How Visible Is Your Project?

I believe that the vast majority of projects are not nearly visible enough, particularly among the extended stakeholder and customer groups, though I’m constantly under fire for holding this opinion.

The reason teams don’t like visibility, as far as I can tell, is that we humans – in general – like to hide what we perceive as risky behaviour.  We do it as children, and the instinct doesn’t disappear.  (Though once we’ve got the trick mastered,  we’re quite happy to show it to the world to impress them with our daring – just watch the skaters on the South Bank in London).

6 ways to stop project management from killing creativity

Have you ever made the head of a programme manager spin around? I recently told a client that his team didn’t need anymore ‘creativity training’, and that what was holding them back was too much project management...Woah!

Aghast, (well I had just killed a sacred cow in his office)… he wanted to know more. Could the way he was brandishing PMBOK and PRINCE2 across his programme really be preventing his team from performing at their creative best?

Calming him down, I told him that his beloved methodologies were of course important in making sure this large and complex programme was well co-ordinated, managed, and monitored... but there were 6 changes he would have to make if he wanted the team to be creative as well!

From Brainstorm to Gantt Chart in One Step

I started mindmapping too long ago to admit, but I found it cumbersome when using paper.  I used to find that thinking about the organisation of the mind map either got in the way, or conversely – and at different times – it inspired further thoughts.  I wanted to be able to be able to get the ideas down in a blaze of creativity, and then use structures to fill-in the gaps.

These days I love mindmapping with software because it de-couples idea generation from idea organisation.  Now I can quickly re-structure the map as many times as I like, I get the best of both worlds.

For seven years I’ve been using versions of Mindmanager from MindJet, which is probably the market leading tool.  There seems to be no end of uses for this software, but one really clever extension application is

Over-simplification, polarization, and false dichotomy

" . . . The greatest failings of strategic management have occurred when managers took one point of view too seriously."- Henry Mintzberg et. al.

I was looking for the quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald about first rate intelligences and holding mulitple ideas simultaneously, when Google threw me a Yale commencement speech (included after the jump)… it resonated with me, and provides an interesting backdrop to some of the work I do with business clients, and indeed some of the issues being debated across the world!

Alpine Methodology

The method for teaching ski-ing has to be one of the most elegant methodologies there is.

Joe Bloggs, random punter, sedentary worker with a beer gut, travels to the mountains to learn a complex and potentially dangerous skill; i.e. throwing himself down a mountain at 30mph on two five foot long skis… and he thinks that he’s on holiday!

Oh yes, there is more to ski tuition than meets the eye… there are lessons hidden in this methodology that could help you lead and manage your projects much more effectively!

Project Management and Project Leadership

Whatever your specialist skills, I’d recommend spending a little time researching on-line search terms…I’ve found it very enlightening.  The numbers below are relative, based on Yahoo searches per month:

The top search terms are currently “myspace” and “google” with 19 and 18 million searches respectively, while the old web perennials “porn” and “free porn” receive only 3 million and 1.4 million.

With 98,018 searches in February, the term “project voyeur” was twice as popular as the term “project” on its own.  Project Voyeur is, inevitably,  a porn site.  But who searches for just the word “project”?  It’s such a vague search term, surely nobody finds what they want.

If you searched for “project management”, you would have created one of 29,235 searches for that term – being about 1/3 less popular than “playlist project”, which is social music tool for creating playlists for web 2.0 sites like MySpace, hi5 and Blogger.

More popular than either of them were the search terms “science project” and “science fair project”.  I think this is a fairly clear indication of the internet demographic.

Coming back on-topic, “project leadership” gets 1.7% of the number of searches of “project management”…but why?  Time for a revolution, I think.

And here’s a new interesting topic I found: “Essence of Decision” – which is a term borrowed from the title of a book on the Cuban missile crisis.  It documents how decisions are influenced by organizational process as well as organizational politics – how decisions in large organizations are rarely rational.  Based on my own experience, I concur.

Philip Greenwood

Tags: Decisions, Project

Global Warming and the Cynefin Framework

Ever since meeting Louisa-Jayne O’Neill of the UK Cabinet Office at one of David Gurteen’s knowledge cafes, I’ve been interested in the Cynefin Framework.  Ms O’Neill wrote an insightful article about the interaction of faith and decision making with respect to the Bush presidency, and that was to be my introduction to the framework.

The Cynefin Framework, proposed by Dave Snowden, helps us understand the nature of knowledge as it relates to different types of situations, and different approaches to decision making in those situations. The space in the middle of the diagram reflects an area of decision making that is affected by faith, or to use a more subtle term a “predisposition to belief”.

On a plane ride to South Africa recently, I watched Al Gore’s documentary film about Global Warming – An Inconvenient Truth.  For two weeks I was a convert; image going on your first safari, thinking “all this will be gone in 30 years”.  I watched the film again on the return flight and, guilt ridden, discussed it with everybody I saw on my return.  Gore’s arguments seemed so compelling; his simple, at times personal, approach to conveying his messages was convincing.

52% Improved productivity

Most executives are rightly sceptical about the financial value of workshops, executive coaching, and leadership consulting. What is the real impact of an 'engaged' workforce on the bottom line? Recent research by respected U.S. survey house ISR provides some interesting answers...

She should have music (wherever she goes)

In 1982, Gerald J. Gorn conducted an experiment in which subjects saw pens of one colour while hearing pleasant background music, and pens of another colour while hearing unpleasant background music.  Later on, the subjects were offered a choice of pens and – you guessed it -they tended to pick the pens that had been paired with the pleasant music.

This phenomenum is known as associative conditioning, and it is used extensively by that most influential of industries, Advertising. Next time you look at an advert, pay attention and you’ll notice that products are associated with humour, particular colours, select music, sexual innuendo and smiley attractive people having good times.  (Go ahead, you can associate these things with us, if you like.)

So what has this got to do with project leadership?  Well, I’m not going to recommend “Eye of the Tiger” as a project theme tune, or even to propose that you are as flagrant as I have been with the pictures in this blog, but I do want to point out that the stake-holders for your project (your team members, sponsors, governance group, customers etc.) have all got those same, sophisticated, “association engines” between their ears that the advertisers use without asking…so maybe you should have a careful look at things like:

• The environment your project teams meet and work in -what does it say about the importance of the project?
• Your use of colour, humour, pictures, multimedia, language, formats and fonts in your communications.

Ensure that they all align to give all your stake holders very positive associations with your project.

Philip Greenwood

Tags: associative, conditioning