Archive for the 'general' Category

We have another new blogger at RPM, Alan Mossman, Director of Lean Construction Institute UK. He trained as an architect and then worked as a socio-technical systems consultant. Returning to construction in 2000 he is co-editor of the Lean Construction Journal and from 2005-07 was Director of Constructing Excellence South West. Alan will be contributing articles every few weeks, or so. Please welcome him with your comments and questions.

When you're done reading the following post, head over to ChangeThis to vote on his manifesto proposal Together at the Workface: Improving Construction Logistics.

Sorry for not posting on lean project delivery, but September was a very busy month. In short, I anticipated it would take 3 months to sell my house. Instead, lucky me, it took 3 days. And the buyer wanted to get in close to opening day of school. We had no where to go. Our plan is to build a new home. After moving out, moving in to a temporary location, and then moving into a furnished condo we are finally settled. No complaints…I'm living in a town with a population of 305 completely surrounded by the White Mountain National Forest. It couldn't be better.

I'm back to blogging. I've found a way to read a little and to innovate a little in between packing, hauling and unpacking. I'll post tomorrow on careers, Bill Gates and monks. Don't worry, I'm still writing about projects, lean, kaizen, and construction. Maybe my hiatus will be good for writing…

I've been working hard posting everyday. While it's not my new year's resulotion, it is a small change that I want to make. The following is a list of anagrams for the same word or phrase. What is it?

LLAMAS PEN NESTS TRY
NAPALM STERN SET SLY
PLASMAS LENT SENTRY
TRANSPLANTS ELM YES
RAMPANT LENS STYLES
SPARTAN SMELLY NETS
SNARLY SPANS METTLE
MAN TARP YELLS NESTS

Have some fun making your own anagrams at the Internet anagram Server.

Yesterday's Lean Construction Congress generated 12 postings. Today was different. I got caught up in conversations and only have rough notes. I'll clean those up and post over the next day or so.

There are a bunch of good blogs on project management. Read about them in Karen Klein's story Project Management Goes Blogging. Better yet, pay them a visit.

I received a thoughtful email from a reader over the weekend. (Thanks Doug!) It reminded me of a set of introductory resources I have on this site. From the navigation bar you can access guides (lenses) on Project Leadership, kaizen for Projects, and IGLC Papers Reviewed on RPM. Each lens was designed as a starting point on the topic written from the RPM perspective. You'll find references to articles, postings from RPM, some of the best books on the topic, and a few surprises.

The lenses are not designed to be complete. I've changed each a number of times since they were first posted. Today I've posted a new lens for the Language-Action Perspective on Projects. This one will take quite a bit of updating. Keep checking back.

Let me know if there is a lens you want me to create.

I took a radical step today to shutdown delivery of Reforming Project Management via Bloglet. The Bloglet service has been quite unreliable. In its place I'm using FEEDblitz. I've been testing it for about a month. I'm very satisfied with the results. I hope you are too. You'll notice two big changes.

First, you'll start receiving the whole posting. I've had many complaints from my email subscribers about the shortened Bloglet messages. The other change is cosmetic. For now, you'll see the FEEDblitz orange in the emails. That may change when I investigate their additional services.

Some of you may need to update your spam blocking so these messages get through.

The first week of December 2005 was a great collaboration of practitioners and lean thinking advisors. We've certainly added to the recorded wisdom of project kaizen. And we have a long way to go. For my part, I'll continue to write about the best practices, project experiences, and lessons, especially those learning moments.

Identify an annoyance in your own work and eliminate it. And then do it again!

Lean thinking is transforming one industry after another. That is a really good thing. It's time to bring lean thinking to the project space. In my opinion there's no better place to start than by introducing project kaizen. So, I'm doing my part by launching the project kaizen website. You'll find it at www.projectkaizen.com. Read the rest of this entry ¶

Previous in series

Read kaizen, learning, and coordination and you'll know why we selected this article as our Gang-of-Seven "plus one" co-blogger of the day. I can't tell whether Eric was writing on Workgroup kaizen or Workstream kaizen. Maybe he's writing about Quick 'n Easy kaizen. In any case, Eric's posting will help you understand the nature and the point of kaizen. Eric writes, Read the rest of this entry ¶

Previous in series Next in series

Kathleen Fasanella is on top again. I don't know where to start commenting on her Great Workgroup kaizen posting. Kathleen writes from experience at gemba. While you might not be interested in cutting and stitching patterns, you will learn from her complete examples.

