What does this mean for you, as a professional?

You have to work on your own stuff and you have to master skills before you can help your team.

You have to master three Spaces of the network: you, your professional network and your project.

Mastering Your Personal Space

If you are communicating clearly, without fear of expression and with respect for the conversation partner, under all circumstances, you have truly mastered you own personal space. Within your space you get to know what you are about, what your thing is and how to shift the mental models of your mind.

Mastering Your Reputation Space

The topic of this blog is running projects. The network that knows about you in this context is your Reputation Space. You can view this as your professional network, your community of practice or just your local office.

Your Reputation Space is your training ground for professional interaction. You practice communication skills, you get knowledge and provide knowledge back to your network. You use skills from your personal space to participate, and you use insights provided by the interaction to enhance your personal skills.

While doing this, you build your reputation (hence the name). This reputation becomes important as it is used in communication with people that don’t know you, or hardly. Reputation is used to “create trust”. Reputation is used to get an idea about what you are about. As creating an audience is also a form of self-actualization, there is a direct link to the Personal Space.

Mastering Your Project Space

This is the area of Project Leadership. The elements of (my version of) Project Leadership are:

• Goals and Means on individual, project and organizational level
• Alignment of goals and means on all levels by communication

Goals

A project has a goal, an objective. This is part of the larger context of the goals of the organization.

Individuals have goals, ambitions, interests. If peoples goals are met, they work happy; if not, they don’t.

Job for the Project leader is to align the goals on all levels. Keep on tweaking and adjusting. Make sure everyone understands. Make sure they are all in balance.

Means

Means are the strategies to reach the goal. This is the set of rituals, artifacts and values shared among the group, the organization and individual. The culture.

The culture can be used to create a strong group; it can be in conflict with the dominant structure.

Job for the Project leader is to align the means on all levels for maximal effectiveness. Balancing deviance with compliance. Making sure there are rules of engagement the entire team uses.

Communication

You think that if you are dropped into foreign territory like this, you would get a lot of equipment.

Sorry.

You get your Swiss Army knife: communication.

If you would like to know more, please feel free to download my ebook “Project Shrink: Linear Edition“.

They all represent metaphors that guide modern managers to implement a project office for organizational change.  You may decide to become a POO–a Project Office of One, or your organization may need a SPO–a Strategic Project Office.

Find out how these metaphors and practices can guide you as a change agent to lead the quest towards a projectized organization…or at least towards an organization more people and process friendly with regards to project based work.  A project office is an ideal mechanism to lead organizational change.

These are the topics covered in the upcoming UCSC Extension course on The Project Management Office, starting December 1, 2009 in Santa Clara, CA.

Randy Englund, Englund Project Management Consultancy, www.englundpmc.com

I love rhetoric. I enjoy Big Stories. Without Too Much Detail. As Too Much Detail ruins a Good Big Story.

Although I sometimes say things excited and full of passion (”you need to…”), it’s always an invitation to look at the information and consider it for your own use. If you like it, great! If you have no use for it, that’s cool too.

Using Big Stories Without Too Much Detail And Meaning It In An Inviting Way is a personal branding thing for me.

I didn’t plan this. It just turned out that this was one of my things. But in the Big Story version, you plan personal branding.

In reality you can plan, but a different plan will be used. As I found out.

It’s weird when people know you from your blog.

Conversations get strange. You’ve never met a person, yet you think you know them. You associate them with the agile crowd, the lean posse, the social media gurus or any other label in existence. And presto, you have a whole set of assumptions about your conversation partner.

It’s strange, but also very powerful. You can skip the obvious stuff and dive directly into some interesting topics to discuss. You connect faster.

If you are involved on the internet, you can nurture the labels put on you. At least, so we think.

Years ago when I started blogging, I decided to cover “projects and humans”. There is no way I can pronounce “The Project Sociologist” (my first option). So it became “Project Shrink“.

People remember that name. Not my real name. But they remember “Project Shrink”. Because it’s funny. It’s short. But in general, people have no real topic associated with that name other than “something with humans”.

