Project Management Digest

Similar to 2007, the TechNet IT Pro technical writers team will release on a regular basis a compiled-single file CHM version of all the latest SharePoint and Project Server 2010 content. For instance here is the latest for both as of June 14th. 10MB of MUST READ content for all IT Pros! Also a perfect companion for all consultants that do not have internet access at their favorite customers. As usual let us know what you think about our documentation: We would like your feedback so that we can provide you with the best possible technical documentation. Please send any comments, questions, or concerns about the documentation to epmdocfeedback@microsoft.com. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=8e434c5c-0c6e-41e2-86ad-79fa30558feb http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3629425d-1505-456e-89e2-ede95f75ffe5

My friend Carl posted this as a comment to one of the longer threads on Analysis Services and Project Server with the ActiveX Component Can't Create Object. error  – but thought it worthy of top billing and a fresh post, as I know others have struggled with this one.  Your mileage may vary and I know there are plenty of permutations of versions that might still catch you out – but over to Carl;

So we resolved our particular issue of installing EPM & configuring CBS into an existing MOSS 2007 / SQL2008 / RS2008 environment where the SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies is installed....

Installed SQL 2005 components from December 2008 feature pack on app server

• Native client
• Backwards compatibility

* note: Management Objects not installed due to SQL 2008 reporting services add-in for SharePoint wouldn’t let it (Higher version already installed)

Then we installed these bits on app server to get things working

• SQL 2008 native client (needed as we got the issue "Cannot connect to Repository" when we only had the 2005 native client installed)
• XMO 2005 cu5 - to get around the previous issue noted re RS Add-in (BriSmith – I think this is the link - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972511/en-us, but Carl can correct me)

... we went around the houses a few times to get to this end point.  Hope it helps someone else :)

http://carldalton.tumblr.com/

Technorati Tags: psvr2007

In episode 13 of Project Potion Dave and Bas talk about advanced Project Management (does it exist?) and PM software for the iPad (does it exist?).

Subscribe to the Podcast

Other people who liked this article liked these too

• Potion 12 – iPads and Ashclouds
• Project Managers. On Video? Awesome!
• Project Potion: 2009 Lessons Learned

Potion 13 – Episode Without Name

It’s a tough thing being in the job market. You make up a CV and send it out by the truckloads. You write it and rewrite it; you peddle the pavement until you stop wearing shoes, as the leather’s started growing from the soles on your feet. If you ever do get feedback from a prospective employer, the message is that you’re overqualified, under qualified, didn’t have the right experience or you smell like band-aids. It’s hard.

As a frequent hiring manager for my projects, I wanted to let you know, it’s not personal. It might feel like it sometimes when you keep getting passed over, but you’re not a relic, and your contribution is vital. It’s your job to make me see that so I’ll beat my recruiter’s door down to get you into my office!

For starters, you might be looking at a job spec. I’ll tell you a secret: the job spec is a red herring. When we hiring managers sit down to write them, we’re trying to put into words what we think we need. While the high level stuff might be accurate, “need a project manager, need a business analyst, need a Pega developer”, the details generally aren’t. “PMP required, 4 years experience in Java, ability to spin into a Wonder Woman costume”…they all point to my (very) subjective guess at my real requirements. The fact is, one persons’ 6 months working with Java could be worth 10 years of someone else’s experience. But I need a benchmark so I make stuff up using my judgement and maybe the input of one or two other people, and the job spec winds up in the newspaper next to your Corn Flakes.

You have to remember, if you’re starting with a job spec, the only thing you can really count on is the high level requirement. That is, if I’m after a business analyst, I probably don’t want a veterinarian. Everything else you may try to tailor to my (let’s be honest) dysfunctional request is an attempt to second-guess my guesses. If I knew in so much detail what I really needed, I’d hire a monkey from the zoo and micromanage it. As a professional, I hope you want the opportunity to shine on your own after I hire you–which means you need to be able to help me discover my needs.

The entire hiring process is so “cart-before-the-horse” it’s amazing our civilization made it as far as it did.

Whether you have a job spec to go by or not, you’ve got a CV you want to get under my nose. You want me to call you up and give you a chance to sell me on how awesome you are. But hundreds of other people are doing the same thing. I can’t keep up with the volume so I have to set guidelines on what I do and don’t have time for.

