Choices...choices...

As a project manager - even if you ended up in the career, as many of us did, as an accident - you will be making lots and lots of choices. Add more resources to this task? Use the Jones company or the Smith company as your subcontractor? Have an on-site project kickoff meeting or a virtual one?

I just listened to an excellent podcast on the subject of choice. It was on NPR's Radiolab, one of my favorite podcasts and one I would highly recommend you subscribe to.

It's brain food. Eat well.

In the podcast was something interesting about the way our mind works. A psychological study was referenced in which people were given numbers to memorize - numbers which were short, like "23" or numbers which were long, like 034789328. The people went into a room, were given the number and were told to memorize it and move to another nearby room down the hall and repeat the number there. That was their only task.

On their way, they were interrupted by a woman with a pushcart who said something like, "excuse me, as part of your participation in the study, you get a snack; would you like a slice of chocolate cake, or a fruit cup?".

Here is the interesting part.

Participants who were given the longer numbers (like 034789328) were much, much, much more likely to choose the chocolate cake, and those given short numbers (like 23) were much more likely to pick fruit.

So what?

Well, it turns out (according to the continued research) the rational part of the brain that needs to process the analysis/memorization of the number is the same part which would make the rational decision that the fruit was the healthy, better choice. However, while occupied with the number, it was distracted, and the more emotional part of the brain, the one that says, "mmmm, gooey, yummy chocolate", takes over and makes the decision.

The connection to PM? When you need to make choices like the ones I mentioned at the opening of this posting, you may want to be sure that the rational part of your brain is free -- or you may be making a "chocolate cake" decision.

If this tickles your interest, see an article from Stanford University here.

And please - add RadioLab to your list of podcasts!

Greenality

Greenality. You probably never heard that word before. But we want to change that. We want you - project managers - to take the lead in making projects more green.

If we want to measure how green a project is, we need a word. If you want to check how original an idea is, we look into its originality. So if we want to check how green a project is, we've decided to coin the term greenality.

You can actually help. My colleague Dave Shirley, PMP, and I have placed the word greenality in Urban Dictionary and in Wikipedia. All we'd like you to do is go to THIS LINK and vote thumbs up on the word. Also if you have comments about expanding and illustrating greenality on wikipidea, just look it up first by clicking HERE and comment to this blog posting with your ideas.

Thanks for your help!

A "Car Talk" puzzler becomes a lesson in Risk ID

One of my favorite radio shows is "Car Talk" on NPR (National Public Radio in the US). You don't have to be in the US to receive it, by the way. You can get their podcasts free of charge at http://www.cartalk.com .

Car Talk is a show which is incredibly entertaining even though it is made up mainly of people calling up the two hosts seeking help with car troubles. The hosts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, also often have a "puzzler" or brain teaser, usually related to auto maintenance or something to do with cars. This most recent one, however, reminded me that we can learn a thing or two about project management wherever we are, even if it is listening to a podcast while sitting at a beach on Cape Cod Bay.

I suggest you read the transcript below and do two things:

1. See if you can solve the Puzzler

2. See if you can catch the connection to Risk Identification (answers below - DON'T CHEAT!)

------------------

RAY: Hi, we're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us, Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers, and we're here to talk about cars, car repair, and of course, the answer to last week's puzzler.

TOM: Yes, the dimly lit Quonset hut.

RAY: Anyway, this was sent to us by someone named Tom Clemala from cyberspace, I guess, and I'll set the scene. You ready?

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: It's just as he did.

TOM: As he did. Go ahead.

RAY: Don't get too excited. The answer's not that good.

TOM: I love it. But the question is great.

RAY: An RAF airfield north of London, a dimly lit Quonset hut, filled with air crews just returned from bombing runs over Germany.

TOM: Dimly lit Quonset Hut.

RAY: All right, shut up will you? The meeting opens with the chaplain leading the men in prayer for their lost comrades. He's followed by the flight operations exec., who begins the debriefing by asking the airmen, "From what direction were you attacked by the German fighter planes?" Without hesitation or dissent, the reply was, "From above and behind." The flight operations exec hastily scribbles the information on the back of a top secret map, hands it to a junior officer and says, "Get this information to the departing air crews; it may save their lives."