I am not the Kanban-guy, the Scrum guru, the Monte Carlo Simulator or SharePoint-man.

That’s a Personal Branding sin. People have to know “what you’re about”.

I started out writing about “Project Management”. But under that label humans don’t play a role. (At least, that’s what I’m told.) In “general management”: yes. In “human resourcing”: yes.

So I adopted “Project Leadership”. Now that is a lovely area in which you can throw any human topic you can imagine. The drawback is, nobody really knows what it is exactly. It may be a safe label, but it’s not an effective one.

I like discussing how you can combine different project approaches effectively. Dave Prior came up with “Project Mashups”. I tried “Freestyling“. I liked “Project Management 2.0″, but that has “Project Management” in it, and, as I explained, “Project Management” doesn’t do humans. Besides, it’s been taken.

And don’t get me started about the responses you get when you use the word “Social Media”!

Currently “Project Shrink” stands for “Project Leadership/Social Media” – guy. That’s my view on the matter.

At a recent PM congress I found out that I am “the video guy”. Just because I am weird enough to walk around in a suit with a cheap flip cam.

300 thought provoking posts about projects could not do what walking around with a $100 electronic gadget established.

So, it seems: weird is good.

Or perhaps: more distinctive is good.

What I took away from this experience?

Plan the branding, but stay open, listen and adapt.

Hmmmm. Sounds familiar.

You know about globalization, you know this makes employees competing with people from all over the world. Have you considered The Other Consequence? That you have to compete with other GLOBAL companies and Project Managers to get good people to staff your projects?

If developers, testers and other talented individuals can work for any project all over the world, why should they work for you?

Let me start with the answer:

Because you have a project that is life changing, that is worth their effort. Because you provide an awesome creative and inspiring environment. You provide leadership that inspires people to rise to the occasion, to become larger than themselves. You give trust, and you can be trusted.

A year ago I called this working environment a Project Tribe:

“The central element of a tribe is the leader and the idea, the goal. You need a leader who can inspire, one that can present Big Audacious Goals that seem to rock the world. Your project needs Al Gore, your project needs goals like “Save The Planet”. That’s why people join the gang. That’s why people want to be part of it (…)

The leader will set some rules of interaction. The leader will keep efforts aligned. Within this context the teams get self-organized and the Big Hairy Audacious Goal makes sure it’s all in the right direction.”

This is a “happy view” of the world. It is optimistic. It assumes the best in people. Some people might consider it a naive picture of their “real world”. But everybody determines his or her own world view, their mental picture that determines how they view and experience things. If you assume people cannot be trusted to perform work on their own, that’s your choice. I choose to believe empowerment works.

I am convinced that if this style of management is in your brain, you have a more tolerating, productive and positive mind set, one that is based upon trust instead of fear. It is about a better human-human interaction.

Do I dare to say, a better, more ethical sustainable world?

Isn’t that worth working for?

And yes, it’s us, the Project Managers, that play an important role. If changes have to be done, you hire a Project Manager:

“People will turn to us to get thing done. We are the Getting-Things-Done-Squad! We have to drive these changes trough the swamp of corporate and global politics; we have to go full speed with zero-visibility; we have to make it all fit together in the end. There is no time for compliance-for-compliance-sake, review-upon-review, no-you-cannot-change Project Management.”

You see, you really need to be this all engaging, empowering, inspiring, purpose providing Leader (with a HUGE L). It’s the only way to get the right people. It’s the only way to contribute to society.

For those of you who want to con the system, and keep on squeezing the last drop of performance out of depressed employees… Do it once, do it twice.. and you’re out of a job. The Internet introduced deadly transparency. The flattened and connected world makes sure reputations spread faster than you can say “Yihaa”.

Who is going to work for you if you have a shady reputation?

It seems to be a dirty word among technical people: “marketing”. But it’s not about selling your soul to the devil. It’s not about tricking people into buying stuff they don’t want.

