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gantthead blogs
by - Bas de Baar
Bas de Baar is a Project Shrink. Well actually, he's the Project Shrink. Projects are about people, and he helps you deal with that. What is your relationship with your mother like? And what kind of PM tree would you be?
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Naming Months So Time Doesn't Fly.
Time flies. I mean really.
It's now February. And all the stuff you thought you postponed until later ("Ah well. Will do that in February.") is filling your daily todo list.
Knock knock. Who's There? This is February, stupid!
Fourteen years ago I stopped wearing a watch. One day I noticed that from the moment I got up to the moment I went to sleep, I was looking at my watch to see what the time was. And armed with that knowledge, I thought about how little time I had left before my next meeting. The watch stressed me out.
I threw the watch away. I felt much better. Being unaware of time helped.
The first day of a month is something mythical within organizations. Stuff is due. Stuff will start. Entire companies have reporting cycles that take the resemblance of a monthly birth. At the end of each month something has to be pushed out.
The organizational rhythm is directly linked to the calendar.
You're sitting in a bi-weekly meeting, thinking: "Really? Has it been two weeks already?"
Time flies especially when the rhythm takes over. Unconsciously.
If you get up the same time every day. Take the same train. Have every week on the same day the same meeting. Time will fly. Being unaware of time will make it go fast and unnoticed. We might not sense that things have changed. That, yes, everything appears the same, but some important things have changed. You only missed them.
As projects are about time and rhythms, it makes sense to me to be more conscious about our relationships with them. Conscious about entry and exit. Conscious about moving from one thing to another. Conscious about transitions.
I am trying to become more aware of the natural rhythms and transitions that occur in group life.
Havi Brooks has a nice exercise to enhance your awareness about markers in time. Providing them names. The idea is that you use moons (full moons or new moons) as markers of natural time. To become aware of our more natural rhythms instead of artificial time.
But, as hamsters in our treadmills running from one reporting period to another, we might start out with calendar months.
For me January consisted of Courtship and Embarking The Beagle.
February will be: Getting To Second Base and Changing Vessel.
Of course, to you this doesn't make any sense. It has no intention to make any. To me it does. And that is the whole point. I had to think about what I want the next month to be, or what I expect it to be, and make up a name for it.
The only thing left is to put a notice on your calendar at the end of the month to review what this month has given to you. Let's see if this helps.
Terrific. Another reporting cycle.
Bas de Baar is making complex people stuff less complex. Yes. A Project Shrink. You can find him on Facebook. |
Old Nox And Dear Isl. Lessons About Change Procedures.
There was a loud, obnoxious man screaming at the gates of Shrinkonia. He demanded something. And now!
He stood there every day. Demanding. Yelling. Every day with a Wish dressed up as a Demand. Old Nox, short for "obnoxious" of course, was well known throughout the tiny mobile state of Shrinkonia. Nobody liked him. It was his town of voice. It was his attitude. But most of all, it was the fact the he appeared Every-Single-Day with something.
The louder Old Nox screamed, the higher the walls around Shrinkonia became. The more he demanded, the less the inhabitants did.
It was actually because of Old Nox that it was so hard to enter Shrinkonia. Not because people were scared. But just because Old Nox demanded something every single day.
Of course, this made Old Nox angry. The less his demands were met, the more demands he made. Ignoring the man, only made his voice louder. And this led to higher walls.
In the end, nobody in the entire empire knew what he actually was demanding. Nobody had bothered to listen to Old Nox. They were all to busy ignoring him, complaining about him and of course inventing immigration procedures to make it impossible for him to get through the gates.
There was the soft spoken woman that always smiled to the people of Shrinkonia.
She waved gently and offered them refreshments when they worked up a sweat in their cubicles. She made a nice casual chat once a week and was interested in what they were doing.
People were looking forward to seeing Dear Isl, as in Incredibly-Sweet-Lady, every week. She passed no judgements. She provided energy. And she could walk in and out Shrinkonia every time she wanted to.
Dear Isl was clearly the opposite of Old Nox.
Less noise from outside the walls made the walls lower and thinner. The appearance of stress from the outside, increased the walls around the empire.
It's a folk tale, so it's metaphorical, right?
Anyway.
