Bi-Monthly Project Management Seminars

Presentation given to the Project Management Institute Japan International Committee on the business case for Project Management Seminars in English.

Introduction

The Project Management Institute Japan currently has about 3,000 members. Actually, Japan has 28,000 PMI members.  Globally, PMI has almost .5 million members. The PMIJ-International Committee exists to support PMIJ in International project management.  Of the 28,000 PMI members residing in Japan 800 are non-Japanese. We are not communicating with this existing group of Project Managers. Who are they? What do they need? We, The Project Management Japan International Committee do not know!

Why I joined PMIJ-International Committee.

I joined the PMIJ International Committee for personal reasons. One is to socialize, and communicate with other interested in similar things. I also love Japanese Business concepts and can improve my performance as a project manager.

Current Support in Japan for non-Japanese PMI members.

Currently, there is ZERO English Language communication or Support for the non-Japanese Speaking, reading community of Project Managers. There is no bridge to communicate with the 800 non-Japanese Project Mangers performing project Management in Japan.

Benefits to a community of International Project Managers.

If we can engage the 800 Project Managers living in Japan, we can create a community. A community of Project Managers in Japan will strengthen PMIJ. The more support we can provide for our Organization the more support we can get in the International Committee. As a strong community we can help each other. We can make more meaningful connections around the globe. We can solve professional problems better. We can improve as individuals.

Why are here in the International Committee?

Japanese philosophy of Takara Bune involves many different gods  all in the same boat. We are all in the same boat and by working together and helping each other we can have wisdom, happiness, long life and wealth.

Global Projects add complexity.

Culture gaps are difficult to detect. When you think about it, how can we step outside of the mindset that we learned from our family, teachers and friends. The insidious nature of Language shaping our thoughts is a barrier setting expectations.

Cultural Ambiguity

For example if we think about the future. The core of Projects. How people construct the future actually depends on culture. For example my western upbringing and English Mother tongue, predispose me to construct future references using the future tense. For example

It will take two weeks.

Sounds pretty positive perhaps 95%. The same construct in Japanese literally is

Two weeks is.

The interesting thing is in Japanese there is no need to modify the verb to discuss the future, it is the same tense. Perhaps, if you are a westerner it might sound very strange. That is a cultural gap. Is it a big deal? The answer is yes. The present tense in English means 100%  one plus one is two. The is in that statement means equals.

Documenting the requirements on global projects we need to close the culture gap. Interestingly, the NASA Systems Engineering Manual explicitly recognizes the vague qualities of English and states. On Page 131 Requirements Validation-

Are Requirements Written Correctly: identify and correct requirements `shall` statement format errors and editorial errors.

The NASA rule book  instructs their project managers to format the requirement.

It shall take two weeks.

Team Charter

Good projects managers will use a kind of rule book or a team charter to manage these kind of expectations. Facilitating this can be fun on a multicultural team. Having an understanding of what exactly does; plan to, expect to, hope to, like to, want to…. mean for a team in the beginning of a project will prevent misunderstandings from happening on global projects. A very nice discussion presents this argument on LinkedIn http://bit.ly/1cKcb2 have to be a group member of Global Project Managers. You can also enjoy a video from a Japanese and Saudi Arabian PMP perspective below.

Cultural Environment of Japanese Project Management from Robert Higgins on Vimeo.

Image via Wikipedia

“Tzu-lu  said ‘ If the Lord of Wei entrusts the government to you, what will you do first?’ ‘Correct names, surely!’,  Confucius (551-479) BC.

Project Management is a global language. PMI and many Organizations have been promoting Project Management as an efficient way to close the Communication Gap.  August 2009 PMBOK Cafe held workshops in which Project Management was discussed in detail by more than 20 Project Management Professionals from diverse industries and more than 5 countries.  These people have extensive experience in conducting projects in Cultures out side of their Native Culture.