Being a (software) project manager you need to negotiate win-win conditions between the stakeholders. This not only means listening to both parties, but this also means putting certain aspects in the spot light, promote a certain point of view to close the gap between stakeholders. You are marketing point of views to enable progress in your project:

“The entire process of software projects is strongly stakeholder-driven. It’s their wishes, fears, dreams, their stakes (hence the name) that determine the course of the projects. A stakeholder can be a project team member, an employee of the user organization, or a senior manager. Virtually, it can be anyone, as long as they have something to do with the project.

The stakes are the crown jewels of the holders. They stick to them, they defend them, they are married to them. They also make up the words to formulate their expectations. The individuals will take all actions necessary to defend their stakes, or to get near the realization of them.

Stakes can be in two directions: fears or wishes. With the first there is a stake to lose, with the second there is something to gain. Either way, stakes are sacred things; anyone, including a project manager, should not try to mess with them.

Again, in order to do anything with the stakes of the holders, the project manager should be the greatest negotiator he possibly can be.”

The average tech geek can see the benefit in marketing other people’s point of views; he’s being pragmatic to get the project in gear and to get a higher acceptance rate of the end result.

But this is not going to be enough in the years to come. Project people have to kick the marketing techniques into gear: they really need to get fluent in self-promotion, personal branding, marketing yourself.

Software projects are ideal conditions for using labor from all parts of the world and using technology to let people work together. Even the main output of the endeavor (software) is digital!

If you are trying to get on board a fabulous project team, you are competing with the rest of the world. Why should the project manager pick you? Why should the organization pick you as a PM? Why should they have even heard of you?

Self promotion, Baby!

What makes you “you”? Why are you more suited for the job then the rest of the crowd?

The average person today has the attention span of a fruit fly. To promote you need to be able to distinguish yourself very fast from the crowd. People want to know quickly what you are about. Every professional has to get into the game of self-promotion or personal branding sooner or later.

Pick a niche and become an expert in it. Start with a very small niche as it is easier to become an expert in a small niche.

Getting a niche, starting your expertise is the first step. Now you have to get noticed:

“Say you are living on a small rural village in Jordan, somewhere in a dessert. You have internet access, a telephone, you speak English and have all the skills that are in high demand. You don’t know anyone outside your village. You start calling people up using the phone book and start by the letter A-Z – every week you learn one person that is connected with something you want to do.

You move to the capital, the city of Amman. You attend a small seminar and meet 100 people . All relevant people that can help you out in getting what you want. Those 100 people also know people, and because they are all in that city everyone’s networks accelerate by the growth of anyone else’s network. Being in the center of economic activity – acts like a tornado, it sucks everything to it.”

Note that this example is a metaphor. You don’t need to move physically to the city. You have to move digitally to the centers of activity. Get active on forums and blogs that are related to your niche. Answer questions and contribute. Put yourself into the spotlights, gently but actively.

Sounds like a lot of work? It is. It also sounds like a lot of fun. Which it is.

Of course you have no time for this. But skip television in the evening. Spent 30 minutes every day on this.

In a couple of years you own your niche. In a couple of years businesses from around the world will find you.

With an increase in geographical and cultural distance the aspect of “trust” becomes all important. When people have never met, there are two mechanism we can fall back on:

• reputation: what others are saying about the other person, and
• trying to read “telltale signs“, look for behavior or other marks that they identify with trustworthiness.

This second mechanism might be as simple as being friendly and saying “hello” every time you see someone down the hall. People attempt to detect the tell-tale signs of trustworthiness not only based upon behavioral markers that society associates with it; it has also to do with the similarity of the other with you. Persons that are more viewed as being equal or “the same” are more likely to be considered honest and sincere towards you.

Back to “reputation”.

Technology has brought us the challenge of working with people we really, really, really don’t know, but it has also provided us luckily with a reputation mechanism by transparency. The question we all ponder: does this help? Is the transparency and the resulting reputation reliable? And does transparency lead to more ethical behavior?