So you wanna know another secret? CVs that benefit ME stay on my table, CVs that don’t benefit ME go in my dustbin. It’s that simple. And yes, I’m really that selfish: my project, my budget, my time. When I finally hire you, we’ll build a relationship and I’ll stop thinking about you in those terms, but before then, I have nothing else to go by!

So how does your CV get a hiring manager’s attention? The best thing you can do is stop talking about yourself.

“But Geoff,” you cry incredulously. “You must be MAD how else can I show you what I’ve done?”

Not so. I want to hear about your customers. In the third person. I want to hear about what they did, got or made as a result of you being there. THAT’S your selling point. Your customers’ lives changed because of your work. Without you, they wouldn’t have been able to do / get / make what they did…at least not in that same fashion. That really does make you special, and I need to know that!

I know the last thing you want to do is rewrite yet ANOTHER version of your CV, but a good exercise is, when you’re looking it over, can you stick the words “my customer got” at the front of each bullet point and have it make sense? If not, you’re probably writing about details that would make my eyes glaze over faster than a bored heifer at the State fair. Try these out:

• “My customer got $5000 bazillion dollars in new revenue.”

• “My customer saved $5000 bazillion dollars.”

• “My customer saw true teamwork for the first time.”

• “Everyone at my customer got to have cheap special chachkis to make their lives easier.”

• “My customer was able to not get eaten by Godzilla that time he rampaged through town.”

• “My customer was so successful they got to rebrand with new awesomeness as a side-benefit.”

Of course I know it was you who were responsible for those things. You don’t need to point that out because you’ve already told me it was YOUR customer. It also tells me that you care about your customer, and are proud of your customers results. It tells me you’re not just in this for yourself.

And THAT is something I want to hear!

Geoff Crane is the PaperCutPM, after 22 years in the trenches of a lot of tough projects, he decided to change direction a little bit and focus on sparking ideas in the vibrant field of project management. Originally from Waterloo, Ontario, Geoff provides consulting and mentoring through PapercutPM. You can also follow Geoff on Twitter at @PaperCutPM

Image © Rob Young and used with permission.

Related posts:

1. How to Respond to the Changing Project Management Jobs Market? Last week I took part in a podcast with the...
2. Project Management Recruitment Ideas – The Cover Note Last week we looked at the application process in the...
3. Project Management Recruitment Ideas – Brushing Up on Your PM Knowledge We’ve looked at the  application process,  the cover note and...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

In the first installment of this discussion I mapped my perception of what scrum delivers against the PMBOK’s Integration Management knowledge area and appended a few simple observations. Today I want to discuss why I zeroed in on integration management as the first place to look. By doing this I want to try to set a context and address some constraints to this discussion.

I went to integration management because I think that Integration (with the capital I) is the main role of the project manager in the sort of projects I work on. My projects are usually larger ones ($5M+) and I work in large organizations that rely on formal systems and structures to keep order and balance competing internal priorities.  The technical challenges are solid, and so are the organisational change issues.

Usually these projects are paid for by a sponsor who is a senior manager within the organization, or the section of the organization that the project is operating in. But the decisions on scope are often made by the middle and frontline management stakeholders. Instantly in this situation you are faced with the challenge of the people who decide what goes into the solution aren’t the ones paying for it.

It takes a certain amount of organizational maturity to overcome this problem, and often scope control and stakeholder management is always difficult. There are quite specific techniques to deal with these challenges though, and they are not in my experience embedded into the typical project approach. Instead sponsors rely upon the talents of the people on the project team to coral or otherwise align the disparate wants and desires of the stakeholders.

That’s not to say that there are not specific systems and processes that can achieve balance. One example is provided by Glen when he starts us of with the balanced scorecard as the source of our project requirements. Another is Robin Goldsmith in a Modern Analyst article from last year called BAs will falter until they discover REAL business requirements.  This is all fundamental to running a business and so maybe we are doing the customer’s work for them if we step into this space?

I suspect that if all of us looked at the projects we are working on today the majority of us would say we are working the wrong project. And the reason for that is often that projects are started for the wrong reasons, even if they are started with the best intentions.

Projects are about delivery, not about choosing goals and choosing organizational strategies. The PMBOK for example dedicates 2½ pages out of 467 pages to project initiation, and about half that space is taken up by 3 diagrams. That’s about half a percent of the total knowledge in the BOK.


