Project Lifestyle

I often wonder why Health & Safety or security thinking seems to only apply to industrial (“blue collar”) workers.

The recent events in Bangkok & Mumbai prompted me to send and email out to my team of internationally active Project Managers & Architects to remind them of the facilities that our employer Oracle has in place to deal with emergencies while travelling on business.

I also took the opportunity to add some hints and tips on how to keep the emergency contact information handy in case of emergency. This includes having it available in multiple places (not just on your laptop, phone or wallet) and formats (hard- and softcopy).

It seems a bit uncool and patronizing to do this (a bit like fire drills: nobody really seems to take them seriously). But that is the danger – it never seems necessary to take a few simple precautions, until it’s too late. Then you (really) wish you had.

Same thing in a project context. One customer, that I worked with for a long time, started every meeting with a short safety reminder (there is the fire exit, there is where we assemble in case of an emergency). After a while you get used to it and it becomes an automatism and that automatism is what can save you when the chips are down.

What are you doing to look after your (project) team members’ health and safety?

I had a lively discussion last week with colleague David Christopher about things 2.0.  Like Web2.0, Enterprise2.0 Project Management2.0, and innovation in Oracle. All that stuff.

David is part of a diverse international team evangelizing these 2.0 technologies and thought models within Oracle and it was very enlightening to see his vision of the future.

We got to talking about PM2.0 and he showed me some mocked up concepts for a Social Project Office. In many respects it presented a lot of features common to many web-based project (portfolio) management tools. BUT…it had some very intriguing crossovers from the Web2.0 world.

You could sign up and follow projects that you are fan of (though not necessarily a participant) by tagging them. In fact the registration/network/group process looked very much like an extended project team diagram (but including “friends and family” and other interested parties).

It also raises the concept of voluntary participation or contribution to projects. Open Source/Wikinomics thinking applied to projects! Hmmm, still haven’t got my head around this one.

But imagine it for a minute. One key issue in staffing projects is that you usually get the people who are available, rather than those who are best for the job. Sometimes these two things collide and you get lucky, but not always.

Voluntary contribution may help address this issues by creating an access path to the right people, not just the people assigned to the team.

The trick is to find and attract the right people (and how do you know who they are up front?).

Even if you attract a wide group of fans and supporters for your project how do you keep it all manageable? Such a group could certainly surface critical issues earlier, but also solve them earlier if you can get the attention of the people who really know.

More on this later…

Some references for further reading.

Andrew Filev writes about this further over at his blog that includes PM2.0 topics.

Bas over at Project Shrink also interviews Andrew on this subject.

As I further get to grips with the Moveable Type technology that powers the BOC site I will periodically issue Maintenance Bulletins (as every good PM should do).

I have added a Blogroll widget to list interesting blogs that I feel might be relevant to the interests of Project Lifestylers everywhere. Look on the right side of the blog & scroll down a bit. The Blogroll is just under the RSS subscription link.

I have also disabled HTML-enabled feedback to discourage spam comments (this blog gets it’s fair share). Feedback is text only and must come from a valid email address.

[Update 10-Dec-2008 –  review comment from Chet Richards added to the text]

An article in the February 2008 Harvard Business Review (The Experience Trap by Kishore Sengupta, Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove) led me on a treasure hunt of new concepts.

The article prompted me to research the topics of cognitive feedback and situational awareness to see how these fields could be applied to the field of Project Management.

On looking deeper into the body of knowledge around situational awareness I happened on the work of the late Col. John Boyd.

This post reflects on how one lesson taken from this obscure military strategist can make a big difference in your handling of interaction with your stakeholders and ultimately your project outcomes. Boyd’s work provides a great explanation of how project teams can come unstuck from their primary stakeholders and ultimately fail, while apparently doing everything “right”.

Just a quick post to wish everyone out there in Project Lifestyle-Land a happy holiday season.

Enjoy the break with your friends and family – I am sure you all deserve it..

I plan to also take time to spare a thought for those less fortunate (a January 1 project go-live does not qualify you for that list by the way…no matter how sorry for yourself you feel.) Traditionally this is what Boxing Day (26 December) is for.

Actually that point reminds me of a discussion I had a year or so ago with one of my team. His customer was planning a multinational rollout and they were ruling out quarter-end months for go-lives (plus an extra month at year-end). The 3 month summer busy period was also not favoured. I pointed out that this idea only left them 5 months a year that they (according to their own rules) could take sites live.  Of course this meant that there were too few slots to take sites live within the overall planned project runtime. Back to the drawing board…

So whether you are already slowing down for the holiday season, or sweating over some data conversion runs or prepping Final Acceptance Tests…take it easy, and I’ll see you here next year.