The Project Shrink » systems

Sims Project Model: Bert’s Lack Of Recognition

Bas — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:06:16 +0000

If we take the ideas behind The Sims to a more office like situation, consider the following situation where person A and B, or Bert and Ernie, influence each other. Bert’s Recognitions-level is way down; he doesnt feel any recognition at all on his job, so his goal becomes “Getting Recognition”. Bert in his mind has three possible strategies which all revolve around just getting attention (as he gets no feedback at all he is dying for any attention at all):

Passive: doing nothing, see if anyone reacts;
Aggressive: full force complaining and bitching;
Escape: doing completely something else that delivers some kind of recognition.

Whatever strategy Bert chooses, his efficiency in his work will drop. Now is a good time to bring in some new element: environment properties. Not only the actors itself have properties, but also the environment in which to have their setting. Most obvious example is the element time; this is a global property for the virtual reality. But also the economic climate, the meteorological climate, but also “global variables”, e.g. in a project setting On-Time, Within-Budget. The values of these global properties can also play a part in the game engine.

To get back to Bert and Ernie, the fact that Bernie doesnt work as efficient as he should will affect the global property On-Time. This will become false. Ernie in this case is the Project Manager and the change in the global property On-Time influences Ernies property “In-Control”; its value is decreasing. Ernie can have none of that, and therefor his goal becomes “Increase In-Control”.

Ernie is not much of a manager, so he has only one strategy available: Putt the Pressure On People With Low Efficiency. And what you know, that would be Bert. But by putting the pressure on Bert, Bert’s Recognition Levels drop even more, and the spiral downwards has begun.

Sims Project Model: Bert’s Lack Of Recognition is a post from: Project Shrink.

Sims Project Model: Tiffany’s Lust

Bas — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 11:59:43 +0000

I must admit, that the first time a played The SIMS I immediately try to get them to kill of love each other. I mean: “Looking for a job” Yeah, yeah. “Hitting the next door neighbor” Cool! Assuming that I am not the only weirdo here, and to make stuff entertaining, lets go to our example.

Consider the actor Tiffany in a game. She might have the following properties:

Gender (M/F) := F
Age (number) := 30
Lust (number) := 50
Anger (number) := 40

We have a 30 year old female that is rather neutral on her emotions lust and anger. Tiffany might be doing something. Actually, every actor is always “doing” something at a given moment. E.g. sleeping, drinking, having a shower or playing chess. This is called the “state” of the actor. Although in reality what people are doing can be limitless; a state can only be a value from a limited list. Of course, this might be a long list. Lets say Tiffany is currently “drinking”. At this moment we have a 30 year old woman having a drink and feeling normal. This game doesnt sound like a lot of fun, does it? So, lets give it some action.

Tiffany is one outgoing person, to put it like that; when her lust-level is 50 or above, she needs to satisfy her lust, this will become her “goal”. If you are fond of some abstract syntax you like the following notation about Tiffany:

Goal::Satisfy lust
State:=all
Threshold:=lust=>50

So, it doesnt mind what she is doing, when the lust peaks, so does she. One of the strategies she has up her sleeve to fulfil this goal is to just kiss someone. But how to select a suited partner? Or a willing victim if you want. The game will have some rules to determine the target, the actor with whom to interact with.

Target: gender=M; lust>90.

All males with a lust above then 90 can be a target. The computer will run through the list of actors in the game to search for candidate that fits the rule. If it has found one, we get to the part where you can see something happening in the game. If it has selected a strategy (kiss someone), found a suited target, it will run some predefined activities associated with this strategy: walk towards the target, say hi, do some chitchat, etc. This is all finally visible on your screen. And finally when the goal is satisfied, when Tiffany finally has her long desired kiss, this will influence her properties; perhaps in this case her lust-level will finally drop by ten points.

Sims Project Model: Tiffany’s Lust is a post from: Project Shrink.

How To Learn Project Management By Playing The Sims

Bas — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 11:51:36 +0000

To be able to discuss how people operate within a project, it is important to have some kind of idea in our head about people, their behavior and how they interact. Some kind of model. Of course a model is a simplification of reality; we leave things out, we make stuff easier, just to be able to understand it all. This might be a small problem, but we have no choice. Without ignoring aspects and making a few assumptions there is no way on earth our brain will get it. Sorry to bring this to you: but our mind is too small for reality.

When looking for a way to describe how people operate, you just have to be totally amazed by the popular computer game The SIMS. In this game you simulate a group of people that live together. They go to work, they sleep, they have coffee with the neighbours, and they have sex and raise their children. The simulation runs in principle by itself, but the fun is that you can interfere in their situation; can withhold them from food, provide them a lot of money, make them hate or love each other. You just sway your magic wand, kick back and see how your actors in the game react. And what staggers me the most, and why I bring up this subject in the first place, is the level of detail, and live like feel of the simulation. They really nailed it down, simulating ordinary people on their own and in a group.