One of the overriding themes that has emerged is the reduction of the Culture Gap.  The Culture Gap are ideas that are difficult to express across cultures.  When you are working across cultures their is a greater Risk of Ambiguity.  Case in point our Current 2009 World bank President Robert Zoleick Stakeholder. As recently as 2006 during  High Level government meetings between China and USA were stalled on the word Stakeholder.  The finest translators in the world had issues with what does “Stakeholder” mean.

The practical methods to overcome this are email, messaging, voice, video and face to face travel.  Finding the correct people who have the critical; language, cultural and technical skills is the first step.  The Second step is Spending time to elaborate requirements is the best practice for management to mitigate this Risk of Ambiguity.

Project Management has been influenced by countless people and cultures.  Japanese business Philosophy of Kaizen 改善 or continuous improvement have been synonymous with Project Management. Which was in turn influenced by Henry Ford.  The Agile Manifesto is a child of this concept. I acknowledge that Agile concepts are a refinement to Project Management. The problem is Slang or Jargon that  is meant to be something that keeps groups together and keeps people out.

One of the issues with the  Agile Methodologies are the growing trend of labeling Project Management as “Traditional”.   Traditional Project Management is most likely rarely practiced anymore.  Traditional Project Management is something from the 60’s.  For example the Apollo Program that successfully in less than a decade from initiation, safely flew 2 men to the surface of the moon and returned them to Earth.  Fulfilling those requirements is a text book example of Traditional Project Management.  The Apollo Program and the Project Managers who crafted the tools by combining humanities best practices are the true owners of arguably mankind’s greatest achievement.

People can call it Modern or PM 2.0 or any numerous labels. The bottom line is call it what it is, Project Management. Veteran Project Managers such as  Glen Alleman of Herding Cats.  are unconvinced that there has been a radical revolution that warrants relabeling the vocabulary of Project Management.

Global Projects require us to communicate across cultures. We need to drop the posturing;  jargon and lingo and communicate in the clearest most easily translated  way possible. Believe me if you walk into a team members office in Shanghai and tell them we are not performing Project Management anymore we are  Scrumming, you will be viewed with some apprehension. Why, because Global Project Management has been practiced in Asia for thousands of years and the concepts in the Project Management Book of Knowledge are translated and being implemented globally. Having the PMBOK as a baseline is a first step in planning a Global Project.

Using the Project Management Book of Knowledge is an inclusive tool. With a Global Standard that has been translated into many of the languages around the world we can reduce the Cultural Ambiguity that is present on Global Projects. Working on a project in China, make sure that your Chinese team members have a copy, same in Japanese, same in Arabic, same in Spanish.  Teams of global volunteers have been working to Create a way to Manage Projects across cultures. Having a common set of names, that can be used across cultures is a giant step to governing your project and reducing risks of cultural misunderstandings.

PMBOK Cafe has a few spots open for the Global Risk workshop and the Marketing School of Project Management. The Three previous Cafes have had Participants from 6 different countries. The majority of the Participants have had extensive Experience working overseas.

Participants earn 12 PDU’s in Conjunction with PMI-Japan. PDU’s are Professional Development Units for the Global Standard Project Management Professional Certification or PMP. The PMP certification has become a common filter for Human Resource managers in accepting applications for Project Management positions around the world.

PMBOK Cafe is focused on creating an atmosphere for people to discuss their experience in the frame work of Scope Management. The Collect Requirements during Scope Management is the critical start to defining Project Success. The Workshop closely follows the PMBOK or Project Management Book of Knowledge Collect Requirements framework. Participants document their work, and contribute to the Global Knowledge of Project Management.

Learn about how Project Management Professionals perform world class project Management globally and earn Professional Development Units or PDU’s in Tokyo Japan.

Next Workshops are in Tokyo September 26th –27th and October 3rd –4th. There are only a few spots left. Register here to earn PDU’s in English in Tokyo Japan.

