Project Shrink

In the remaining months of this year I have some exciting speaking engagements coming up (stay tuned for updates). Here is the slidedeck for one of them: The End Of The Human Cannonball: Project Leadership In Today’s World. The End Of The Human Cannonball: Project Leadership In Today's World View more presentations from Bas de [...]

You can limit your team’s room to operate. By giving them detailed instructions what to do, by giving them very fixed and tight constraints, you can drive them into a funnel of efficiency. It’s like a bobsled track. The less room you have to move sideways, the faster you go. But what happens if you [...]

If you want to have a self-managed team (and you really want that), you need to agree on the means of the project, the rules of engagement. One set of rules for everyone. Everyone should know the same set of rules… Humans … have “rules” about how we do things “around here”. It is not [...]

How to use social media successfully in projects, is described in the Harvard Business Review article by Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra, Jeffrey Stamps and Jessica Lipnack: “Can Absence Make A Team Grow Stronger”. The article is from 2004, and they are not mentioning “social media”, they discuss “virtual workspaces”. But the two concepts are strikingly [...]

Ants don’t need central control to get the work coordinated. They use a simple and effective way to communicate and make individual decisions based upon the information. Ants are hardwired to work like this. Nature provided them all with the same set of rules in their body. Every leg has a natural tattoo describing how [...]

** This is a guest post by John P Vajda, PMP. Find out more about John at the bottom. ** How does one become more Agile? The question beckons any project manager worth his/her weight in PMP training books. We all ask ourselves how we can better deal with uncertainty. How can we embrace the [...]