Let me summarize project initiation for you; justify your project with a business case or other tool, develop a charter so everyone knows the project goals and scope, and then identify who your stakeholders are. Identify any organizational issues that are going to trip you up and go for it.

Organizations have more complete processes than this, but they are beyond the scope of the PMBOK. You may find these processes in Portfolio Management manual, product development methods and strategic planning processes. But fundamentally project selection is not the project manager’s job.

Some organizations require a 3-6 month period of maturing the thinking about a project before it really kicks off. Other places will kick a project off after a boozy lunch and a good idea.

The truth is that neither method is better than the other to any great degree, as long as you follow up the initiation process with good sense. And however it’s done; it’s usually done by someone different to the person who has to deliver the project.

When I compare scrum to PMBOK I am comparing tools that help manage the delivery of projects, not the selection of projects or setting of project goals.

Integration management includes the processes that report on progress and manage the balancing act between cost, scope (which for me implicitly includes quality) and schedule. And given that the project is defined when you turn up the unique competency the project manager brings is the ability to deliver these two things in a way that helps the project close out successfully. The other knowledge areas are useful, but not *core* to the job and not particularly Project Management specialist knowledge.

Coming up:

• Why a Product Backlog is like a WBS which is like a PBS
• Why procurement management and human resource management knowledge areas are not core to this discussion
• How Scrum needs to be augmented to address Quality Management
• And Sundry other discussions about PMBOK and Scrum.

What do you think? What do you want to hear discussed next?



var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try{var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");pageTracker._trackPageview();} catch(err) {} var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));try {var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-4191072-4");pageTracker._trackPageview();} catch(err) {}

In a series called The Context Machine I will summarize three years of looking for answers to the following question:

“If you are a Project Manager that operates for a short period of time in a foreign organization, with a global team you don’t know, in a domain you would not know, using virtual communication, high uncertainty, limited authority and part of what you do out in the open on the Internet, how do you make it all work?”

I recommend to read the first post before proceeding with this one.

To a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Or, perhaps more appropriate: to a shrink every problem is psychological.

I view projects as a set of social interactions. And because we all define problems, solutions and things in general from our belief system, I see most project events in terms of communication, culture and behavior.

In this post I will introduce the notion of “context” as essential element in communication and as attractor for social clustering. This post is very theoretical, but needed to understand the framework in the next post. I’ll promise to keep the other posts less abstract

Communication is the single most important element in people working together. We’ll need some concepts to discuss this topic in a virtual and global environment.

People cluster together. We form groups for economic and social reasons. What if we could use our natural tendency for social clustering as a way to drive teams? We would have a very powerful mechanism on our hands.

In this post I’ll make an attempt to explain how both elements come together with the introduction of “context”.

Each individual has a context. It’s made up of his experiences, his history and believes.
A group or organization has a context, which can be best viewed as its culture, the quest and history.

So. Projects are about interactions. And context is everything.

When you think about the words you are going to write, you have a certain mindset. You have experienced things; talked about stuff, you have a specific intent. Your context.

Then you just send the message.

A receiver picks it up. Looks at the sender and the text. If you are lucky, they will make an effort trying to “know you” and build up the context from cues you provide. If you aren’t that lucky they just see your name, and go “meh”. Stereotypes. Mind is already made up. All kinds of mechanisms to ensure there is a context alright, but it isn’t yours.

Each individual has a context. It’s made up of his experiences, his history and believes.

Others can attempt to reconstruct this context. They can do this

• by accessing publicly available information about someone (Google his name, word of mouth);
• by using cues that helps us interpret the context (If we see Dr. before a name, we know he’s smart. If he’s young, he must be naive. Cues don’t have to be that obvious and cliche);
• by asking questions directly to the sender of the message (saving the obvious for last).

Groups also have context.

A group or organization has a context, which can be best viewed as its culture, the quest and history. These are all powerful concepts when used in teams.

For projects we create goals, create an identity that the organization members want to be associated with. We create rituals, rules of engagements, language and visual cues that turn a collection of individuals into a tight and focused group. A group with a purpose. A group that feels special and a little different from the rest of the organization.

To run efficient virtual teams you really have to go through all the elements that make up this group, and communicate the digitally. You have to identify commonalities between the group members that strengthen the group. Use this to emphasize a group identity. Adopt common language that sets the team apart from other teams.