“Trust is at the Heart of Global Team Management” Binder (2007)

Power and trust are closely related. On simple projects we can have small agile teams that can co-locate with the critical stakeholders and rapidly develop deliverables.  It is easy to create, and quantify trust when people are working close to each other. Projects that are separated by regions, time and cultures present a different set of challenges.  How can we create, build and maintain trust?

Identify

Jean Binder in the book Global Project Management 2007 talks about 5 aspects. First identify the level of trust. The variables that effect trust are; complexity, schedule, number of different locations, number of different cultures, number of different organizations and number of new relations. As these variables increase we need to spend more effort managing and developing trust between people.

Second, Binder recommends drawing charts of communication channels.

Visualizing stakeholders influence on projects describes some of the ways we can create dynamic self-illuminating visualizations. A simple approach is to create a stakeholders survey that all people would fill out, that provides the data to discover the strong links or nodes between stakeholders. Critical planning information based on previous project experiences is to identify the strong channels, for example stakeholders that have identified each other as trusted.  Binder calls these “Strong Channels”. The “Weak  Channels” that are critical to project success will require more effort to create, build and maintain trust.  PMBOK describes the theoretical communication channels  (N*(N-1))/2.  The third type of Channel I identified is the “New Channel”  these are clearly the people who have little or no information about each other.

Third, Binder discuss 15 different trust building activities. One of the highest ranked is face-to-face. Two others are provide “opportunities to demonstrate integrity and competence of your team members” and “Use collaborative technologies”.  the problem we have is that we want to prevent information overload.

NASA Social Networking

NASA has identified communication, information sharing, access to information on how to do your job better, effective processes and team dynamics as leading causes of Project Failure  Emma Antunes (Feb, 2009).  Solutions to these common leading causes of Project Failure is Social Networking.  SpaceBook is NASA’s long term solution to solving this problem.  How does social networking do this?

“Social Networking is a tool for building teams and strengthening networks.  FOR FREE.”  Antunes  Feb 2009.

How Social Networking can Enable Mission Success: An overview for Project Managers

Attributes of Social Networking such as tagging. bring divergent and diverse groups together.  For example having access to everyone’s browser bookmarks, for example Delicious or Stumble Upon is a free way to browse by Keywords or tags.  Good Project Management would be to Socially Bookmark important sites and create notes for project team members.  When people have a question about some information, they can quickly and easily search their team members bookmarks by tags.  This is a critical way for people to share knowledge.  Enterprise will naturally embrace their social networks, connecting people with sites like: Flickr, Delicious Bookmarks, Google Reader, Twitter, FriendFeed feeds can provide critical Cultural Social Information.  The concept of Social Networking is that the “work” part of Networking.  It  allows knowledge workers to explore useful information.  It saves people time. It does this by filtering and pushing useful information to people who need it.  It is a very hot topic, many enterprises are unveiling applications everyday for example Lockheed Martin is releasing an open source social application.

Connectivity

Open, autonomess, diverse and connected networks produce more and better knowledge for organizations.  Stephen Downes November 2008.  Connectivism decreases the boundaries of projects.

Autonomy provides employees the granularity of the type of information they want to share.  It is a democratic view where each member of a project, can contribute about their culture, their beliefs and their values.  The combination of these social networks facilitate trust.  They naturally strengthen the “new nodes”.  They are building blocks for trust.  Consider using these free and open tools for your projects to foster trust.  While they will not replace the importance of live social interactions, they can provide the background chatter that can facilitate human interactions.  These social tools are about supporting people and giving people the tools to create trust in their relationships.  The goal is to open up our communication channels so that information and knowledge can flow freely between the knowledge workers who need to know.

How to implement this?

