I was interviewed by Bas de Bar recently. Bas has a great blog called Project Shrink. It is a valuable source of tips, ideas and other important information for project managers. Bas is also the author of "Surprise! Now You're a Software Project Manager." Those of you who are in software development might want to have a look at it. We had a conversation about the nature of Project Management 2.0, emergent structures, collective intelligence, project management software and my work on Wrike. It was a pretty long dialog, so Bas decided to publish it in parts. I will be glad to get your feedback on what I said there.
As we all know, the project manager in organizations traditionally has the burden of compiling plans and information for the team’s work. The information is then kept in disconnected files, no matter if it is a Microsoft Word file or a Microsoft Project file. The manager is struggling to bring the project plan to life as all the information on the project is concentrated only around a single person - himself. He first has to pull facts out of employees by meetings and e-mails, then put them into a file, then update the information, then communicate it to upper management and clients. The usual means of getting information from your employees turns out to be time-consuming and effortful. This “bottle-neck” effect creates additional, but unnecessary, duties for project managers. The new generation of Web-based tools unleashes the power of collective intelligence and changes the pattern of project management. It allows associates to collaborate on project plans.The working process is coordinated not by a single manager, but by other employees, as well. Thus, collective intelligence can influence not only managing projects, but the whole organization. Enterprises are now interested in using collective intelligence in two directions: inside the organization to improve productivity of project work and outside the organization – that is from organization to its customers. An example of the inside influence of collective intelligence would be an organization with lots of projects developed simultaneously. Some people are involved into different projects at the same time. The new-generation software gives associates an opportunity to create a more efficient working environment. This environment is flexible, easily customized and perceived intuitively by team members. The software enables project participants to contribute to collective work and has details of all the project processes in the company. At the same time, it allows coordination by the manager, who can follow all the processes easily. The result is boost of productivity by transferring some of project manager’s burden onto the software. Project management 2.0 tools are able to make the communication between co-workers easier and faster, which again means more effectiveness and less bureaucracy for the company. The outside effect is that companies gain more advantage from their communication with clients. The operations become more transparent to the customers; they can easily follow the progress of a project and send their feedback. Project management 2.0 is building new customer interactions and thus improving customer satisfaction. There are many more directions in which collective intelligence brought by project management software can influence business processes. Later I will continue to speculate on what the opportunities and challenges of project management 2.0 are and will give you my ideas about how we can benefit from them. If you want to be interviewed for this blog, let me know how you unleashed collective intelligence in your company and what your gains were. There are several tools on the market that support collective intelligence in the project management sphere. I work for Wrike, online project management software provider, which leads the area.
This year's Office 2.0 Conference is coming soon. I'll be part of a Project Management 2.0 panel, so if you want to ask questions in real time, you are very welcome to join the conference. Other panels and sessions also promise to be interesting. If you have some stories to share for the panel, leave a comment here with your contact information. I may get some discounted tickets from organizers for visitors who can bring the value to the panel.
Recently, I came across an interesting study by a well-known German university. It revealed that about 80% of successful ideas created in teams were born from informal conversations, both in co-located and virtual teams. It also stated that in R&D teams, almost 90% of conversations could be described as informal. So, informal communication doesn’t only have psychological value, but is an essential component of innovation. According to my own experience, conversations on informal topics are key for getting your team connected. Distributed teams don’t have the opportunity for casual watercooler talks, so they might have a deficit of this important component. If people work together on a regular basis, even if they are not located in the same office, they eventually get to know each other better. But the bigger the team is, the lower the natural tendency for bonding. One of the things we do at Wrike (where our distributed team counts for over 60 people today, and is growing) is that at our regular company meeting, apart from talking about plans and achievements, we also weave in some personal info into the mix. For example, some people may share photos from recent vacations, we introduce newcomers with some information about their hobbies and interests, etc. The team likes it, and it definitely gives additional topics for internal discussions. Also, we try to meet in person as frequently as possible. I’ve noticed that every face-to-face meeting improves collaboration, because team members get more open to communication and feel more comfortable when they need to put their minds together at work. These remote employee engagement activities contribute to forming a friendly and productive environment where people don’t just work, but enjoy to work. And it is no surprise that this, consequentially, makes a positive impact on employee retention. How important do you think informal communication is for work performance? Wrike's flexible work management platform empowers remote teams to do their best work, from anywhere. Find out more here.
