You can click here if the episode isn’t displayed below.

This recording is the final part of a session “Why Should You Care About Social Media?” at PMI Global Congress 2009 by the PMI New Media Council. Other parts of this session can be found here:

Collaboration With Skype, Vyew and Google Docs
Using Yammer For Frictionless Communication
Be Careful With Social Media: Words Of Caution

Subscribe with iTunes to "The Project Shrink" video podcast.

Personal Branding – Episode 34 Project Shrink Podcast

Below are two short video’s I recorded.

Dave Garrett About Gantthead.com – Project Management Community

Talking to Dave Garrett (CEO Gantthead.com) about the largest online IT Project Management community.

Project Management 2.0 And Wrike

Talking to Andrew Filev (CEO Wrike.com) about Project Management 2.0 and Wrike (project management software). PM 2.0 brings the concepts of Enterprise 2.0 to projects.

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Talking About Gantthead And Wrike

“I learned that you cannot jump from the PMBoK directly to topics like “mental flexibility” and “emotional intelligence”. I am sorry to tell you, but most people cannot make that jump that fast. A path to “project enlightenment” has to be defined. Conveniently, I think I have one… In Buddhism teachings are presented in Turnings of The Wheel Of Dharma. Each turn builds upon the previous one and brings the student to a higher level of consciousness.”

I have been going back and forth this year between “Second Turn: Structure For Resilience”, “Third Turn: Global Pool” and “Fourth Turn: Flexible Mind”.

While writing, talking and discussing about these levels, I have found a more effective, easier to explain version of the 4 Dharma’s. The message doesn’t change. But the emphasis and words are slightly different.

Three Spaces: Personal, Reputation And Project

Basically, I just went from 4 to 3. I currently talk about:

• Personal Space
• Reputation Space
• Project Space

The idea originates form the Social Media presentation I’ve been giving this year (see slide 24). In order to use social media skills on your project, you have to learn and master them on a personal and professional level first. The elements of Project Leadership require strong personal and interpersonal knowledge and skills:

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

Or as I conclude my presentation on Project Leadership: “Develop Project Leadership Skills To Get Your Team To Self-Organize.”

So, you work on your own stuff, you master the skills before you can help your team.

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

In the context of projects, the essence is captured in the earlier described notion of Project Leadership. For details, check out this presentation on Project Leadership.

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Mastering Three Spaces: Personal, Reputation And Project

I love to write and talk about Project Management… uhm, Leadership… or “The Thing That A Project Manager Does To Move His Project In The Proper Direction, Related To People“.

I want to share new and exciting stuff and hope it challenges your thinking, enhances your mental flexibility and provides you with useful information.

I really appreciate the audience (hi!). 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. Because I appreciate you, as my readers.

Luckily for me, the internet is a huge place, I mean, BIG! From billions of people, a handful of them (hi!) take the time to read my ideas and thoughts about “The Thing That A PM…”

I need an audience to share my thoughts. So does everyone.

But what if I tried to do my thing limited to one building with one Project Manager? The chance that this one PM likes talking about Bobsleds and Pirate Ships are zero. And even if, one person is not an audience. (yeah, yeah, I should learn humility… I know).

I either stop doing my thing. Or I look outside the building. Or I turn into myself and become weird.

If you want to nurture information leadership (calling it “thought leadership” would be too much, would it?), you have to make sure there is a big enough audience. Keeping things limited to one part of the organization might be counterproductive sometimes, just because of this reason.

What I recommend (kindly suggest) is to go through this presentation about Knowledge Management in Enterprise 2.0. It explains why knowledge sharing in most companies doesn’t work. Hint: this is the exact same argument, but better presented.

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Size Matters: Without Enough Audience, No Leaders

Churn: (verb): to stir or agitate violently, to produce, proceed with, or experience violent motion or agitation.

Fest: (noun): a gathering, event, or show having a specified focus.

Sometimes word definitions provide all that we need to label something clearly, and other times “slang” terms are all we need to understand the specific meaning. When considering all the terminology in the Project Management world, all of the phrases, colloquialisms, adjectives, and buzz words, 2 words come to mind that make me squeamish and anxious like no other: Churn-Fest.

So what is Churn-Fest exactly?

We’ve all attending meetings, been part of email exchanges, or witness a churn-fest real time on a project. You probably are participating in a churn-fest as you read this. The simple fact is when the wrong people come together unprepared, unorganized, or simply lacking the discipline to make decisions, a churn-fest can occur. These dreaded churn-fests start simply with a question, a comment, or maybe a request. Further clarity is needed, more questions are asked, more lines of communication are opened, more people chime in, so forth and so on. Soon, a simple question has exploded into a million fragmented sections and you are getting input from 20 people on topics they may not even have expertise in.

Why does a Churn-Fest occur?

