Project Shrink

Currently I am tracking 85 blogs related to “Project Management”. Last month I found these ten postings highly remarkable and interesting: Conspiracy vs. Collaboration Place Those Small Bets, Quickly! The Definitive List of Software Development Methodologies Systems How to Write a Book 5 Ways to Be A Naturally Visible Leader Thoughts on Austhink Software’s work [...]

When your company is struggling with projects, when all Project Managers are PMP certified, when every conceivable procedure seems to be in place, it is time to turn to The Fifth Discipline. No, this is not some kind of dark society. It is the art of creating a learning organization.

I love Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG), the ones that are life changing, the ones that make your existence worthwhile, the ones that make you feel powered up like an energizer bunny. Goals like the one Al Gore is presenting in his “Challenge To Repower America“: “Power all US energy within 10 years with non-carbon [...]

Software Projects are about humans… They’ve always been. During my study, I got inspired by Barry Boehm’s Theory W, everything Fred Brooks has written, Tom DeMaro and Tom Lister, and Alistair Cockburn (for me the only person that has written intensively about the link between choice of project approach and human related issues!) Alistair has [...]

You can tell, can’t you? It is a dead give away… I cannot stop thinking about resilience! Check out the Youtube channel of The Stockholm Resilience Centre, it has informational short videos about …. resilience… like this one: What Is Resilience? If you like podcasts, how about one hour “Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent [...]

Panarchy provides us a wide angle lens to look at projects. Originating from socio-ecological field studies this powerful concept lets us capture the project, the individual team members and the embedding organization in one go. Previously I discussed the ideas behind Panarchy: the adaptive cycle, multiple scales and the interaction of multiple scales. In this [...]

Previously I wrote about using the concept of Panarchy to analyze complex problems. This concept can assist Project Managers dealing with today’s complexities. If you haven’t read the previous post, I suggest you catch up on that one, before proceeding. But of course, it’s up to you. Photography by Tinken. For a long time, firefighters [...]

For me, THE most influential book of the first half of 2008 is definitely “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Craig Janet reminded my with his post yesterday of this book, and the fact that it was due time to give it also some blog time on Project [...]

In Paris I tried to order some croissants in a bakery. I spoke slowly “six croissaints”, pointing to the crummy broad. The woman behind the counter looked at me like I was insane. After 7 times repeating this act, she responded “Ah… croissants!” Photography by LongHornDave. I went to a customer a couple of years [...]

Reality is difficult to analyze. Project Managers still have to eliminate root-causes to major problems though. How to analyze today’s complexity? I found something worthwhile exploring: Panarchy. Its origin is in ecosystem management, where it is used for assessment on how ecosystems, social systems and economic systems are interacting. How complex do you want to [...]