Just from the looks of it, it seems worth to look a little closer to the underlying behavioral game engine (the part of the game which emulates individuals behave depending on interactions with other actors in the system) to help us crack the code for a proper model. Of course this will be a simplification of the real deal.

Every individual in the game is called an ‘actor’. Every actor has some properties that describe it. Of course you have a name so you know who is who, but you also consider aspects that are a given like age and gender. Next to these kind of ‘given’ properties you have items that describe the state of mind the actor has at any given moment, and yes, they will change. Think about emotions like lust and anger, or physical conditions like hunger and general health.

To be able to do something useful with these properties, they can have values. Of course, gender can be Male or Female, but for things like Anger you can use numbers: 0 can mean completely without anger, and with a value of 100 the steam is getting out of an individuals ears.

How To Learn Project Management By Playing The Sims is a post from: Project Shrink.

What Are Complex Adaptive Systems?

Bas — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:23:27 +0000

For the context of projects I will focus on a special type of systems: Complex Adaptive Systems, or CAS for short. I will first throw you off guard with a formal definition, after which I will explain a little more. The following definition is from John H. Holland:

Photography by Phauly.

“A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a dynamic network of many agents (which may represent cells, species, individuals, firms, nations) acting in parallel, constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing. The control of a CAS tends to be highly dispersed and decentralized. If there is to be any coherent behavior in the system, it has to arise from competition and cooperation among the agents themselves. The overall behavior of the system is the result of a huge number of decisions made every moment by many individual agents.” (source: Waldrop, 1992)

Before you go all bouncy, let me tell you a story about the Game of Life. In 1990, while at university, a popular programming exercises was to create a small program based upon John Conways (a mathematician from the 60s) computer simulation “Life”. The idea is that you have a 2-dimensional grid with cells. These cells can be alive or dead (on or off, colored or blank). When the simulation is running the state of a cell is determined by three simple rules:

If the cell has no living neighbors or just one, it will be dead (caused by loneliness);
If four or more of the cells next to it are alive, it will be dead (overcrowding);
If a dead cell has exactly three living neighbors it will come alive (Bitstorm).

The effect of these simple rules can be quite surprising. The starting grid can be very chaotic, but after a while you can see patterns emerge, and even stable situations can be reached where nothing will change any more, or the same patterns are just repeated over and over.

This simple program shows how from a simple set of rules that only take into account the cell itself and its direct neighbors can create some complex patterns in an entire system (the grid as a whole).

And this is exactly what is known as complex adaptive systems (CAS). Systems like this are the economy, the weather and human interaction, and the game of Life is a very simple one. In a CAS a very large group of small components or agents are interacting with each other. These local interactions are following some general rules. The collective of all these interactions, the sum if you want, determines the behavior of the whole system.

After previous postings on this blog (and wait until you reach my next posts about about The SIMS) you don’t have to wonder what this all has to do with project management. The people involved in the project and its surroundings are considered the “agents”. It is the human interaction between all those stakeholders that determines the overall behavior of the project. Nothing new here. But, applying CAS literally means that rules aren’t applied to the project as a whole, but the focus should be the individual interactions between people. That is way this entire exercises is so important.

What Are Complex Adaptive Systems? is a post from: Project Shrink.

Why Projects Are Nothing More Than Social Interactions

Bas — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:05:49 +0000

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.

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

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

Reality Refuses To Follow Your Plan

Bas — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 21:48:16 +0000

Project life can be quite frustrating when one day after another turns out not how you planned it. The software should be ready when you said it would. It has to. Otherwise you have people waiting, customers complaining and bosses getting annoyed. It is your reputation and ultimately your job on the line. If you just plan harder, more detailed, than the plan must be correct. Right? Of course not. I know, it is becoming some kind of mantra for me, but, yes, it is a shocker for a lot of people, you can’t force reality in sticking to your plan. Forget it. It is not going to happen. Ever. Because it seems to be a habit hard to break, a state of mind hard to get rid of, it is worth spending a little closer look into this matter. Why can’t we predict project future?

Fifth Discipline

The answer starts with something called “The Fifth Discipline”. It sounds like some cult, some hush-hush society that guards a life-changing secret: the 5th Discipline. Although it was life changing for me, it is nothing like that. It is the title of a book by Peter Senge he wrote in the early 1990s [1]. He put forth the idea of “five disciplines” that have to be considered in improving business and organizations (Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Systems Thinking, Shared vision, and Team learning). Every discipline has its own merits, but for the topic at hand we will focus on one: systems thinking. For Senge 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. To give you an idea, consider the following example: A car repair shop has not much to do. So if a client comes with his car, he can be helped 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 to long, clients go away. Having fewer clients, again, the speed of service is up again.

In this short example, our main problem with reality becomes clear. It is 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 to see for us.

Another 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 to large, too much new members are added simultaneously, etc. it may even drop.