The social network phenomenon has already transformed the consumer Web into so-called “Web 2.0.” Major Web players such as eBay, Yahoo, MySpace, and Amazon have opened their portals to communities, adding social elements that caused great interest and demand. Now organizations that aren’t Web-based imply similar technologies in their working processes. Web 2.0 is affecting business processes by offering incredible communication opportunities for organizations known as “Enterprise 2.0.” So now we are witnessing replacement of traditional corporate applications by these newly developed ones.Enterprise 2.0 technologies rely on collective intelligence. Advantages are incontestable. These technologies are people-oriented: they develop interpersonal relationships and build long-term social networks. In fact, they are apt to change corporate cultures. Enterprise 2.0 introduces simple, flexible and user-friendly ways to support processes inside and outside of a company. The technologies are believed to result in a rapid development of organizations and improvement of the working environment. “Giving employees the tools to create and continuously tweak automated business processes themselves has enormous potential because of what it enables: the emergent reduction of routine, low-value transactional work and an increase in tacit interactions” Dion Hinchcliffe, a veteran of software development and president of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 consultancy Hinchcliffe and Company, pointed out in his blog. This Enterprise 2.0 movement naturally affected and later captivated project management in organizations. I call this new trend project management 2.0, similar to the “Enterprise 2.0? term. The problem of innovating project management has become one of the major concerns for management as a whole. Analysts argue whether one has to be talented to be a project manager or whether he just needs to have profound experience and skills. Companies spend great sums on special training for their employees. CEOs complain that certified project managers are extremely expensive. This causes discussions on the question of whether a project is doomed to failure without a project manager or not. Now new processes brought by project management 2.0 make the topic even hotter. The new technologies modify project management. The transformation takes place not only in instruments that project managers apply. The whole conception of project management is changing with the introduction of collective intelligence into the process. The projects tend to be managed by a group, members of which collaborate and get things done without strong top-down administration. The role of the project manager is changing. My goal in this blog is to analyze the existing changes and speculate on the influence of project management software on enterprises. Your feedback is very welcome. Leave your comments below, please. This post is just a start of an ongoing conversation.
I have already mentioned that many-to-many structures employed in project management 2.0 software offer a better way to organize your projects. Here is an interesting angle on the same topic. Have you ever thought about how our mind organizes ideas? We do not organize all the information we know in one strict hierarchical tree, life is too diverse for that. Associations radiating out (or in) from many different connection points help our brain to navigate through a vast information pool and quickly make decisions. Many connections in many different directions connect items together. We could say that the structure in our mind is a network of connections or a many-to many structure. Many-to-Many Mind Map This phenomenon of mind functionality inspired a psychologist, Tony Buzan, to invent the Mind Mapping process. In his popular title called "The Mind Map Book," Buzan calls this phenomenon “Radiant Thinking.” “Most people are trained to think in a linear way, thinking of one thing, then the next thing, and then the next, in a series of singular associations in one direction,” notes Buzan in one of his interviews. “The way our minds really work is in multiple thoughts and multiple directions at the same time. The way the brain fundamentally thinks is radiant, meaning that it thinks primarily from image centers and then radiates out.” Buzan used this capability of the human mind to introduce a technique of arranging words, ideas, tasks, or other items connected to a central key word or idea. Presenting these connections in a radial, non-linear graphical manner, the method encourages a brainstorming approach to any given organizational task, eliminating the hurdle of initially establishing an appropriate or relevant conceptual framework to work within. Once you augment a radiant Mind Map structure with associations between different nodes, it becomes a many-to-many structure that resembles the way your brain works. You can build a structure that perfectly reflects the way you think. If you use adequate project management software to record this structure, you can then apply it to manage your business and personal activities. Project management 2.0 brings collective intelligence into this, so your team can share this structure and work on it together. You can share your tasks with people from another department, or from French or Japanese office of your company or with your clients. The best part is that you can combine your structure with other person's structure without breaking the connections that are important for you. Associative connections between different people’s hierarchies now play the role of "weak ties", linking people from different departments, offices and even companies. Weak Ties Leverage Weak ties are recognized by sociologists as the best bridges between people to spread new ideas and innovation. Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist and the author of the one of the most influential sociology papers, “The Strength of the Weak Ties”, states that “weak ties bridge social distance.” He also notes that “weak ties provide people with access to information and resources beyond those available in their own social circle”. Granovetter’ ideas are summarized by Harvard Business School associate professor Andrew McAffee, who points out that weak ties help solve problems, gather information, and import unfamiliar ideas. They help get work done quicker and better. This is what makes these ties so powerful. When speaking about weak ties, Andrew McAffee says, "My former HBS colleague Morton Hansen, for example, found that weak ties helped product development groups accomplish projects faster. Hansen, Marie Louise Mors and Bjorn Lovas further showed that weak ties helped by reducing information search costs." So a structure that has a lot of weak ties turns out to be more beneficial for a project. To find out the principal advantages of this structure it will be useful to compare it with one-to-one and one-to-many structures. The limitations of one-to-one (linear) and one-to-many (strict hierarchical) approaches can easily be extended into the project management space. Traditional project management software like Microsoft Project enforces a strict hierarchy that requires a manager to select only one way to organize information. In this case project managers have to sacrifice all weak ties and even some of the strong ties in favor of one hierarchy. This makes plans harder to navigate when your perspective of the project differs from the selected hierarchy. Let's take a look at a typical example. An engineering manager builds a product development plan around a structure that he considers as best one to organize information. Then a marketing managers needs to augment this plan with marketing activities. If the tools that these managers use support only a one-to-many hierarchy, there is a great chance that the managers will end up with two separate plans, so all of the connections between these related projects will stay in the managers' heads. Some of them will be forgotten, and others will have to be managed manually. We don't even need to walk to the marketing department to understand the importance of weak connections. There are different roles in the engineering team. The importance of particular associations between tasks differs from one role to another. The "one-association-fits-all" approach makes plans hardly usable by some of the team members. This burden can easily be avoided with the right tools. The Power of Collective Brain Project management 2.0 software supports many-to-many structures, connecting different team members’ views on the project. It gives a bigger and more comprehensive project scope. It enables project managers to view one project from different angles and helps them find better solutions, which would not otherwise come to the manager’s mind. As more people can get different views on the project and can build more associations, their collaboration becomes more affective. The project team works like a huge collective brain. Many-to-many structures allow all of the team members to contribute to the plan productively. This enables collective intelligence and leads to collaborative planning. In turn, collaborative planning makes organizations more agile, productive and transparent. Your comments on the post are welcome, as always.
Before, but recently, I came across some very interesting research data, so I decided to give this topic a different angle, taking the present economic conditions into consideration. The ups and downs of our economy are enough to make any executive dizzy. Just look at U.S. Steel (X). In the second quarter of 2008, the company achieved record profits, yet in November, executives laid off 675 workers and postponed the construction of a new $450 million plant. When the economy weakens, leaders are forced to link expenses to revenues. To accomplish this, they instinctively impose top-down, across-the-board solutions. Unfortunately, the latest research shows that this common strategy results in a 50-50 chance of damaging the company's long-term ability to thrive. Nevertheless, there are organizations that shine in changing financial conditions. The most agile companies that are able to quickly shift resources and employees to meet changing demands find millions of dollars in savings and often emerge stronger. The meaning of “agility” First of all, what does it mean to be “agile”? Enterprise agility (business agility) is a company's ability to rapidly and cost-efficiently recognize changes and adapt to them. In short, to be “agile” means to be able to make the right decisions and implement them fast. Making the right decisions is impossible without having real-time visibility into your company and the complete picture of your projects. Without this visibility, it would be like driving in the fog. You’re not sure what’s ahead of you, but you have to keep driving. That’s why you need the information that is in the minds of the employees dispersed across the organization. You need the knowledge coming from bottom-up. A constant dialogue between leaders, team members, stakeholders and clients is crucial. This fact is proven by the research conducted by Joseph Grenny, the co-author of three immediate New York Times bestsellers: “Influencer,” “Crucial Conversations,” and “Crucial Confrontations.” During the last quarter of 2008, in the thick of the financial downturn, Grenny and his colleagues studied more than 2,000 managers and executives from more than 400 different companies. The results were remarkable. The researchers found that teams that foster focused, unified dialogue are 250% more likely to survive. Less agile teams are 360% more likely to miss millions of dollars in lost opportunities. Is bottom-up the right solution? So if an enterprise wants to adopt the Agile project management lifecycle, should it use bottom-up management? Indeed, besides being a great way to get knowledge from the experts at the team level, the bottom-up approach to management on the whole, and to project management in particular, has a number of advantages. One of them is that it empowers team members to think more creatively. They feel involved into the project development and know that their initiatives are appreciated. The team members’ motivation to work and make the project a success is doubled. Yet, we all know that the bottom-up approach is often criticized for a lack of clarity and control. To be able to execute your decisions fast, you need to keep a tight, top-down control on operations. Otherwise, you may miss an important opportunity. What’s the right solution then? The best way is to find a balance between the two and take the best practices from both of them. I once wrote a post about taking the best from the two approaches (bottom-up and top-down) to project management. So to be agile, you need to be able to blend top-down control with bottom-up agility in a "Ying and Yang" style. Later in this blog, I’ll continue to develop my ideas on how this can be done by upgrading your project management practices to “Project Management version 2.0.” Now, I’d love to hear your thoughts and answers to the following questions: • Is agility important? • How can we make a company more agile? • Do project management practices influence the overall enterprise agility? • Have you tried blending top-down and bottom-up in project management? Jump into the comments section and share your vision.
