Disqus - Latest Comments for alianani

Re: 2009: What Do You Want To Do?

alianani — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 11:18:12 -0000

1- Bas de Baar- we have met virtually during the write up of our joint articles on Fish Pond as a metaphor for managing complexity. I wish to explore each other in person.
2-Portugal as this is one a very few Western European countries that I have not visited.
3- By increasing trust to a higher level, but short of complete trust. Complexity teaches us that creative successes generate from balancing the opposites such as order and disorder, control and lack of control and trust and mistrust.

Re: The Four Dharmas Of Project Management

alianani — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 01:58:05 -0000

I forgot to add that each wheel leads to a higher level wheel (loop). this is consistent with the complexity approach. If we think deeper we find your approach, Bas, is similar to the OODA loop. Observarion leading to orientation. This in turn leads to decision-making and then acting. Acting is based on information, beliefs, resilience and desire to act. Action comes last. In the same token, project managers should only act when they have assurances that staff have the desire, ability and resilience to act. The OODA loop is complex because of it undergoes feedback. So is your four wheel metaphor. I assume it is complex and that a reductiont approach is unsuitable

Ali Anani

Re: The Four Dharmas Of Project Management

alianani — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 01:18:36 -0000

Bas, Your article is a brain teaser
The turnining of wheels is a great metaphor. It provides a new perspective to project management. This article is bound to create many comments.
I fully agree with your approach in starting with the hard skill and then the soft skill requirements to implement what I would call the "The Hard Requirements". No matter how hard these requirements are we may only satisfy them with soft skills. The input for any task is time, materials and human resources. The soft skills of the human resources are influenced mostly by resilience to changes and pressures.
I have one negative comment. You mentioned in your article, and I copy and paste "If we look at the interactions between the stakeholders, some categories may come in handy to divide up the beast we are trying to concur; it is always easier to cut a complex issue into smaller parts when trying to make some sense of it. For this purpose I will use three dimensions for interactions in teams: the power structure, the task structure and the information structure." This is a reductionist approach and is contradicting the complexity approach. I feel that a better approach would be to build a self-similar repeating structure of the four turnings. This way only we observe the emergence of new phenomena, and not by the reductionist approach.
Your article is a sound reading indeed

Ali Anani

Re: The Secret To Coping With Change: MIND + NETWORK

alianani — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:09:45 -0000

Helen,
That is a very interesting question. To answer it in full would make Bas pull hair out of his head. But, let us remember that networks have their complexity meaning that small differences among members might lead to totally varying trajectories and,accordingly end results. No matter how similar people are they shall still have infinitismal differences that may explode over time.
I read once The things that make us individuals - that make us unique - are the same things that make us stronger as a collective community http://www.med.umich.edu/di...
We behave guided at least in part by how we think. Small differences in thinking patterns might generate new ways of doing things. Differences are welcome this way, no matter how small they might be.

Re: Dear Craig - Why Requirements Change

alianani — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:08:12 -0000

Well, I may get drunk without drinking!!!!!!!

Re: Go To The Spike And Become Adaptive

alianani — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:06:18 -0000

That is correct, Bas. Strategy is knowing where you stand and to where you are going from your starting position. People get busy developing performance indicators to gauge their progress on their set direction. But, we know from complexity routes that the future holds many scenarios. How may we assume following one and pre-determined future path? We need to open our eyes to all possibilities and keep learning from experiences and trial and error.
In summary, complexity science opens our minds and eyes to the many possibilities of the future. To assume or pre-select one path means that we may control our destiny. Can we do that in reality?

Re: Go To The Spike And Become Adaptive

alianani — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 08:50:44 -0000

In response to a comment by phone enquiring about the limits of possible adaptation. This is an interesting comment that I would like to share with the readers.
Adaptability suffers from what has been termed "The Red Queen Effect". In summary if you keep runnung in a landscape at the same rate of others you seem to stick at your starting point. It is important to adapt much faster than others to feel the progress. The rate of adaptation is crucial. Besides, as long as you have more choices than the environment in which you are working then adaptability comes to a halt. To adapt, you must generate alternatives.

Re: 25 Sure-fire Ways To Motivate Your Team Members

alianani — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 05:02:28 -0000

A simple question for dina and all,

Of the 25 points mentioned in the article, which ones would be most rewarding for lunch breaks? Within the boundaries stated by Bas that include relaxation, motivation and additional information then a question arises: how to balance formality with informality in these breakaway meetings?
Thanks all for your enriching remarks.