Systems Theory

When you talk about it, it feels quite natural. It has a proper “yeah-this-is-how-it-works” touch to it. But mind you, it is quite a mental stretch for most of us. Between the great World Wars of the 20th century scientist Ludwig von Bertalanffy came up with a new way to look at things in physics, biology, economy, psychology, sociology and all other sciences; he formulated the General Systems Theory. In essence this view on the world consists of recognizing that independent elements make up something larger, something bigger, a unified whole. Although the elements are independent, they are influencing each other, the have a certain relation, they are related. This “whole” with its underlying elements is called “a system”.

Although the previous paragraph may throw your mind in a back flip, the concept of systems is quite an intuitive and natural thing; an organization consists of employees all working and communicating together, they make up the elements for the “whole” which in this case is the organization. Flows of air, the movements of water, the impact of sunshine are all the underlying elements that make up our weather system. Every individual buy or sell transaction make up our economy. You see, nothing to be scared here.

At a first glance this systems world view seems like an empty shell. You might wonder what it brings us? How can this help you and me? The answer is nicely formulated again by Senge [1]

“Business and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it’s doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved. Systems thinking is a conceptual framework (..) to make full patterns clearer and to help us see how to change them effectively.”

Another neat thing about systems is that across the whole spectrum of sciences, systems pop up that look the same or have similar behavior then systems in a different discipline. This allows is to beg-steal-and-borrow theories and models from different areas. Our toolbox to look at our own systems of interest has widely broadened.

Cybernetics

Closely related to the notion of systems is the concept of cybernetics, first formulated by the mathematician Wiener. This concept describes how a system communicates with its environment and based upon the feedback it gets from it, alters its behavior. If a group of animals will drink water from a well and one of the groups dies because of it, they entire group may search for a different well. If a company introduces a new product, and sees its stock plummeting because of it, it might change its strategy. The feedback mechanism comes in all sorts and shapes; they are the focus of cybernetics. The additional value this brings should be obvious; a system always lives within a context (a project within a larger organization for example) and this idea of communication/feedback provides us with an angle on how to look at this phenomena.

And new angles are precisely what we need to counter our idea of reality-following-the-plan. It is all a matter of changing our mindset. Doug DeCarlo almost dedicated half of his book Extreme Project Management [2] to convince us of this fact. In his opinion traditional managers hold a Newtonian view of the world, in the sense that events are linear, cause-and-effect can be nicely summed up in beautiful laws. In today’s world of dynamic complexity that model of the universe in your mind is not going to cut it for you: what you need is a quantum mindset. Exactly the kind of world view I am talking about!

If you are convinced that you cannot predict the future, your control loop becomes completely different. Traditional the thermostat model is used: reality is measured and compared against the plan. If reality is different than the plan, all effort is put into creating such a process that reality is in line with the plan again. If salespeople are not meeting their targets, they don’t get the bonus. This kind of carrot-stick management creates all kinds of unwanted behavior. Like people that are reporting what they are supposed the report to confirm the plan, regardless the actual real situation. Everything to avoid the stick.

When you have a quantum mindset, you know that reality cannot be planned. The thermostat model is therefore a ridiculous way of managing. More natural is the adoption of the scientific model: your forecast of the future is your expectation. If your forecasts are not in line with reality, your assumptions on which you based your expectations on, are not correct. You need to alter your mental model and try to come up with better forecasts.

[1] Senge, Peter, 5th Discipline
[2] DeCarlo, Doug, Extreme Project Management

Reality Refuses To Follow Your Plan is a post from: Project Shrink.

My Current Model For Project Management

Bas — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 16:02:57 +0000

It seems only fair that I share with you the current research model I have about projects. I personally think that if you raise doubt and questions you also have to be part of the solution.

It may not come as a surprise that I view projects as a network of people that interact and have relationships. These networks are not stable and are not limited to the project itself. Networks emerge, people join and people leave, the networks collide and merge, or one network splits to become an almost independent unit. Of course almost, in the end our entire society is one big freaking network.

In the fashion of complex adaptive systems each network (=system) has global properties. In human networks this are shared properties that are projected to the outside world (the non-network members) and give the network itself direction. The global properties of the system are the result of the interactions of the members (=agents), but their value influences also the individual agents.

At this moment I recognize 4 types of relationships among the agents of interest:

Task
Interactions that are the result of intermediate steps to get to the goal of the network.

Information
The flow of information through the network. The interaction itself is communication

Coordination
I assume that the tasks cannot be done by one single person, and that the amount of resources (skills) are limited. Therefor coordination within the network is needed for the allocation of scarce resources, communication about intermediate results, coordination of goals, capabilities and forecasting of the (near) future.

Association
People have also relationships within the network (and within other networks) as means as a social expression.

Of course this view will alter. But it is the basic thinking structure I have at the moment, and I hope it will help you understand why I am posting on certain topics.

My Current Model For Project Management is a post from: Project Shrink.