There probably needs to be a top-down approach, as well as a bottoms up grass roots approach with some middle management facilitating “Social Software Management Training.”  My personal experience is that there is a generational gap between adopters.  GenY will be accustomed to these types of tools, as they are already ubiquitous.  Baby Boomer generations may grasp the significance but will have a risk adverse approach to utilizing them.  There is also a growing technological gap, people with access to fast computers, with up to date software and high speed internet will have a much easier time utilizing the Social Networking benefits.  There are many companies that have there Social  Networking Policies spelled out online for reference as a starting point for managing the associated risks.  Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines by Laurel Papworth has an extensive list.

Follow me on Twitter here.  Follow me on FriendFeed here.

Social Project Management.  This is a presentation I will be delivering at the All Volunteer, PMI-Japan International, Special Interest Group
The Link for this URL is Public http://prezi.com/124170/

from prezi.com

If you have any questions about the conversation please do not hesitate to ask.  Open Discussion on Project Management

Outline of the Presentations talking Points. Please Open the Presentation at the above url and follow along if you are interested in what the images and the slides mean. When the Presenation Canvas Loads, Please be Patient. You can Navigate by clicking the Big Arrow on the bottom of the screen.

Social Project Management tools for the projects that are open for society.

Projects are about people.

|dareka| Who?  In the Asia Pacific area our projects are very diverse.  We typically every day work with people from many different Culture.  The photos are members of the PMI Asia Pacific Planning Committee for the Global Congress 2009.  Our projects are diverse For example attending the presentation on July 8th 2009, Senior Project managers are working on Long Term Mega Projects in Indonesia, Russia…. so this idea of diverse complex projects is not theory it is actual every day reality.

|naze|  Why?  Why do we need Social Networking?  Why do we need Social Project Management?

|Stakeholder relations| From PMBOK Fourth Edition it is clear that the Project Manager is at the center of a very complex network.  The purple area is the People in their “House” or Uchi in Japanese.  As we move out from the “House” we increase the complexity “Outside” or Soto in Japanese.  The diversity of Asia Pacific exacerbates the temporal power distance (Hofstede 2001).

Customers will be people perhaps outside of our Internal Project controls.

Others will also be outside.  These Others stakeholder is a person or group who has a direct interest and impact on the project outcome and determines whether the project is a success or not’ (Kathy Schwalbe, 2006).

|ara| New. Social Networking Creates a new way to manage these groups Outside of our “House”.

|Knowledge| We can also create new knowledge

|Breakthrough| Social Networking can breakthrough barriers that are very difficult.

|Henrik Knibergs blog|  This is an example of a Personal Breakthrough or AhHaHa moment I had studying Agile Project Management.  There is a lot of data on Agile and various methods.  But I had alot of trouble grasping what is the point.  This Blog I found by Social Networking explained in 5 mintues what I couldn’t grasp in a month of studying.  After having my AhHaHa I realized that I can recycle this concept into non-software Projects as a part of my Configuration Management in the Planning Stage.

|mondai| Problem.  The problem we face is

|Stakeholder Relationships| We are at the center of a complex network

We have alot of information coming in?  How can we deal with this problem.

Social Project Management is an emerging ecosystem of semantic interconnected user generated content.

|donoyouni| How ~ In what way.

By using a wide variety of Open, Free.  Social networking tools.  My criteria for this is they must be open, but also have some garnularity to be secure.  they must be free or “freemium” is acceptable also.

I strongly suggest to use Firefox to integrate with various addons that extend the functionality.

Online Mail-User Accounts.  I suggest having two accounts one with Gmail and one with Yahoo.

Signup for delicious to bookmark and share your bookmarks.  I also demonstarted the major difference between traditional file and forget browser bookmarks to semantic shareable bookmarks that are search able by tag, whcih include User generate notes to add value to the data. I also recomend to install the Plugin and I showed how to install and use the plugin.  Someone asked how many bookmarks I have and I showed them several thousand on my personal private feed.  We also quickly located bookmarks using the semantic tagging filters.

Activate Google Reader.  I explain RSS feeds and how google reader can consolidate Social Blogging Content and it is searchable.