These churn-fests happen when Project Managers or Project Leaders don’t help control the flow of information and work to involve the right people to aid in making the right decisions. The key factor is you need the right people present to make the right decisions. You need to present the right information at the right time to speed up the decision. You need to filter out the noise and provide clarity in what you are asking for.

People can also inherently feel they are experts in areas that they are not. Just because you work in Marketing doesn’t make you an expert in copy writing. Just because you are a Quality Assurance Analyst, this doesn’t make you an expert in developing code. Just because you can dress yourself in cool clothing, doesn’t make you an expert in design. Being self aware, and knowing your role is in a project is critical to preventing churn-fests.

Balancing creativity with churn

But what about collaboration you ask? Don’t we want an environment that breeds ideas, creativity, and participation? – Of course. But it doesn’t mean ever person on the team need to be part of every project decision. It is critical to understand team strengths and weaknesses, and as individuals be ok without adding input. Strong team members who are self aware should be comfortable adding input, or simply not saying anything at all.

A project leader has to know when churn is happening and work to prevent it from spreading like smooth butter on hot toasted bread. It’s delicate and the ability to know when a decision has veered of course requires practice. Focus on listening to the direction a conversation is going. If the conversation is circular, starting to address non-issues, spinning into other topics, or simply getting off track, jump in and bring it back on course in a constructive way. Get to the root of the question, and bring it back to the surface. Ask: Why are we here? What are the goals of this discussion? What is our purpose or objective?

So how do you prevent churn?

1. Be prepared and set a clear goal and objective. This can be defined by requirements, stories, agendas, problem statements, scope statements, etc.

2. Get the right people involved in the discussion, and kick the wrong people out. If you need a VP to weigh in, bring the VP into the discussion. If someone is there and they aren’t adding value, don’t include them in the discussion.

3. Be organized. Keep all your reference material in a shared collaborative environment for easy access. Use online tools that foster organization and collaboration.

4. Know your roles and responsibilities. Define what everyone’s primary job is on the project. Understand what their strengths and weaknesses are on the project. Be prepared for the team to adapt and change as the project goes on. Your strong silent developer may be leading the team by the end, and that is ok.

5. Foster a creative and productive problem solving environment. Make people comfortable with the idea of solution based thinking. Allow people to express their ideas in constructive ways. Differentiate between brainstorming and decision making. Always help to drive to a resolution when needed.

6. Practice solution based thinking, not problem based thinking. It’s easy to say why something won’t work, but make people say how it can work.

7. Control the spread of information. Don’t CC your message to death. Provide the information to people that need it, don’t blast the world with “noise”.

8. Don’t waste people’s time. Your job is to maximize efficiencies, remove roadblocks, help the team connect and collaborate. If people are churning they cannot execute.

9. Figure out what people need, and get them it! Whether it’s expert judgment from an organizational lead, a sign off to move forward on a project, or to get the Business off the developers’ backs, give the team what they need to be successful.

10. Talk! Yes, actually talk on the phone or face to face to prevent churning. 5 minutes of “face-time” can save you 5 days of churn.

Churn can and will happen, but if you practice these techniques you can eliminate confusion, avoid conflicts, and move your project along to success.

About the author: John P Vajda PMP, CSM: works as a Project Manager at Oracle Corporation*, and doesn’t even like butter.

Follow John on Twitter: http://twitter.com/genexerjv

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A Project Churn-Fest: when project team members spin wheels, burn time, or simply can’t make a decision

This post is an early draft of a concept I am working on. It will focus on the supply and demand of information to nodes in social networks. People have a need for information (demand), some people have a need for an audience for their information (supply). I will use the notion of leaders (supply) and followers (demand). Inherent to social networks is the fact that you have way more followers than leaders. The system maintains this balance. Problems occur when boundaries make it difficult to ensure this balance.

Image by James Cridland.

Yes, this is a simplification of reality. It’s a model. It’s not The Real World… argh … don’t get me started about The Real World.

It needs references. It needs some examples and clarification. I am working on that. But I also was kind of hoping on your feedback

20% Holds 80% Of Information

Within social networks information is not distributed equally. A few have a lot. A lot have few. I think that information follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the information is held by or accessible from 20% of the people.

When looking at the flow of information in organizations, you will find the existence of a few hubs: nodes in the network that are highly connected. In organizations not everyone has a relationship with every other employee. There are a couple of employees that know a lot of people, and most people in the organization know these few so-called “hubs”, leaders in information brokerage.

In networks you find many more followers than leaders.

In human networks you’ll find more people listening than speaking. Looking at the online world, we’ll see the 90-9-1 principle, which says that “in a community, the rule of thumb is that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and 1% create it.” Few people create, lots of people consume.

A person can be a leader and a follower at the same time, but for different topics. Leading in Project Management and following in SOA technology.