Context As Selection

An exciting project, a WOW project, will attract certain individuals. What one thinks is a hot cause, another individual might find boring. A public declaration of cause and culture functions as an attractor for “the right people”. If you fill a sink with water and when it’s full you pull the plug, all the water will spiral towards one point. Automatically. Just because the proper conditions are created.

Context is not only an element in effective communication, but it works also as a social clustering mechanism.

Not everyone can join a group. There is some door policy. The context of the individual determines if he may enter or not. Does the group think are you a good match?

Context is a mechanism for selection.

Creation Of Reputation

Every project that is performed adds to the history of the organization and the individuals. Projects create (or more appropriate) add to the context.

Successful projects enhance a persons reputation. A reputation can be considered as publicly available information about the context of a person or organization. This used to be primary word of mouth, but in our digital world you can also view this as it’s digital footprint.

Summary

• Each individual has a context. It’s made up of his experiences, his history and believes;
• A group or organization has a context, which can be best viewed as its culture, the quest and history;
• Receivers attempt to reconstruct the senders context when interpreting a message;
• Context works as a selection mechanism to attract individuals to an organization and when adding people to groups;
• The actual performance of projects add to the context of organization and individual.

Next up: The Context Machine Other people who liked this article liked these too

• The Case Of The Stolen Context
• Lengthening The Feedback Loop
• This Is Not A Story About Social Media.

The Context Machine: The Essence Is Context

Applications are not customized in a vacuum. We do not obtain a magical requirements listing which develops magically into a commercial off the shelf customized application suitable for the end users needs. Programmers, Business Analysts, Report writers, or database architects who follow this pattern are doomed to hear from the stakeholder. "That wasn't quite what I had in mind". It is time to break free and engage the stakeholders in the customization of their applications.

Requirement gaps or disconnect problems do not age well like a fine wine. In the best case scenario they cause rework, in the worse case they cause the cancellation of the project. To prevent these gaps from occurring or catch them early in the process, you need to reach out and talk things through with the stakeholders.

A couple of years ago, we were customizing a commercial solution for our health information management coding department. The previous application had 3 screens, one for patient and visit demographics, one for icd9 diagnosis, icd9 procedures, and cpt4 procedures, and finally one for all miscellaneous tracking. The screen flow was customized to the chart organization and how the coders extracted necessary information. Through brittle programming in the background which had been customized over the years, we had an extract ascertain the professional and facility er charges from the codes. The transparency brought issues, for which the best way was to remove the transparency and have the coder apply the correct charge code.

Unfortunately, the it focus when on bringing the ER charge coding forward for the coders to be able to review and change the system generated charge codes. The plethora of screens that were developed brought the solution to a grand total of 12 from the previous 3. It was not received well, and rework started to bring the screen flow more inline with the coder's workflow.

The Take Away Having a joint review session throughout the customization of the application would have prevented this gap. Those who do the workflow often know the workflow best. It is best to set the stage for the desired business goals, and then collaborate with the stakeholders to achieve those goals!

Apologies to Chris Moyles. We just wanted you to know that with a great newsletter comes a great podcast, and Project Management Tipoffs, the project management & recruitment issues newsletter from Arras People, is a great newsletter.

With over 14,000 subscribers that check out our free mailings each month, there’s little wonder as to how respected it is. So beginning in March, we added a short 30-minute podcast for subscribers and non-subscribers, adding driving commuters to that list of people who want to get the Tip off on the next trend in project management & recruitment. Like our online subscribers that print us off and read us on the train-ride home, the podcast format gives that audience of drivers to and from working environments a chance to stay equally as sharp, only with the author of this post’s voice beamed directly into your head!

The podcast version – like the online version – of Tipoffs’ June edition is out Thursday morning at 11am GST.  Subscribe to the podcast today for our insight and analysis on the all ways recruitment can work for project management job candidates out there. Account holders can also subscribe to our regular iTunes feed for free. Check out last week’s preview post on the June issue for a full, comprehensive look.

BONUS: Be sure to check out the new regular Twitter feed for Project Management Tipoffs as well.

Related posts:

1. Tipoffs: A Big Day Tomorrow The Project Management Newsletter - Project Management Tip-Offs A last-minute...
2. April Tipoffs a Week Away…With a Twist Arras People can now be referred to as the Project...
3. What Can You Expect From Tipoffs Thursday? Project Management Tipoffs can be in your Inbox Thursday, just...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

You know when you are attending a conference and someone gives you their business card?  For networking purposes you absolutely should have something to give back to them.