Signup for yahoo pipes.  I demonstrated how you can create your own custom RSS feed. How that feed can be shared.  This is very powerful way to search Petabytes of information and munge the data into a more discreet usable personalized feed.

Subscribe to feeds in Google reader.

There is many other non-core social networking sites for example Yahoo, Youtube, Alltop, Scribd, Xmind, and Prezi.  You can add the RSS feeds directly to Google reader or you can add them to your Yahoo Pipe and filter the data.

Google reader is the central place to consolidate many kinds of feeds and information.  You can sort and search in Google Reader.  Another important feature is you can makr items for sharing in Google reader.  Shared items are public and you can comment on them and work with information from other people.

Feedly for FireFox Only at this time.  Works in conjunction with Google reader and Twitter.  Feedly performs and analysis on your items in Google reader to push the most interesting content to a clean portal of information.

Twitter is the short messaging service that has been discussed previously.  By having content and message and meaning you can distribute your message to people.  People who are interested in your message can find you and subscribe to your messages.  By combining valuable up to date information from Petabytes of data that has been filtered with algorithms you can influence people or even Stakeholders. You can shape, and influence a wicked problem.

For Example:  Traditional Business on a Social Giga-Project (Tuschiya 2009 Meag-projects spanning generations), like a High Speed Rail between San Diego and San Francisco would involve a kind of top level, lobbying or meeting between Senior Sales/Project Teams and Government agencies to discuss the price or material like rail stock.  The discussion will talk about mostly price and technical competence.

A Social Project Management Approach would start very early in the project by building consensus and teaching people about the benefits of a Train Culture.  This Grass Roots Social Project Management Approach would encourage education and engagement of the Stakeholders early on to facilitate the Talking Points of the High Level Meetings.  By building consensus and grass roots supports for Cultural shifts, Social Giga-Projects

FriendFeed is a “simple” conversational, open semantic approach to engaging in real-time conversations.  It is Filtered User driven Knowledge, ready for threaded conversation.  It has granularity, for example one conversation can be tagged under multiple Groups.  For Example you can tag a topic by Project, and Agile, and Mega.  These semantic groups can facilitate the Kanban concept of self organizing.   It has Security you can have open groups or private groups.  It has file transfer.  You can upload a file directly from your computer that is available to everyone.  The discussions are threaded, so new ideas can emerge and discussion can proceed.  It is simple.  It is complex.  It is open.  Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook all the Public information is searchable and usable for the public.  This supports agile, logarithmic growth.  It has real-time search.  It is scaleable.  The Founders of the company are from Google and worked on some for the original core google products for example Gmail.

The Output of Social Project Management would be self organizing groups continuing to form and work on Projects in an open environment.

Linoit is a kind of open online project board.  Micro-Projects can be self organized, people can set dates and schedules.

Using powerful free tools for example Word-Press.com people can write about the knowledge they have gained from collaborating.

|Henrik Knibergs blog|This content can improve and provide crystal clear analysis improving the collective knowledge of Society.

|ara| New. The Velocity of Knowledge Creation is increasing.

If we can volunteer our time and use these tools on Open Social Giga-Projects, we can also learn how to use these new emerging tools on our own projects that will require higher standards and security.  We can create a New Breakthrough in terms of Social Giga-Project Management.

Social Project Management

by Robert Higgins

I formally release all the ideas and concepts to Creative Commons.  Please Attribute the Concept to me,  Please feel free to improve it, modify it to suit your needs for commercial use.

Social Project Management by Robert Higgins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at pmbokcafe.com.
Contact me for Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://friendfeed.com/rnhv.

How can we use Twitter in Project Management?

First what is Twitter? It is “an application that allows users to send brief text updates of up to 140 characters”. So let’s step back and look at the first question and replace twitter for communicate. How to communicate in Project Management? We all know the answer is Planning.

Twitter same as unsecured email is a valid risk.