TOM: Here comes the good part. This is the good part.

RAY: As the junior officer turns to leave the dimly lit Quonset hut, from the inky shadows, a hand grasps his arm.

TOM: Can you just see it, man? Was it Humphrey Bogart?

RAY: This was a nice, brief little puzzler, before you started repeating all the lines. Anyway, as the messenger turns to leave, from the inky shadows, a hand grasps his arm and he hears these words, hold that order. Or, hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't. Hold that order, the information you're about to give may lose lives, rather than save them. What did the guy from the inky shadows know that the flight exec didn't?

TOM: That's not the right question.

RAY: It isn't?

TOM: Well, I bet, I don't think. I mean doesn't the flight exec know the same information that this guy in the inky shadows knows?

RAY: Well, he should.

TOM: He should.

RAY: What mistake did the flight exec?

TOM: Yeah, that's better.

RAY: What mistake did the flight exec?

TOM: Exactly, and did he lose his job over it?

RAY: No. He should have.

TOM: He should have, huh?

RAY: Yeah, well.

TOM: You don't know the answer, by the way.

RAY: Basically, it was a case of poor sampling. You see the only information that the flight exec had in the dimly lit Quonset hut.

TOM: Stop it, stop it.

RAY: Was from the guys who survived, from the guys who came back. The guys who came back were all attacked from above and behind, but it may be that those weren't the fatal attacks. The fatal attacks were from some other direction, and those people, those airmen, had no advice to offer, because they didn't come back.

TOM: Exactly.

RAY: So that's why --

TOM: So, we don't even know what he wrote on the back on the map.

RAY: I'm assuming he wrote hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, the attacks are coming from above and behind.

TOM: Back and to the left.

RAY: When, in fact, that information --

TOM: What he wanted to know was the information from the guys who weren't at the meeting.

Did you guess the answer?

And did you see the connection to Project Management? Here, at least, is what I saw.

We need to identify a full contingent of people to interview when discovering (identifying) risk on our projects. Hopefully we don't face the same issue here, in which the identified risks are missed because of fatal incidents. The point is that we need to look for the identification of risk to come from a full spectrum of sources or we end up with Risk Identification bias.

In your projects, make this analogy. Think of where you may be getting information that's simply too optimistic (or pessimistic) because the folks who might have that information simply are not present and accounted for.

And for goodness sake, listen to at least one episode of Car Talk!

Is the world ready for earthpm.com ?

Are you ready?

Are you - and your project - green?

Today, my colleague Dave Shirley, PMP, and I are proud to launch a new website, EarthPM, which is focused on all things you might find at the intersection of all things 'green' and all things Project Management.

We're just getting started, but the site already has some interesting articles and is about to be supplemented with interviews and other resources related to how your project can be more earth-friendly.

You may just be curious. You may just be an expert. Either way, we would like your feedback and opinions and input. It's your earth. It's your project. Here's where they come together.

Relax, have a seat in your comfy chair, and enjoy 'The Lazy Project Manager'

Now, here is a book that is in harmony with the postings on this page and also written in a style that accommodates my sense of humor and philosophy of project management.

The Lazy Project Manager, a brand-new book by Peter Taylor, is, by his own admission, not a methodology nor a replacement for a PM book, nor a preparation for the PMP Exam. It is, however, written by a gentleman who is a PMP and who has a great deal of real-world PM experience. So you should pay attention regardless of what the book isn't.

What the book is, instead, is a collection of wisdom and coaching about how to manage projects in such a way that you are active and assertive as a PM when you need to be and only when you need to be. The author, a fan (like me) of Monty Python (see the Comfy Chair sketch by clicking here), and silliness in general, adapts one of Python's gimmicks as the common thread throughout the book: "a project is thick at one end, much, much thinner in the middle and then thick again at the far end". This is the opposite of a dinosaur, as theorized by Anne Elk (brackets, Miss, brackets) who stated, in her very own theory, which was hers, "all brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end".