To make it easier for you to always have something in your handbag to hand out, I have another great giveaway for you this month.  All Business Cards, which (as the name suggests) do business card printing, have offered three readers each one set of 500 business cards.

They are printed on thick 16 pt card stock, and you can choose from single or double sided cards.  Another choice:  you can pick from a glossy UV finish which apparently “enhances color depth” and “extends card life”, or a matte finish (like my latest favourite nail varnish), or you can opt for uncoated cards.

There’s one small final thing to bear in mind, and that is that shipping costs are only included for winners within the US and Canada.  If you enter the draw and are successful, and you live outside the US and Canada, you’ll have to pay the actual UPS shipping charges (or you could choose not to win and let someone else have the prize).  There is more about shipping on the All Business Cards website, but it isn’t expensive.  And the cards themselves are still free!

Anyway, if you would like to enter, leave a comment to this post (remember to include your email address in the comment form – it doesn’t get published but it will let me get in touch if you win), or drop me a message with your name and email address.  There’s no silly phrase to write this time – I’ll save that for next month’s great book giveaway.

The closing date is 9 July 2010.  Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Giveaway – last few days! Have you entered the giveaway for a copy of Women in Science, Engineering and Technology yet?  If not, you have three days left: the draw...
2. Fun Works giveaway – closing date Well, it seems as if lots of you are not having fun at work, given the amount of entries to the book giveaway. It’s not...
3. Giveaway: Business Etiquette book I have a copy of Business Etiquette: 101 Ways to Conduct Business With Charm & Savvy to give away.  I quoted the author, Ann Marie...

Why has Project Portfolio Management struggled to be adopted in organizations? While part of the problem lies with the vendor overselling the product, the bulk of the issue stems from our collective failure to educate ourselves on PPM--and understand how we should adopt it.

One of my very first posts about being a BA was about how much I hate the tools BAs have to work with in our jobs. One astute commenter pointed out that most of the tools I mentioned were not really BA tools at all, but general purpose tools that BAs ended up using. This general tool approach often occurs because of a lack of funds for specialized tools or an ignorance that better tools even exist.

Given these limits on tool selection, I'd like to take a few minutes to give the BAs out there who lack specialized tools a few quick ideas on ways they can use a word processing application to be more productive in creating and managing requirements.

Use a template
Hopefully, your organization has a predefined requirements management template of some kind for you to use. If they don't I highly recommend asking if you can form a group of analysts to create a standard one for use across all projects and business areas.

Templates are great for many reasons, but the one I want to talk about speed. If you have a set template, you know the minimum amount of information you need to get to your first review. It is as simple as filling in the different sections with the appropriate material. You don't need to spend time trying to figure out what different artifacts you could or should include, as a properly created template tells you what you need. Starting with a totally blank document each time is analogous to recreating the wheel.

Say it with style
Use Styles. They're the little labels like 'Header 1', 'Header 2' and 'Normal' that are found in the toolbar, usually above the document itself. These are fantastic time savers as you can create new styles and apply them to different areas of your document for additional emphasis.

The other great thing about styles is how the Headers tie in with your Table of Contents. By correctly using a style, your table of contents builds itself for you when you tell the application to include one in your document. Creating and maintaining a table of contents by hand, especially in a very long document, can be a nightmare.

A word of caution though, especially if you're using a template. Make sure that you only create as many styles as you need. Having too many styles can make using them as unwieldy as doing multiple format updates manually. Make sure your template is stripped of all unnecessary formatting prior to its initial distribution.

Auto Text
Auto text is a feature which I find interesting, but don't personally find a lot of use for in my particular role. The idea of auto text is that if you find yourself constantly typing out a long string of terms or some unwieldy proper name, you can create a short set of keystrokes that the word processor will automatically change into the phrase. If for some reason my organization regularly has discussions about 'Very Extended Three Letter Acronym', then I could create an auto text rule so that whenever I typed 'VETLA', it would automatically be replaced by the full text.

This is especially useful if your organization has a lot of specific 'jargon' or acronyms that are unique to themselves. Consider this to be nothing more than an automated Find and Replace function. Be careful about what acronyms you set up as any time you use them they will always expand. Word processors are not smart enough to understand if you really want to use the acronym this time or if the acronym also has a common usage that does not mean the same thing as your organization specific usage.

