they can have several strategies:

Change their effort: Working less if their not appreciated enough. So that the total sum of their effort versus reward in comparison is equaled out, or work harder if they believe better rewards will come.

Change rewards: If the rewards they were looking for, are not there, they can look for other rewards, throwing alternatives in the equation, like trying to get more money.

Sabotage: If the reference group is in their sphere of influence, they can try to sabotage their effort à reward sum, by undermining their position.

Bail out: People can just give up. Throw in the towel, sit apathic in front of their computer screen, calling in sick or go looking for another job.

Take for example a developer that is looking on an internet site that contains other job descriptions and salary indications. He will draw up an effort/reward equation and concludes that he is not appreciated enough. First he will try to work harder, under the assumption that the reward (appreciation will go up). When that isnt the case he will ask for more money, trying to compensate with this reward. When he doesnt get a response on this either, he will probably bail out in some way or another.

Some management teams can have a great resemblance with a monkey hill. Within corporate politics one wants to have a larger power base than the either. Managers dont want to loose face among each other, because that would undermine the need to feel respected and in control. So you get a lot of sabotage or cloaking behavior like:

• Covering Up Own Incompetence
• Undermining Anothers Reputation
• Attempt to Build an Empire within the Organization
• Attempt to Maintain an Empire within the Organization
• Attempt to Increase Sphere of Influence within Organization

When stakeholders are using the change effort / reward strategy most of the time the project manager can deal with it using motivational techniques. If people are bailing out, you have a problem, you have to reboot the stakeholder from scratch. And if you have a lot of sabotage-behavior, you better dig in deep for some heavy corporate politics.

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 Sociology – Part One (repost) is a post from: Project Shrink.