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…..