Document Properties
One thing that I find is regularly overlooked is document properties. Any document you create on your regularly used PC probably has your name listed as the author of the document. However, if you take a document created by someone else and replace all the content with your information, the document properties will still show the person who originally created the document as the author. I've worked on projects before where the author field in document properties was a person I had never heard of and the company they worked for wasn't affiliated with my organization in any way.

There are lots of different properties in documents that could be helpful if you take a look through the list. Title, Subject, Author, Manager, Company, Category, Keywords, Comments, Hyperlink, the list goes on and on and on.

Tracking Changes
My last suggestion is the one that comes with the largest disclaimer of all my comments. Track changes can be very useful, but even more than a decade of enhancements, most word processors still do not do this very well. Track changes can do an acceptable job of showing what textual changes were made and by whom. Where the function often fails is in attempting to track changes to tables, inserted objects and textual formatting.

Even if you use the tool sparingly, it isn't used often enough in most organizations to be in the common repertoire of most knowledge workers. If you choose to show the final version including changes, you will likely need to explain to some of your reviewers how to read through the changes that have been made to the document.

If you decide to track changes, make sure that most of your internal revisions occur with the functions turned off, or that you increment the revision number and accept all changes before doing another round of reviews. This keeps the document from being overly cluttered and distracting from the actual content.

Those are my suggestions for how to get the most out of a requirements document created with a word processing application. Do you have any suggestions I didn't cover which you teach others? Let us know in the comments.

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try{var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");pageTracker._trackPageview();} catch(err) {} var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));try {var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-4191072-4");pageTracker._trackPageview();} catch(err) {}

According to a study from Iran, "Having some of your project's elements outsourced, is normally good news both for an overloaded project execution team as well as their management team. But the bad news come when the subcontractors will be stopped and each one is claiming for the other's deliverables to continue his work."

In a series called The Context Machine I will summarize three years of looking for answers to the following question:

“If you are a Project Manager that operates for a short period of time in a foreign organization, with a global team you don’t know, in a domain you would not know, using virtual communication, high uncertainty, limited authority and part of what you do out in the open on the Internet, how do you make it all work?”

Yes, I know, I tried to put as much difficulties as I know of into this question. But it’s the question we are dealing with.

The Medina Of Fes

It all started three years ago with my trip to the fabulous country of Morocco. When I was leaving the medina (Old City) of Fes through the gate I felt overwhelmed by this great illustration of human complexity.

Standing on top of a hill you have a great overview of the entire medina. It really consists of thousands and thousands of streets, but from above you just see one massive, silent brown and green landscape.

When entering the medina you get proper feel of how big and busy this maze actually is. People are crawling through every possible opening. These openings are called streets, but actually that is not the correct expression. A more appropriate description is space between houses. From the hilltop you have no idea what is going on in this enormous network of spaces between houses.

The city itself contains complete small eco-systems between houses. Out of sight from the street level, but visible from the roof gardens of surrounding buildings is this part of town dedicated to making leather from skin. It is a specialized small city within the larger medina.

These small specialized parts are not the only hidden secrets. All houses within the medina look very dull from the outside. Almost no way to look inside from the small streets. But when entering such a riad one has to be amazed by the size of the internal gardens that make up the center of these large houses.

The Connection With Projects

For me Fes illustrates that a society is multi-layered. Depending on which scale you are looking at you see different things happening. But all levels are connected. The streets make up the city. But the development of the entire city determines where streets are created or used.

If we are studying projects, we cannot do this without looking at the individual stakeholders and team members. We cannot do this without the organization where the project is conducted. We have a tendency to look at individual elements, and we know somewhere there are some connections, but mostly we treat every scale individually.

But all things are interconnected.

Interactions Between Members And The Project

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 reach the final goal. If you take everything away, and put people in the center of what a “project” is, you will see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other, just like any other group of people would do.

Just to make things easier on our lives, we call the result of all this behavior “the project”. In this sense it is nothing more than an abstraction. If we say “the project is late”, this doesn’t mean that some creature or entity from outer space showed up later than expected; it is the result of the project people working together that wasn’t finished on the time we predicted.