One day, Dear Isl heard the Shrinkonians complaining, again, about Old Nox. And she said:
"You should take action, if it bothers you. If high walls don't help, why don't you silence him forever?"
Everybody liked Dear Isl, that's why they called her "dear" Isl, instead of just Isl. So, that seemed like a reasonable suggestion.
So they killed Old Nox.
His last words were: "But I just wanted to borrow some sugar."
At the reading of his will, it turned out that Old Nox didn't have any money left to buy even sugar for his coffee. All his money went to his ex-wife. All he had left was his house. His ex-wife had tried to get her evil hands on his house. But she hadn't succeed.
Until now.
Old Nox had forgotten to change his will. So Dear Isl, got his house.
There is a lesson somewhere about change procedures. And boundaries around projects.
Somewhere.
Bas de Baar is making complex people stuff less complex. Yes. A Project Shrink. You can find him on Facebook. |
Together With Britney And Hogarth On The Road To Abilene.
Life has very cool moments.
When you are presenting at a seminar you might wear a head set. You know, a microphone strapped to your head. And of course, at such moments, you feel like Britney. As in "Spears". Wearing a headset entitles you to do a Britney. Finger in one ear, sing loud and out of key, having all the right moves. Sliiiiiiiiide to the left. Sliiiiiiide to the right.
If you don't feel like Britney, you're not allowed to wear the headset. If you don't feel like a princess, you can't have the pink tiara.
So. I am watching a presentation by some guy about some boring topic. He enters the stage and he's wearing a headset. I am waiting for the finger in his ear. Nope. Song? Nada. Slide? No way.
No Britney.
In my mind there is actually forming this sentence. Seriously. I hear myself saying to my other imaginary self…
"No Britney. What a loser."
Since last year I have a new inhabitant of my brain. Hogarth.
An 800-pound gorilla that I see sitting around offices. I have to thank Joel Bancrof-Conners for that.
"“Oh, right! Meet Hogarth. He’s sitting down the table, wedged between the QA director and the product manager, quietly reading his newspaper and ignoring everyone else. It’s a bit of tight fit, but what do you expect from an 800 pound gorilla?”
Joel took a gorilla instead of the elephant that is normally used in the phrase “the elephant in the room”. It represents the topics every body knows are there, but aren't talked about.
"Hey, Hogarth. Wasn't expecting to see you here!"
Seriously. You'll start to see Hogarth drinking coffee. It's ridiculous.
Ever been to Abilene?
I see big signs with "Abilene 100 miles" on them.
Sometimes a member of a group ends up doing something that he doesn't want to be doing, but does it anyway to please the others in the group. When all members in a group do this, when all members do something that they think will please the others, but in reality nobody wants to, they are on the road to Abilene.
This is named after an anecdote management expert Jerry Harvey uses, to illustrate this phenomenon, which he called The Abilene Paradox. The story is about a family that ends up driving on a hot day to Abilene. Nobody wanted to go there. But they all thought they would do the others a favor.
Sometimes, seeing teams operate, my internal dialog goes …
"Yep. That truck is going to Abilene."
And don't get me started on Shrinkonia!
Unlike Abilene, you really want to go there.
I did even become Emperor of Shrinkonia.
I realized I needed a different language for writing about projects. I realized I needed embarrassing drawings to express my thoughts on projects. I know projects are about humans. But how can I talk about people stuff when the tools I have to communicate with are technocratic, cold and impersonal?
That's how my mind invented Shrinkonia.
I turned 40, started drawing and became emperor of my own imaginary state. Go figure.
Shrinkonia: a place where project teams find connection and flow, so they can create amazing things together. It’s located all over the world. And mobile. So it moves around. And people come and go. They move to Shrinkonia fluently and leave as they have done their thing. Also home of The Project Shrink. And MacGuyver. Although. They do not really live together.
Life truly has cool moments.
Bas de Baar is making complex people stuff less complex. Yes. A Project Shrink. You can find him on Facebook. |
The Mann Gulch Incident: The Importance Of A Role System In New Teams.
In 1949 thirteen firefighters died at the Helena National Forest, Montana. A forrest fire got completely out of hand, and surprised the team that was dropped by parachute to control the fire. The Mann Gulch fire is an incident described in detail in Norman Maclean's book "Young Men and Fire".