As for the first part, that one is easy: every system can be manipulated. Especially on the web. Entire PR companies are in existence simply to provide “a good vibe” about a person or company on the web. All the “experts” are recommending each other. The eBay seller reputation system has been mislead before by people selling stuff for a penny just to get the needed recommendations. The system is just as reliable as the people using it.

But even when the system is working properly, even when transparency makes sure people’s behavior will be noted around the globe, this doesn’t mean you can take the benefits from it in your project or business. Although with a good reputation a lot is to gain, having a bad rep puts a lot at stake. So people will play things save. They will create low-risk behavior, resulting in the end into mediocrity..

A good example of this is illustrated by the following:

“While the typical CEO is only too happy to pocket the lucrative financial rewards that come with the mantle of leadership, some seem reluctant to accept this degree of accountability – especially if it means personally taking the rap for non-compliance with the law. I guess not many corporate heads are convinced that a minimum-security sabbatical in an orange jumpsuit will be as good for their careers as it seems to have been for Martha Stewart’s.”

Humans have a preference to fail conservatively. For me personally this is a surprising one. However, I do recognize it. The idea behind this is that people would rather choose an option that they know, that they have done in the past, EVEN if the outcome is likely to be unsuccessful, than try something new, where the outcome may be positive, but unsure. If they fail, they can also hide behind the notion that they did everything everybody else is also doing.

Let’s hope that the future doesn’t only contains of people conning the reputation systems by “influencing” information that tries to pose as “transparent”, and people that fear the system and stick to mediocre accomplishments.

I’ve been giving a lot of speeches and workshops lately on “Doing More with Less” because of this damn never ending recession we are in.  (Did you know that unemployment is really about 22%, not the 8% they are saying?)  In any event, people go to networking meetings and meet others networking – but never anyone who might potentially be hiring them.

How many actual tasks do you do at home or at work “just because?”  How many things do you do for your boss, your client, or your spouse, that they could care less about?

I hired a consultant who spent so much time giving me stuff I didn’t want on my computer like a password I didn’t need, an alternate to Outlook I didn’t want, and some security on top of the security I already have, that he charged me a fortune, but never got around to doing the things I’d hired him to do.  Oh yes, he charged to undue all the stuff he put on the computer as well.

My clients often complain about IT people who add bells and whistles that are not only not necessary, but cause more work.  CEOs often marvel at the waste of reports that middle level managers generate for each other to keep each other busy.  I was once on a Commission until I realized the only reason for its existence was to give staff a purpose to get a paycheck.

In this time of tightening your belt, of doing more with less, I urge you to really look at the places you go and the tasks you do and see if they really are helping you achieve your goals.   Good Night.  ArLyne

Aren’t I wonderful, I can do several things at once.  What’s that you say, none of my deliverables are complete?

Well, I didn’t mean to throw that away and now they’ve picked up the trash and I have to go out to the dumpster.

How many of these fit situations you’ve been in, or know of?  I bet a lot of them do.  These are all from stories told to me by clients and/or friends.  People who pride themselves on multi-tasking….. By that I mean being out of focus because they are trying to do more than one thing at a time.

Slow down, you’ll get done faster is the advice I gave many.  Slow down, pay attention to what you are doing – or in the jargon of psychology “Be in the here and now.”

Furthermore, by focusing, rather than merely going through the motions, you can quite often find an easier and faster way to do what you were trying to do – a more elegant, simple, parsimonious solution – which, of course, allows you to do more with less.

All too often I see workers doing one thing, thinking another, and looking a third place.  We live in an era of constant external stimulation and a demand for multi-tasking at all times.  I’ve watched my computer guy (who charges for his time) work on the problem I present to him, while at the same time surfing the internet and talking to other clients on the phone.  My cleaning lady is on the phone all the time and thus misses things, and even occasionally breaks things.

Multi-tasking also has us rushing about, forcing six extra errands on the way to a meeting, only to have to speed to avoid being horribly late.  Not only does this preclude Poka Yoke, but it also creates much unnecessary stress.  Stress makes us perform worse than when we are stress free.  So – slow down – do it right the first time.

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