In this sense the word “project” is the same as “economy”. If our economy is improving, there is not some kind of energy force that is doing better than before. The whole system of people working, people buying and people living that is better off in some way than in the past. We need this kind of abstraction, just to be able to cope with it; it is easier to talk about the economy than about 100 million individuals.

But the interesting thing is that this abstraction influences the people that make up the underlying system; if the economy is doing better, people will spend more, if a project is late, people will work harder.

Influenced By Panarchy

How to analyze today’s complexity? I found my answer in Panarchy. Its origin is in ecosystem management, where it is used for assessment on how ecosystems, social systems and economic systems are interacting.

One of the essential part of this ecological framework is the notion of three system levels that interact. Let me illustrate the ideas with an example.

For a long time, firefighters used the wrong strategy to attack forest fires. The approach taken was to extinguish the fire as soon as possible, as small as possible. If a small tree is on fire, put it out immediately. By solving the problem at the “individual tree level” you didn’t have the issue on a larger scale, “the forest level”.

After decades of using this approach, it had worked overall pretty well, however, when a fire broke out, it seemed almost unstoppable. Once the fire was active on a larger scale, forest or landscape, it went on a rampage. Before the “put out before the tree is on fire”-policy was used, smaller areas burned once in a while. The burning of the smaller forest area made the newly grown trees more fire resistant. It also created more natural open spaces; areas that have no plants or trees, so the fire hits on a barrier.

Two lessons here:

• You can view a system on different scales or levels (leave, tree, forrest, landscape / person, team, project, organization, society), and
• The different levels interact.

In terms of Panarchy, three elements are considered: the focal system (in our case “the project”), the higher scales (e.g. the company, or professional group, or society) and the lower scales (e.g. individuals or teams).

Panarchy provides us a wide angle lens to look at projects. This powerful concept lets us capture the project, the individual team members and the embedding organization in one go.

We can look at three levels at once.

Although I think this actual model can help us further, I am using it for inspiration, as I think I have a better answer to the original question I started this post with.

But the notion to look at multi levels at once that interact, is a concept I will borrow happily as it addresses my main problem with alternatives.

A second concept I’ll borrow from Panarchy, is the idea that resilience in projects are determined by the diversity of individuals: resilience is in the interactions. Formulated in the framework itself (*):

“The resilience characteristics of any focal system are in large part determined by the interactions of scales across this panarchy, from the focal system to coarser scales and from the focal system to the finer scales.”

As explained at SustainableScale:

“Diversity is believed to be a key issue in restoring resilience – both biological and social diversity are important to the extent they contribute functional redundancy (i.e. similar services can be provided by some element in the diversity). But as biological diversity is lost, or as human systems and institutions become homogeneous and rigid, then the likelihood of restoring lost resilience declines.”

In the 2008 financial crisis, what you see is that all banks were using the same kind of strategies and constructs, and they are highly connected. So when a huge disturbance hits the banking system, they infect each other by the heavy dependencies and react all the same because of identical structures, lack of diversity.

Next up: The Essence Is Context.

[*] (“Assessing and managing resilience in social-ecological systems: Volume 2 supplementary notes to the practitioners workbook”, can be freely downloaded from the Resilience Alliance – bottom of the page).

Other people who liked this article liked these too

• The Context Machine: The Essence Is Context
• Effective Communication By Thinking Alike
• What Was The First Model You Used?

The Context Machine: The Need For A Multi Layered Model

So, this picture is what I call (for want of a better term) the double value chain.

I want to change the name, as soon as I think of something better.

The idea is to show the rapid, repeatable, deterministic production of IT value (real time transactional services, compared to manufactured goods) on the vertical axis, as well as the longer, non-deterministic service lifecycle, comparable to Product Development, on the horizontal axis.

Does it succeed in this?

Notice that the service/product lifecycle does NOT start with "strategy," as I do not see strategy as a generating event. Just as often, strategy is something that you start to think of after you've been delivering something for a while. And the boundary between strategy and continuous improvement I think is thin. I propose we look at them as more similar than different...

(click to enlarge)

   

One thing I always appreciated about the value chain concept was the implicit matrixing. Notice that the major phases all have implications for each of the service layers. Ideation is great, but will you have a facility to run the service in?

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try{var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");pageTracker._trackPageview();} catch(err) {} var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));try {var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-4191072-4");pageTracker._trackPageview();} catch(err) {}