Dave Prior and Bob Tarne have recently blogged about the so-called post-modern project management with a reference to Dr. Davidson Frame. Their idea is that there are lots of methodologies available, and that in real life, there can’t be just “one true way” for managing a project. Each project is unique, and each time we need to find a new way of managing and completing it, very often mixing several methods and techniques. This is the creative part of the project manager’s job. The project manager needs to be flexible and try to view his or her project from different angles to understand which methodology he or she should apply and how to use different methods together harmoniously. Here, the right tools will be a great help. Project management software should support a manager’s flexibility, giving him or her options to look at the same project from different perspectives. It’s hardly possible to have different project perspectives with traditional project management software. The reason is that this software utilizes rigid, one-to-many hierarchies of tasks that are usually designed by project managers at the very beginning of a project. Unlike traditional software, project management 2.0 tools employ many-to-many hierarchies. These tools let a project plan emerge from pieces, effectively enabling collaborative planning. They allow you to utilize a decentralized, pull-based model in planning. Many-to-many hierarchies in project management 2.0 tools also allow project managers to pick any reasonable sub-set of tasks, create a view with these tasks and share the view with someone who needs it. It is not like the all-or-nothing sharing of a file. At the end of the day, more people can collaborate and contribute to the project work. As the new tools allow team members to make changes to the initial structure simultaneously, more people can organize and reorganize their views, and more structures emerge. With project management 2.0 tools, you can start with one task, add fifteen more, organize them, add more tasks, reorganize them and repeat the process on a daily basis. When all team members walk through this process, you start to bring the power of many to work in your planning process. Many-to-many structures emerge with the help of team members’ collaboration. When seven employees share their daily to-do lists with a team leader, the team leader gets a bigger picture. When five team leaders share their teams' plans with a project manager, the picture gets even bigger. When it goes through directors and vice presidents to the CEO, the whole structure evolves from what was one task into a big ecosystem that perfectly suits the organization. This agility helps to bring iterative and incremental improvements into the project plan without giving away the control. Project managers get an opportunity to find the best way to organize their teams’ work. The project manager’s job becomes more about coordination, guidance and leadership than routine manual updates. Project management 2.0 tools with many-to-many hierarchies help to truly unleash collective intelligence in the project planning. The team (and then the whole company) becomes highly responsive to dynamic external environments. As productivity increases and red-tape drops, employees become more motivated. These positive effects come from the synergy effect of two phenomena -- emergence and collective intelligence, empowered by the project management 2.0 software and practices. In my next post, I plan to speculate about the way human brain organizes information and how this is connected with many-to-many hierarchies. This will give another angle on the subject. Until next time.
People often ask me to advise them on the best resources that will help them deepen their project management knowledge or start their own project management journey. One of Wrike’s clients recently asked me: “I’ve been given the green light to seek out any useful resources in the field of Project Management to further my professional development. I’ve Googled a few things, but can’t really decipher what would be beneficial vs. a waste. I was wondering if you might be able to point me in the right direction and recommend particular books or seminars that I could look into?” I thought that it would be better to post my reply here, so that more people could take advantage of the advice. When you look for information on project management, the first thing you’ll find will be resources affiliated with the Project Management Institute (PMI). PMI is a very influential organization in the project management world and offers a lot of materials and training. It can give you a good overview of the fundamentals (“old school”). So PMI courses might be your first choice when you start educating yourself in project management. As for me, I am familiar with Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK) and walked through that river, but at the end of the day, my project management philosophy was much more influenced by the following themes: • Jim Collins’ works on leadership. I recently posted my ideas on how his Level 5 leadership concept is aligned with Project Management 2.0; • Agile project management methods: they are close to Lean practices. Besides, there’s a SCRUM methodology, which I posted on in my blog; • Enterprise 2.0 principles (one of the best readings here is Wikinomics). It’s interesting that all of the three above mentioned points come from different backgrounds, yet they have lots of commonalities. Also, I recommend you take a look at works by David Allen and Stephen Covey. They are not related to project management in general, but they might help you improve your personal and team productivity. What do you read to improve your project management skills? What did you like and recommend to others? Do you know courses in your area that you could recommend? Leave a comment below and share your wisdom with other readers.
Do you think innovation and revolution are synonymous in software? If so, don't be so fast. As the Chinese proverb says, even the longest journey starts with the first step. This week, I've shared some musings on this topic with the readers of VentureBeat, a popular blog that focuses on "defining innovation for forward-thinking executives." The post discusses the "do's" and "don'ts" of business software and looks at the balance between an app's innovative functionality and ease of use. Read the article to discover the full story. You're welcome to join the discussion on VentureBeat. Or, as usual, add a comment to this post. I'll be glad to know what you think.