We have all accepted the risk that email is insecure, and we all send confidential, potentially damaging artifacts through email every day. Should we consider Social Media; not limited to blogging, Facebook, Linked-in, YouTube and yes even email as security events and make it clear from the beginning in our planning documents? How can we use Social Media on our projects?

There must be some people, who have successfully used twitter in managing projects. For example President  Obama’s election campaign was a project. How did he use twitter for managing his campaign project?

We should say what twitter isn’t.

Twitter isn’t a blog. Twitter facilitates conversation, but it is horrible at retaining data. We should realize everything we twit is at once permanent and temporary at the same time. Robert Scoble correctly points out the significant historical twitter streams are “missing”. Perhaps, we can use it as a kind of performance review, or if we need more anonymous security we can use Rypple. Crowd sourcing using twitter? There are much better platforms already established for that, for example Amazons Mechanical Turk.

What is twitter good at?

It is part of an information eco-system Working the Social. It is a conversation starter. It is a way to post links to relevant items. It is a small but vitally important link to communicate with incredible people all around the globe as equals. Twitter strips away race, gender, power, control and allows you to interact based on the quality of your character. But at the same time it seems like there is a risk. It definitely breaks the first rule we ever learned outside of the house which is don’t talk to strangers.

Robert Scobles uses it as an intelligent discussion platform, and embrace it as part of a larger ecosystem.  Which brings us to FriendFeed a Collaborative Business Tool. Can the Global Community of Project Managers use it as a way to create a new PM Culture? As of July 5 2009 there are currently only 11 people in the FriendFeed Project Management Room. Can we create something that is open and intelligently discusses important issues?

Twitter forces people to pithily communicate. People are projects. Communication is how we perform project management. Twitter is a simple tool for communication and improving your social network, and for influencing people. Recent detailed technical studies June 2008 Project Management Journal “Measuring performance of Knowledge-Intensive workgroups through Social Networks” concludes that “Social Network Structure and Position are important Factors to consider for Individual Performance.” And “Structural Diversity played a new and important role for performance.” If you have a good character, if you can communicate to an intelligent community base of diverse professionals you can seek some advice and learn novel methods to manage your people and projects better. You can ignore Twitter and Social networking, but that would be risky in today’s world.

Conclusion

Twitter is a risk.  Communication Management Planning should specify social networking.  Twitter can be used in some social projects, but it is unclear how it can be used on specific projects.  Twitter is good at short messages.  Twitter is a part of a larger eco-system, and we can use it as a way to increase our personal knowledge.

Sign up on FriendFeed and let’s discuss it. How can we use Twitter for Project Management?

Update July 18th

Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines by Laurel Papworth

Update July 8th 2009.

Wallmart has embraced Twitter but they have identified the Risk.  They clearly state their authorized twitter users.  This is a good example of proactively managing Risk.  For more Info Visit Wallmart Twitter Page

Global Project Management Culture has been well documented as a complex system.  The wicked problem of global transfer of knowledge in project based organizations has been documented in this excellent paper. Knowledge Transfer in Project-Based Organizations: An Organizational Culture Perspective. Mian M. Ajmal, Kaj U. Koskinen. Project Management Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1, 7-15 2008.  The Authors Ajmal and Kokinen describe that the biggest problem is not tech but culture.  They cite a study that says 80% of the problem of transferring knowledge is cultural.  There is a perception among people that holding information is more important than sharing.    Perhaps, the most famous example of this is Leibniz and Newton calculus controversy.  Newton did not publish his knowledge for 20 years, and it was only under the threat that Leibniz was in the midst of publishing his work that he finally did.

Why do we want to share knowledge?  That is an excellent question, and my only answer is the lessons learned from Newton his analogy is “I am only standing on the shoulders of Giants.”  Newton Recognizes that it is only by sharing that we can grow.  A giant for me is Alexander Budzier, his sharing of his notes for his doctoral thesis is an inspiration for me.  Please visit this giant here.  http://blog.budzier.com/ I would highly recommend bookmarking his blog in your google reader.

