The PMBOK Code, The path of technology

Today, we are undergoing extreme data overload. There are additional layers of complexity in technology. Complexity in Projects that span decades, time zones, languages, cultures in addition to the technology. The base I am most familiar with is The PMBOK. In 2009 we are in the Fourth Edition of The PMBOK. Where are we in terms of Knowledge and the Book?

Mayan Yin Yang

Mayan Yin Yang

I would argue that we are in the right place in time.

The PMBOK Code some would argue is preparing people the wrong way. There is some tension in the Global Project Management Community. Some argue that standards, controls, and hard systems are the wrong tools for today. The Pirates Code as set forth by Morgan and Bartholomew can be a metaphor for our dilemma.

Elizabeth Swann

wait, you have to take me to shore, according to the code of the Order of the Brethren

Captain Barbosa

first, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement, so it must do nothing, and secondly you must be a pirate for the Pirate’s Code to apply and you’re not, and thirdly the code is more of what you call guidelines than actual rules, welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner

From Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

We can preserve the solid foundation of The PMBOK Guide and Develop New Frameworks at the same time. The books and organizations need to have a baseline, we have to have a control point with which to measure change. But this is not a book this is interactive social media, you are participating as a reader. What we need you to do to bring your humanity to the argument you have to tag the chaos. If you just want to read and perhaps leave a comment you don’t need to go any farther. But if you want to participate in the Revolution, Get yourself a nice cold drink and get ready to Login and Password.

In this next major revolution you are either a reader or a writer. I do not count casual comments in someone else blog as being a writer. We have to make you a writer. Luckily it is free and easy. Get yourself a nice cold drink and get ready to Login and Password.

I use Firefox as the primary work horse, I also extensively use opera, chrome, safari and iexplorer. They are cool and being web savy means that it is ok to divide your life into different applications. You can have multiple gmail accounts open in different browsers is one reason I use it. So get yourself I nice fresh gmail account, it is best to have your personal name on it. Make a photo of yourself. Now join the ecosystem.

Site Purpose Why
Verisign Personal Identity Portal Get an Open Id Redudant yahoo is open id
Don’t type passwords as much, login with it as much as possible
Google Gmail account You can link your yahoo account here for ease of accsess.
Open up a new google document and copy and paste this as a base for your records. You can copy and paste bios, things like that. Firefox does a decent job of auto complete for short things. It is also critical to activate your google reader account.
Picasa Visuals Picture says a thousand words
YouTube Video Communicate in a Video
Yahoo Yahoo account and Open ID
Flickr Visuals Picture says a thousand words
Yahoo Pipes This will be one of our core tools to reduce the complexity How to make a pipe.
Delicious Optional to use Stumble Upon Social Bookmarking, forget the favorites on your toolbar, keep your social sites. Everything else that is interesting and you come across
Firefox integration Install the plugin for firefox Can also get an iexplorer and safari plugin if you wish.
Posterous Email blog People use it easy to comment as yourself.
WordPress Powerful Blog This is much more flexible, but a little more learning curve over Posterous
Disqus Plugin Sign up and install Perhaps you cant install Disqus on regular WordPress, I am not positive yet.
Linkedin Authentication Provides some kind of Authentication but it is a closed walled garden, It can be a conversation starter.  But what goes in don’t come out to the open internet.
SlideShare Visuals There are many great Presentations you can learn from and use to embed and enhance your communications
Scribd Important Documents Another opportunity to be Social and Communicate with People
Xmind Download client, create account Stellar Mindmapping Online
linoit Deceptively Simple Stellar Planning tool
Alltop Top Blogs A kind of filtered list of top Project Management Blogs
Twitter Realtime Chat Micro Messaging
Feedly Install into Firefox. Simplicity, Feedly provides a very clean interface of your personal RSS Feeds.  It pulls them in from Google reader account and you can share it with  your FreindFeed Account
FriendFeed Threaded Real-time discussions Open Social Networking.

Update July 8, 2009.  You can use Friendfeed to link everything we just set up.  So you have one place where all of your social information is stored.

Once you establish your accounts, You will have a powerful tool kit to collect, filter and create. Since we are focused on progressing  the Global Project Management Body of Knowledge. Where to start? Why we start with the Google of course.

google reader

Log into Google Reader. How does it work? One Way is to Copy and paste this Url into the add subscription window. You just made added a feed that will update for you. Next click on Share with note.

reader share with note

Now you are actually creating content. You can share this content with people.  This is part of Read/Write Culture.

Now, to Alltop this Alltop Project Management Link here, link it to your Google Reader.  Alltop is a kind of most linked blogs.  Many of the popular blogs are focusing on Fundamentals of Project Management.

Next, please go to  Yahoo pipes, I have been using this Pipe here. This will be one of our first tasks. We are going to need to make some beautiful pipes as a community. Now, since you are logged into your google account, you can easily subscribe to your Google Reader using a button on the page and presto it goes into your Google Reader.

Getting, a little more deeper are we? It gets better. Make sure you are logged into Google and next go to your Feedly home page. Now it should be starting to fill up and clean out.  Feedly, is very powerful.  It is compares and organizes your feeds what is also being linked to in other Social Networks For example Google Reader, Delicious, Twitter and Others.  The most popular items as commented on by actual readers is pushed up.

feedly

I hope you enjoy your ability to munge (Filter Peta bytes of Data) and incredible amount of rich information.

But if you remember we have a problem. The problem is our projects our facing intense complexity. Even though we are from all around the world separated by time, language and culture we still need to find a way to work together. The Japanese say it is ten times easier to criticize than to create a solution.

When you learn something share it. Write it down and publish your blog, take a picture make a video. Post it on twitter, our Yahoo pipe should pick it up, we can push the best content up in Friend Feed, and as a community we can improve.

By Using Yahoo pipes we can work together to study the data coming in. We can have it machine translated from many languages in real time. We can Study some wicked problem in detail, post it for peer review, we can change, we can learn. The tacit knowledge that emerges from this open mega project will be translated into actions. These actions will be evaluated for soundness and eventually they will be brought into the baseline. The PMBOK Code the path of technology.

I owe deep acknowledgment to Robert Scoble, Lawerence Lessig and many others that I have discovered over the last year.

Updated July 7, 2008.

FriendFeed offers Real Time Search, Filesharing, and Threaded Discussions.  The API is open and it may be integrated into many other powerful ways.  Imagine your favorite group in LinkedIn, but it is open search able, scalable, linkable recyclable with all of your other social networking that is open in one place.

I recommend you install the “Share of FreindFeed tool bar link”.  When you find an article that is interesting for discussion you can use the Bookmark link to select text, images and post a comment.  That comment can post in various groups, and also to Twitter in one stroke.

It provides a platform to have threaded open discussions.

Free of Advertising, free of banner ads.

Perfect for the creation of new Knowledge.  Leveraging Distributed Collaborative Communication.

The combination of social networking is very powerful.

I reserve some rights to clean this up, this post is a little messy…..

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