project management stories ::

nimble team - leaner budget by MA Neff

Early in the planning stage, we help companies, organizations and candidates achieve their key objectives through innovative strategies and services that migrate seamlessly into strong and consistent presence. Picture the Worlds is devoted to clarifying how your mission can be accurately defined by measurable performance indicators. Too often the larger the organization, the more stridently methodology can be heralded as a beacon of project success. We look, instead, for ways to keep communications quick and projects accountable.

We propose ways to clear the path of unnecessary steps that take team members off task. A vital key—and one that is often mandated in fiscally constrained times—is creating small more nimble teams. It's generally recognized that the basis of this thinking came out of Kelly Johnson's defense aviation experiences at Lockheed. As one of 14 rules, he learned long ago the wisdom of using "an almost vicious manner" to keep teams small. Google found this out too as its employee count soared. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page avoided losing momentum from what could have turned into a bloated methodocracy by adding new teams, not increasing team size. Following a similar principle, Harley Davidson's Buell Motorcylces considers three the ideal number for their development teams.

["In Praise of Small Teams", in PM Network, March 2009, p28, Viewpoint by Bud Baker, Ph.D. ]

chatter ::

Getting the design right and the right design, is the subtitle Microsoft researcher Bill Buxton gave to his book "Sketching User Experiences". Getting the design right is easier said than done. First, project management operates at the juncture of people, power and politics. A project manager doesn't wake up to Buxton's mantra until the first time a project comes in on time, on budget and completes all the specifications but fails. What went wrong? The project followed the approved plan, but in the end it failed. Why? Because it did not win the hearts and minds of the customer. Especially in economically uncertain climates, when projects that are perceived as high risk typiclly don't have an option to fail because they aren't begun.

The second reason software projects fail, according to Buxton, is that applications are breaking out of the box, as in the PC on your desk. According to Buxton "our ways of designing software and technology-based products is already broken". What all of us need to do is begin to understand "how to take the larger ecological, contextual and experiential aspects of 'the wild' into account". The wild means out in the world where we live. Now that microelectronics and telecommunications technologies are embedded into our devices, the old rules no longer apply. When management reacts by cutting back, it makes sense to look even harder for emerging patterns of change.

Part of a project manager's role is to help organizations recognize opportunity for change. Tough times are essentially disruptive and inherently trigger mindshifts. For starters, it's imperative to not lose site of long-term strategies focused on productive relationships. It is a good time for managing change to improve perceived value in the marketplace. Precisely because they stand at the intersection of people, power and politics, it falls on project managers to coax alignment between project goals and the surrounding environment. Social tools like blogs and wikis can be effective, highly responsive paths to understand project concerns and control change.

[Companion site to Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton, Elsevier 2007]