Looking for an easy way to find all those blogging on project kaizen? I'm using Google Blogsearch, a new service in beta testing, to collect all the postings for me. Place the term "project kaizen" in the search box. Up will come the latest listings. It's easy to read through them, or you can scroll to the bottom where you'll find an RSS feed for the search. Copy that feed into your feed reader and you won't miss any posting that includes project kaizen prominently in the title or body of the posting. You can choose either a 10-post feed or a 100-post feed.

I used this approach yesterday to find Kathleen's post along with two fine posts on the GrimReader and SwimBlog.

To celebrate the Library of Congress granting me an ISSN for RPM, I've launched my most ambitious of tasks. I'll be posting a new cover image for each issue with help from Kim Black. Hope you enjoy them. Where did I get that skiff-on-an-empty-beach photo that has served as the background image for RFP? It's served its purpose as a placeholder. Long live Reforming Project Management, The Magazine for the Project Age.

eth Godin is on a roll. In the last three months he's published 3 e-books and is launching a new website (business?). It started with Knock Knock and was quickly followed by Who's There? Seth's latest is Everyone's an Expert (about Something). This book makes the case that we all have something useful we can teach others. Seth is not charging for any of these books, however he does encourage readers who like the book to make a gift to the Red Cross or another charity.

So what does this have to do with project management? Everything. First, Seth has an amazing capacity to bring together people to get his and others' projects done. Each of these books, along with the forthcoming The Big Moo, take collaboration and the contributions of many. Everyone's an Expert introduces the idea of providing a lens on a topic. A lens is a way an expert can introduce that expertise to others. Think of a lens as a single webpage that assembles a collection of resources. Of course, each of us could search and assemble our own resources, but then we have to find the best among all the rest. Enter the expert.

I've posted a lens on project leadership and project-based kaizen. I'll follow these with a lens on the language-action perspective. You can find them from the navigation bar in the header or RPM Lenses.

've been looking lately at the PMBoK®. In our work here in the New South Wales Department of Commerce we have a model of projects according to 7 parameters and I'm getting
someone to 'map' the PMBoK 9 areas of knowledge to our 7 'key success factors'.

Project management models neglect the fact that projects are humanistic endeavors: done by and for people, and thus are constrained primarily socially.

Our 7 are: service delivery (being that we're in public administration), affordability, sustainability, governance, risk, change (the change the project will bring about) and stakeholders (related to 'change').

I've taken a look at other models of project management recently and am coming to the conclusion that the (mechanistic) models are generally flawed because they concentrate not on the project, but on 'project management' as though this activity of bringing projects to fruition has an independent importance. They also neglect the fact, in my view, that projects are humanistic endeavors: done by and for people, and thus are constrained primarily socially.

I looked at Max Wideman's website where he summarises the state of project management in the 90s writing about how its expanded since the 70s:

"… Conceivably (project management) could still be expanded further by such potential additions as stakeholder management, cash flow management, data management, document storage and retrieval management, management of cultural differences, and even vocabulary management … With a little imagination, and research reading, one could add several more, such as critical chain buffer management,[27] customer relations management, issues management, public relations management, and even knowledge management[28] itself — the list seems almost endless."

Not only is this an example of thinking that seems to be more Fayol than Flores (or even more Fayol than Ford!), but it misses the point of what PM is. It's surprising that PM in traditional thinking gets hooked up on the secondary game, and simply seems to take to itself more and more descriptors which are about the project manager more than the project.

[As I write this I also am calling to mind what Mintzberg writes about management proper. Management as I understand his analysis is about facilitating productive relationships. That entails a heap of 'managements' of course (of finance, people, stakeholders, change, training, meetings, etc) but that's the fundamental organisational responsibility of a manager. refer, e.g. Mintzberg, H, The Manager's Job: Folklore and Fact, HBR March-April 1990 p163ff]

You could go on forever saying that project management includes [something] management, but that would achieve nothing more than statements of the bleedin' obvious and not be of any great help.

It helps me to think of project management as being about three things:

1. defining the outcome that is to be achieved (finished product, organisational change, etc by a certain time for a certain cost: quality of performance is implied in the basic requirement),
2. facilitating activity to effect the outcome (getting the right people, resources and knowledge to work in an effective co-operative sequence), and
3. taking steps to avoid or prevent harms to the outcome (ie risk, change and stakeholder management, and developing metrics to forewarn of potential problems to allow corrective action to be taken).

