Tagged Posts: Project_Management
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2008-03-06:
Technorati Tags , BBC, Collaboration, googlemaps, London, mashup, Mashups, opml, Project_Management, social+software, socialmedia, via:beatnic, web_2.0, XML
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2006-10-02
Technorati Tags Project_Management, Scrum
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2006-09-22
Technorati Tags Agile, Project_Management, Scrum
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2006-03-29
Technorati Tags Innovation, Productivity, Project_Management
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2006-02-06
Technorati Tags Agile, Databases, Emotional-Intelligence, Enterprise-IT, IPR, Knowledge_Management, OpenOffice, presentations, Productivity, Project_Management, Scrum, Syndication-Formats, Training, wiki
New on the bookshelf…
Proactive Risk Management, Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development
by Preston G. Smith and Guy M. Merritt
Technorati Tags Books, Project_Management
OpenOffice are starting on a “project management tool”:http://oopm.openoffice.org/ [via "Clarke Ching":http://www.clarkeching.com/2004/06/new_openoffice_.html]
Technorati Tags Project_Management
Over at Reforming Project Management Hal Macomber is seeking to transfer the learning from Lean Production into the project management world.
In Lean Production there exists the concept of the “visual workplace”, commonly expressed through the 5S model. Hal points out that projects may not always involve material products and resources but always involve people and conversations; it therefore makes sense to translate the 5S model into what he calls the 5R Protocol for a Listening Workplace:
- Roles
- Rules
- Reflection
- Relationships
- Routines
What’s interesting is the way his own thinking is developing as he reflects on this model and the conditions that need to be in place for real changes to happen - critically the need for having the right mental distinctions to notice what is really important and then taking action based on those distinctions:
What we notice has to do with the distinctions we can make and the routines that we follow. Both our noticing and effectiveness in action increase as we take action. If we want to work in a lean way we need the distinctions of lean and we need to take action. [...] Learning to operate in a lean way happens by doing projects in a lean way.
For me this sits well with the model of cognition used by NLP:
Our habitual perceptual filters control what we actually notice in our surroundings - an engineer will notice different things from an HR expert. The mental programs we use (or habitual ways of thinking) will then influence what meaning we ascribe to those things and therefore influence our conscious intent about what to do. Those same mental programs will distort our conscious intent into our everyday strategies, which in turn result in actions and words that fit with our perceptual filters. The whole system is both recursive and self-reinforcing - the success of actions we take in the world tends to strengthen the perceptual filters and mental programs that led to us choosing those actions.
In such a model changing behaviour often needs the conscious adoption of new filters and disctinctions re-inforced by action until new unconscious mental programs take hold. This is where coaching is especially useful to remind the person who is changing what they should be paying attention to.
What Hal is doing with his 5R model is start to express the things that make a difference in order to get “Lean Projects” right - it will be interesting to see how he develops this into practical tools that can not only be applied but through their application embed new ways of thinking.
Technorati Tags Coaching, NLP, Project_Management, Psychology
I’ve been spending time re-familiarising myself with the nuances of this tool. I’ve been using it for about six months, and now use it for planning meetings and pretty much any major document. I’m about to start a project that will also benefit from its ability to link with MS Project and Powerpoint, so I’ve been digging into that part of the functionality.
What I love about the project management link is the way the functionality of this tool complements the total left-brain-ness of standard project management tools. The most important part of any project is the first meeting where the people involved get engaged with breaking the scope down into manageable chunks - to be able to do that with a mindmapping tool and then export a first-cut WBS or PBS is just…cool…
I’ve played around a bit with mind-mapping for a number of years and although you can’t beat the flexibility of pen and paper for personal notes, for collaborative work some kind of electronic tool seems essential. (apart from anything else, I lose paper!)
Links to old broken wiki removed
The other idea that’s nagging me tonight is a need for a MMToWiki tool. I’ve slowly started putting some NLP Wiki pages together but I’m finding the flat-file format of a Wiki rather frustrating when writing a set of interlinked documents. I’d love to be able to outline and write the first major tranche of those pages in MindManager, then export to a set of Wiki-formatted text files.
Hmmm… and when, I wonder, is tool-building a displacement activity from the writing? 
[update 2003-02-13] Have found Mind2XML an add-in for MindManager that does “exactly what it says on the tin”. So now the gap in my knowledge that comes into focus is how little I know about XSL
[update 2007--4-11] And almost exactly 4 years after I wrote this post, a very similar idea about the combined use of wiki and mindmaps emerges over at Activityowner.Com - with the big difference that he has actually produced a first draft of a conversion tool…
Technorati Tags Creativity_Tools, MindManager, mindmapping, Project_Management, Technology
Just found Hal Macomber’s excellent Reforming Project Management blog. Some recent entries: Story-telling Reforms the Project, and several entries 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 about Koskela’s and Howellls paper The Underlying Theory of Project Management is Obsolete
[via GeoDog ]
Technorati Tags Project_Management
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