Project Shrink

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In a new series called Future of Project Management Software I will be talking with PM Software vendors about their view of the future. To get us started, I had a conversation with Bastiaan DeBlieck and Bart Stevens from TenForce, a Project Management Software company located in Belgium. What, do you think, Project management Software [...]

Follow The Oracle The answer to all your Project Management problems… ask the Oracle (no, not the database, but the wisdom thingy). Love it! Is SEI-CMM L5 better than Agile Methodologies? “In this article i want to explain how i convinced my management to adapt Agile Development for my project. I moved from CMM L5 [...]

Perhaps it is a sign I have too much time on my hands, or I should really get a good hobby… but … I spent some time going through my mailbox with all my mails from one of my last projects and came up with the following theory… Photography by Mzelle Biscotte. The carbon copy [...]

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 [...]

The typical stereotype situation between sales and development/project management/delivery/support is that sales will sell everything at all costs just to close the deal (take some bonus) and leave the rest of the world grasping for breath of all the thing promised. The subject was triggered with me by a recent posting of Pawel Brodzinski. It [...]