Project Shrink

How do you convince an organization to use Scrum or another agile practice and really adopt it? I asked this question to three Project Managers experienced with agile practices and traditional approaches.

You’ll love this episode about leadership. In Episode 19 of The Project Shrink Podcast I am talking to Dave Logan about Tribal Leadership. Dave is a best-selling author, an expert in cultural transformation in the workplace, a senior partner at CultureSync and on the faculty of the Marshall School of Business. He co-authored the book [...]

In this episode of “The Project Shrink” I am talking to Jerry Manas. Jerry is an organizational architect and author of two books: “Napoleon on Project Management” and “Managing The Gray Areas”. We are talking about the “gray areas”. Managing projects is all about finding balances, finding the right touch for the right occasion. Jerry [...]

This is a posting in The Fish Pond Metaphor series by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar 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 [...]

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar 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. Other people [...]

I tried to get around it. I tried to avoid it. But in this case I can run, but I am surely unable to hide. So I decided to face it head on, get it out in the open. I just have to make the connection between training your mind for adaption, as suggested in [...]

The world is changing dramatically, fast and beyond everything we have seen. Globalization and technology have introduced more diversity, more dynamics and more interdependencies than ever before. This provides project management, and management in general, with a challenge. How to survive in this environment? Together with dr Ali Anani, I am taking on this challenge [...]

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar In Fish And OODA Loops we introduced fish schooling as an important part of the Fish Pond Metaphor. Schooling mimics human tendency to organize and view our selves in groups of people. This leaves the question of how individual fish operate within a school resulting in one organic [...]

By Ali Anani and Bas de Baar After reading about OODA loops and Social OODA some of you (yes you!) might have had one big question: What the heck has this to do with fish? In this post we will go back to the Fish Pond and explain the connection. Well, we’ll try. Fish do [...]

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 [...]