I became fascinated of this sad story by the article "The Collapse Of Sensemaking" by Karl Weick. In this article the author uses the case of the Mann Gulch Disaster to analyze what went wrong in this professional team under stress conditions.
This group of firefighters didn't know each other very well. A couple of team members had worked together before, but for the largest part this was a new group. Trust wasn't established yet, people didn't know how other members thought and how resourceful they were.
But in professional teams trust isn't necessarily needed to operate.
The profession itself provides a role system that guides the individuals in what they should do and what they can expect from the others. In software projects we can have the project leader, technical team lead, tester and business analyst. This is one particular form of our role system. In hospitals there are strict role systems when operating on patients.
Firefighting in the 1940s also had a role system. A leader at the front of the crew who constructed the orders, a second in command at the end of the line who repeated the orders and made sure they were understood. And the firefighters in the middle, that followed and repeated the orders given by the leader.
What happened in this particular case is that the crew got separated from their formal leader, and the spaces between the remaining crew members became so wide they couldn't pass the orders around any more. The person replacing the formal leader wasn't skilled in strategy, so his orders weren't any good. And even if they were any good, no one behind him could hear his orders.
The role structure was simple.
A leader passing orders around, and a person at the end of the line making sure the orders were heard and understood. Remove the leader and disable the ability to pass the orders around, and the role structure broke down.
In "The Collapse of Sensemaking" Weick writes: "If a role system collapses amongst people for whom trust, honesty and self-respect are underdeveloped, then they are on their own."
Trust holds teams together. We know that. But, trust also needs time to develop. We know that also.
In the meantime we are left with our role system. The formal structure that our profession and our companies provide to us. But this will only provide support when it is functioning properly.
Weick again: "The recipe for disorganization in Mann Gulch is not all that rare in everyday life. The recipe reads. Thrust people into unfamiliar roles, leave some key roles unfilled, make the task more ambiguous, discredit the role system, and make all these changes in a context in which small events can combine into something monstrous."
Before we get to know each other, before trust can be established, the role system is all we have.
Is it?
Bas de Baar is making complex people stuff less complex. Yes. A Project Shrink. You can find him on Facebook. |
Gantt Says. How I Became The Project Kid.
I learned Project Management from Mr. Miyagi from the movie The Karate Kid. Actually, my Miyagi was French, knew nothing about karate and everything about wine. But they both talked in weird English sentences. Myagi had "Wax on. Wax off." My mentors favorite being: "Gantt says."
I think he really talked to his Gantt charts.
There is something creepy comforting in blaming Microsoft Project for all your project problems. It's not your fault that people are over allocated just to make the deadline. It's not your fault that the resources are not available. It's not your fault that the deadline is months later than expected.
"This are just the facts. 'Cause Gantt says so. Now that we have established that, we can easily look at the problem."
In some disturbing way this talking to the Gantt chart as a third person can help separate you from your project and planning problems. You are not your plan. And that's correct. Because Herr Gantt is your plan.
So. One of my early lessons in Project Management was the use of externalization. “This process of externalization allows people to consider their relationships with problems, thus the narrative motto: “The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem.” as used in Narrative Therapy.
And then they wonder why I became a Project Shrink.
Working physically with something that represents your problem area helps you to explore your relationship with the problem. Planning Poker for example lets participants interact with stories and estimations. Quite literally. Moving around cards. Kanban boards with post-it notes have the same function.
The concept also applies to culture.
Remember The Travel Guide To [your organization]? In this exercise you are asked questions about your organization that explore your relationship with its culture. You talk about habits, rituals and anecdotes. The interaction with with these cultural elements help you shape a new narrative.
By creating something, in this case a Travel Guide and drawing maps, you externalize your relationship with the organizational culture. This allows you to explore the connection from a small distance, taking a step back from the sensitive topic.
The trick of treating Herr Gantt as a third person, is just that, a trick. A powerful one. Just be aware that The Others might be a little annoyed when you just keep referring to calendars and sock puppets as your new imaginary friends that tell you how to run the project.
"When are you ready?"
"Well. Gantt says next year."
"Who?"
"The chart I have imaginary conversations with. You'll like him."
Not sure if that is a good career move.
Bas de Baar is making complex people stuff less complex. Yes. A Project Shrink. You can find him on Facebook.
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