It goes almost without saying that the project manager role is to achieve the identified outcome with the minimum expenditure of resources and within the minimum time possible. Any trade-offs which have to be managed must be done so to maximise the 'outcome position' agreed by the 'community of intention' (the project team and its stakeholders) for the benefit of the 'community of interest' (the project recipients, users or customers).

It is merely trivial to say that this entails 'time management', 'communication management', 'issues management' or any other particular 'management', because the project manager is looked upon to do what ever is required to effect the outcome, administering and managing the project as appropriate; and that's the main demand upon the project manager. The project management models are strong on the administration and management minutiae, I think, without providing a theoretical or practical core value for project management.

Project management is facilitation of communities of productive intent to achieve desired outcomes.

As a corroborating illustration, a production manager in a factory doesn't define his/her role as a whole bunch of 'managements' to effect production, but as doing that which is necessary to effect production. Project management can be seen, I think, as production management where the purpose is one product which is somewhat individually characterised with respect to the relationships it affords with its 'community of interest' (those who will be affected by the project) and those it requires of its 'community of intention' (that is those doing the project, those who are its 'owners' and those who are its 'customers'). To be less abstract, compare a building to a toaster, or a public policy innovation to buying photocopier paper.

Like general management, project management is facilitation of communities of productive intent to achieve desired outcomes. With 'projects' noted as being more customised than routinised, relying on a temporary community for their realisation rather than an established or semi-permanent one.

But on the other hand, most projects have similarity with other projects. When I worked as an architect (registered), I did every project more or less the same: talked to the client, analysed needs, produced a 'brief', did a design, documented it, got approvals, estimated it, called tenders, and administered the contract. It was more like production management with the 'box' we produced changed to meet customer needs. The production system itself was almost identical each time.

My hat's off to an amazing group of organizers and volunteers of the Orange County PMI Chapter. Saturday's PMI in Action event brought out about 150 people on a sunny day. The agenda was packed. The speakers did a great job from Mark Mullaly's keynote "What Makes a Great Project Manager" to David Anderson's back-to-back sessions on Agile, Deming, and the the use of cumulative flow diagrams (CFD) for managing project work. (More on CFD in another post.)

I did my two presentations on Let's Play Catch! and Why Do Projects on a Lean Basis? They were well-received. I've uploaded them for you.

I'm speaking at the PMI Orange County Chapter on Aug 13th. It's a Saturday. That's a big deal for me since I live north of Boston. I'm quite excited about the speaking opportunity. I'm on stage with some great speakers and writers. Mark Mullaly and David Anderson are just two. I've commented on both their work over the last three years. This will be the first time I speak publicly on two topics: "Why Do Projects on a Lean Basis" and Let's Play Catch! Now that the Powerpoint presentations have been submitted for printing I'm coming up with better ways of presenting the topics! I'll let you know how it goes.

If you're in the area, please stop by to say hello.

Just a short note letting you know that the Reforming Project Management weblog has moved from http://weblog.halmacomber.com to http://www.reformingprojectmanagement.com. Why? I'm more ambitious now than I was before. I've adopted WordPress, a content management system, as my blogging tool to give me more control over the environment. I'm aiming to make it more of a magazine format. The change in URL is to make it more of a home for anyone who wants to author articles for the site. Contact me if you want to publish.

There will be more changes coming. And there are a few housekeeping matters that will take some time to address. The other site still works (for now). Thanks to Kim Black for making this all possible, particularly the spectacular work she did in keeping all the reader comments alive on the new site. If you ever need help with a weblog or a website, Kim is a whiz!

It's been far too long since I've posted on these pages. My life has been busy…so busy. And I've enjoyed every minute.

Among other matters, my youngest son is investigating his options for college. We've enjoyed our tours. It's been great father-son bonding.

I've concluded that college is wasted on teenagers! Boy would I enjoy spending four years of my life immersed in learning without a care about work. Oh well…

So now I'm back writing. I've been working on some exciting projects. I'll share my learnings and my short-comings. And I hope to hear from you along the way.

I've been posting everyday this week and will do so everyday this month in celebration of 2 years of blogging on project management. If you are a subscriber and don't get a Bloglet email on a day, then jump on over to Reforming Project Management to read what I've posted. Sorry for the inconvenience.

On Monday I'll be grid blogging on the subject of the "brand". Grid blogging is an experiment in tapping the knowledge across the web. Bloggers will post on the same subject on the same day. We'll also link to each other. And we'll offer a means for finding the postings via search engines. Just search on "[grid::brand]". Include the square brackets in you