This is not some evil plot. It’s inherent to the social system.

From the information input perspective, you don’t want to be swamped in information. You limit the amount of sources. You want these few sources to be “the best”. “The best” being measured in popular demand skews the choice of information hubs towards a limited few. You want your sources easy to find, which also turns you to the more popular hubs. It’s similar to “the rich get richer”. If you are a popular hub, you become even more popular.

From the information output side you get a similar view. Leaders need demand for their information. A higher demand means larger influence, more recognition, a larger reputation. Leaders will behave to maximize the amount of followers. They need to be a very small minority.

Leaders are born with this urge. You really want to be a hub.

Within social networks there is a balance for the distribution of leaders and followers. There is an “natural amount” of hubs within a network.

Blue Ocean, Red Ocean

Once a follower has found a good source, it will remain connected as long as the need for the information exists. The relationship from follower-to-leader remains mainly stable.

What does a leader do without followers? It’s going to look for them throughout the network. Hubs move around to stay hubs.

For example, a couple of years ago a blog about Project Management was almost alone in its category. You could have quite a following with your blog. As more and more blogs come into existence about this topic, it gets harder and harder to build up your audience. Lot of leaders and not enough followers. An imbalance between supply and demand of information.

So, hubs start to move. They are leaving the red ocean, in search for a blue one. “Blue Ocean Strategy” is a business strategy book written by Kim and Mauborgne, that promotes creating new market space or “Blue Ocean” rather than competing in an existing crowded industry (Red Ocean).

In the case of Project Management blogs, you are trying to differentiate yourself. Looking for a different or more specific niche. Change the medium by adding video, audio and presentations. Looking for your fresh, blue ocean.

Next up:

What happens when boundaries prohibit movement and a leader cannot move throughout the network? What if you shrink to ocean into a pond (moving from organization to project)?

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Leaders And Followers In Social Networks

In this presentation, recorded at the PMI Global Congress in Orlando, she discusses the following topics:

• New Media Never Sleeps
• Without Business Value, New Media is Just More Noise
• Suddenly, Everyone’s an Expert
• We Hate Being Vulnerable
• Not Everyone Wants to Participate

You can click here if the episode isn’t displayed below.

This recording is part of a session “Why Should You Care About Social Media?” at PMI Global Congress 2009 by the PMI New Media Council. Other parts of this session can be found here:

Collaboration With Skype, Vyew and Google Docs
Using Yammer For Frictionless Communication

Subscribe with iTunes to "The Project Shrink" video podcast.

Be Careful With Social Media: Words Of Caution

You can click here if the episode isn’t displayed below.

This recording is part of a session “Why Should You Care About Social Media?” at PMI Global Congress 2009 by the PMI New Media Council. Other parts of this session can be found here:

Collaboration With Skype, Vyew and Google Docs

Subscribe with iTunes to "The Project Shrink" video podcast.

Using Yammer For Frictionless Communication

“I thought this was a blog about Project Management… uhm … Project Leadership?”

Thanks for bringing that up. Yes it is. In my view a project is nothing more than a bunch of people interacting together to achieve a certain goal. And it’s the role of the Project Manager to make sure the sum of the interactions fulfills the desired goal.

So, it’s about communication, and it’s your job to make sure communication is good.

If people know what you’re about, what your thing is, they know when to contact you, and when not.

You don’t contact me with questions about your critical-path. I know about it, but it’s not my thing.

By setting expectations on what you’re about, you can steer the assumptions people have about you in the right direction, with as a result improved communication.

But first, you have to know yourself what you are about.

What is your thing?

Finding out is a fabulous training for communication. You have to dig deep and find the words to express what you have found.

Sometimes people need a manifesto to explain what they are about. I love Chris Guillebeau’s Guide To World Domination and Ken Thompson’s Bioteaming Manifesto.

My manifesto can be summed up in one sentence:

“If your project sucks, you must have earned it.”

I try to explain this a little more. I still struggle finding the right words.

I started creating slidedecks for this purpose. It’s a medium that works for me.

By explaining yourself and engaging about “your thing” you practice your communication. And you learn a lot about yourself while you are at it.

Find out what you are about. It improves your communication. It improves communication with you.

If you need help with that, or want to tell what your thing is, just leave a comment.

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Why You Should Know What You’re About

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.

Yeah, yeah, this is about personal branding.

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 (ha! there are more of us!).

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.

With a gazillion PMPs and agilistas, it doesn’t make any sense to use that label as a differentiator.

You have to be in a party of one. Or two. Max.

You have to make up your own words, otherwise you end up in some kind of turf war, yapping about semantics.

And than, hope it sticks.

And that’s the great thing when people know you from your blog. You get a glimpse of what you are really about.

Do you know what you’re about? And do you know how people view you?

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The Real Project Shrink.