So back to the wicked problem we are facing.  Which is the merging of various project management cultures to facilitate the transfer and most importantly utilization of knowledge.  Ajmal and Kokinen cite the best way to increase our success is to Recognize that culture is a living Social System, We must assess this culture and recognize the function of our organizations culture. You can look at the xmind map and you can easily see the obstacles to knowledge culture.

Lets focus on the 12 characteristic obstacles.  Knowledge is messy, self organizing, seeks groups of people, travels on language, carelessness, shape of experiments, does not grow forever, social phenomena, organically, multi-modal, requires flow which to me means velocity.  So that is our wicked problem.  The requirements to solve the problem according to Ajamal and Koskinen are multidimensional means of facilitating input, effective ways of sorting useful from useless and developing an organizational culture.  The best solution would be for us to work together “generative knowledge creation occurs only when people are striving to accomplish something that matters deep to them.”  You need to commit to a shared vision of generating and sharing knowledge.  In my previous post we invoked the metaphor of The PMBOK Code the Path of Technology and the need for a baseline and how to munge the data, sort what is important and the request for us to work together. 

This post is to postulate that we can use the existing technology specifically friend feed as a way to collaborate as an open community.

This is not a call to all gravitate to one system, it is contrariwise.  It is a call to all pursue maximum complexity in terms of individual blogs, groups, networks and ways of communicating mind maps, images, videos.  It is the Multi-Dimensional requirement of facilitating input.  Create an open Project to use Yahoo Pipes in collaboration to open up the velocity while at the same time sorting what is useless.  But this will only happen if we Create Culture and Organize and it will only Happen if we Question the Norms.

Thank you for your time!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…..

The PMBOK Guide Fourth Edition has been revised.  This is an important milestone for Project Managers around the globe.  As a Standard the PMBOK is indispensable because of its translation, wide spread global acceptance and the critical importance of providing people with a reference with which to communicate.  I always carry the localized translations when I am working on a project in China, Japan or Asia.  Having a common set of tools is the first step in a successful communication loop. Once again the PMBOK is changing.  There have been many great blog posts, conferences and lectures about the changes.  There is one change that  is critical.  The major change is the deletion of a “Create a Preliminary Scope Statement”.  This was found in the Initiate phase in the Third Edition.  Why has the global community decided to delete this?  Is this a good idea?

I think so.  There was ambiguity and confusion between 2 scope statement documents.  The Initiation  is the start it is the beginning.  Creating the Preliminary Scope Statement was Planning.  Now it is very clear.  Scope is Planning.  There is one more change that is equally critically important.  Now the first area in Planning is Collect Requirements.  This has been clarified to focus on the stakeholders.

People are what make projects work, and the lessons learned from the project management literature have shown that setting common expectations is critical. For example “Project Success: A Cultural Framework” PMI Journal Vol. 35, No1, 30-45, ISSN 8756-9728/03 Stress creating a “Project Management Subculture”.  This is the culture of common language, collaborative teams and competent project managers.  There is a wide selection of literature which talks about the complexity of communicating across time, place and culture.

PMBOK Fourth Edition has placed more emphasis on people.  People provide the requirements.  The process of discovering those requirements are soft skills.  PMBOK Fourth Edition 5.1 Collect requirements guide emphasizes creativity, collaboration and documentation.  In fact these same soft skills are repeated in managing Risk, Quality and other areas.  These skills are focused on people and creating Culture.  Project Culture is about change.  We all know that fundamental change is difficult to achieve.  Taking the time to use the PMBOK Guide to collect requirements is essential.  Fundamentally, speed and agility may not be the essence when you consider that creating Culture takes time.  Good Project Management is taking the time to communicate with each other about the Requirements beyond micro messages, and stand up meetings.

What do you think?  Does the Fourth Edition clarify Scope Management and place more emphasis on People?