Brontosauruses aside, the concept is that projects have the most need for attention and assertiveness by the PM at the starting and ending stages and in the middle need communication and management, yes, but in a much 'lazier', more monitoring and controlling fashion.

In his coaching and advice, the author tackles the usual suspects, feature and scope creep, the evils of email, reporting not being the same as communicating, dealing with a wide variety of project sponsors, and all cleverly illustrated not only with illustrations (the author is fond of two-by-two grids) but also illustrated with stories from his own experience and with jokes or brain teasers thrown in here and there.


Taylor does something that I have done on my blog and in my own writing - he gives you a chance to cheat. By cheating, I mean that he levels with you, the reader, the busy reader, the lazy reader, and says something like, "look, if you want to get to the bottom line, skip over to the last chapter now. You will miss some stuff but ... you'll get the idea". In fact, he even uses this principle of cheating itself to help explain the Pareto principle - a tactic I thought was particularly ingenious.

Another interesting thing about this book is the author's use of footnotes. Where many authors rely on footnotes only to reference their sources, Taylor instead takes the opportunity to provide a variety of other things in the footnotes. Don't skip them - or you will find yourself missing a recipe for a virgin bloody Mary.

So don't be lazy - get a hold of this book and read it, perhaps on a lazy summer afternoon.

Poignantly perpetuate your project's purpose

This is a not a book review.

I tend to review PM books, but also read some general management books and note their applicability to project management. That's the case with Nikos Mourkogiannis' Purpose. I heard about the book on several podcasts and decided it would be a good read - and it was.

What I would like to do in this brief post is to share a couple of takeaways from the book for project managers.

The book is about how organizations can "purpose" themselves for success, and one of my assertions about project management has always been that it is a microcosm for organizations in the larger sense. But, as we all know, there are also differences - significant ones - between projects and operations. So one must look carefully for the gems in books like this that can be adopted and molded a bit to fit into the context of a project.

One such gem is Mourkogiannis' determination of the sources of energy for the company - or in our case, sources of energy for the project.

The four purposes which I think you can apply to a project (just as the author applies to great organizations) are:
Discovery, Excellence, Altruism, and Heroism

Mourkogiannis' point is that although no two companies are alike, successful ones have excelled by drawing on one of these philosophies and "applying it with integrity". There is an undercurrent in the book about morality, one which makes even more sense in light of the recent embarrassing and shameful stories from financial and "insurance" companies such as AIG and the Madoff schemes*. This seems to make the book and its ideas even more relevant now. But I digress, I want to tie this to PM.

Below is what is in effect the heart and soul of the book. I still recommend that you read it but this captures the main idea.

I suggest that PMs could do best by focusing on the chapter, "The Real Value of Purpose", in which the author gives examples of how each of these moral purposes were "put to work" to build the culture for success at the companies he uses as examples. I think that PMs could model some of these purposes to infuse their projects with the same kind of culture and focus, paying attention to which one suits their project most aptly.

Check it out for yourself by going to the author's web-based purpose profiler.

And you can order the book from that same page. On purpose.

*AIG (as are other companies who were mired in greed and a lack of Purpose) is so embarrassed, in fact, that they are removing their own name from their own employees' badges and corporate buildings. I'm not kidding: see this article from today's news:
AIG Said to Remove Logo From Employees Badges.

Go Banana Slugs!

I never would have believed it unless I looked it up. And I did.

The official mascot for the University of California Santa Cruz is the ... Banana Slug. You can see one in action here.

What does this possibly have to do with project management? Not too much, but a little. I was asked to guest blog on the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension project management page, and I happily accepted. And this is before I knew about the Banana Slug logo.

So if you want to have a look at some posts - they may look familiar because some of them were re-treaded versions of ScopeCrepe postings, then you should slither over immediately (or whenever your sluggish activity gets you there) to:

http://svprojectmanagement.com

...and have a look at my three postings. But don't stop there, you will also find (or perhaps instead find) excellent material from other PM personalities. Give it a shot, ya big slug!

Let's Go Banana Slugs!!!