Re: Dear Craig - Why Requirements Change

alianani — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:17:10 -0000

Thanks for the cofusion_ is the man with the beer Bas? In this case I see a great example of metamorphism or transformation.

Re: Dear Craig - Why Requirements Change

alianani — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:11:54 -0000

This is a fantastic and illuminating reading.
In addition to what Bas stated, I would like to add the following remarks:

"In multi-stakeholder environments (i.e. large organizations) there is rarely one clear voice singing the requirements tune." This is consistent with the brain-opener book entitled " The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, by James Surowiecki. As we rely sometime on intuition, the sense of the crowd becomes important.

"The people you put into project management and requirements management roles don't have the right skills and knowledge." This is very wisely stated. People lack practical application of how to manage complexity. How to tune the findings of complexity into the diary of managers is still problematic. Most managers get scared of complexity and stick to their comfort zone. Avoidance will not solve any problem; yet many people continue doing that.

Re: Project Management And Feedback

alianani — Sat, 31 May 2008 01:43:13 -0000

The time factor is important in feedback. Feedback has a purpose to help managers to adapt to new realities with resilience. Slow motion feedback might lead to lagging adjustments and feedbacks are this way useless or might lead to incorrect adaptation. So, verbal feedback might be useful in reducing time frames. I concur with the need to verify information to ensure its correctness. Adaptation to wrong information might only lead to undesirable outcomes.

Re: Go To The Spike And Become Adaptive

alianani — Fri, 23 May 2008 04:49:18 -0000

Dear Dr. Brown,

I want to thank you for your remarkable comment.
I also encourage evry reader to read your post that has a linkage in your reply. In particular. and I quote your post, In reality economies and cultures that already have a critical mass are able to grow their ‘market share’ at the expense of less developed cultures and economies. Yes, we do see things eye to eye even evough we approach the same issue from different directions.

Re: Project Animals: The Deadly Basset

alianani — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:33:50 -0000

For your information some people in Russia are born with blue mark on their butts(It is true). How about introducing another theme in emulation of the animal theme: a color-based management system?

I corrected two spelling mistakes

Re: Project Animals: The Deadly Basset

alianani — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:24:20 -0000

This is an interesting reading. People have used animals in different occasions. The bull and bear market, the butterfly effect and the flying geeze growth model. These are exemplary examples.

Re: Lessons From The Pond For The Project Workforce

alianani — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 07:25:47 -0000

A silent idea or suggestion is static and generates hardly any interest. Revealing ideas sets motion and dynamism. We encourage readers to surface out their ideas and suggestions.

Re: Lessons From The Pond For The Project Workforce

alianani — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:11:24 -0000

Dear Jaideep,
We are absolutely encouraged by your heart-lifting remarks. An applied theory is the soundest theory and your rich experiences augment the application domain of our article.
You touched upon a highly important issue when you said "I slightly disagree to the line “single constant in business is resistance to change” as I believe there is another constituent to this as “another constant in business is change”.
We concur with your comment for we realize a constraint in one situation might not be the same constraint in different situations. This remind us of the Chinese proverb that states “A wooden barrel may be formed with staffs of uneven length; How much water it can hold depends on its shortest staff”. A constraint once fulfilled is not anymore the deciding constraint.

Re: Lessons From The Pond For The Project Workforce

alianani — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:44:12 -0000

It is interesting to look at hibernation positively. I like the positive attitude of the article. The ideas are unfamiliar and people may resist them for this reason.

Re: What Is The Best Way To Motivate Team Members?

alianani — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:13:33 -0000

I want to share with you a misunderstanding that might have lead to a ripple of motivational effects.
In an e-mail exchange with Bas de Baar I understood the world mean as unkind when he meant it as denoting or implying. I have been asking myself over the last two days had I not been corrected quickly by Bas what this misunderstading could have resulted in. How a small misundertanding could branch out into different relationships. A small misunderstanding could motivate a person to take a totally different course than if this small misundertanding did not occur.
We talk about motivation in a linear fashion: give more incentives and you shall end up in having more productivity. But beware of the Butterfly Effect that could send people into completely different directions.
What prompted me to write this comment is what Satin wrote in the previous comment that he was a lucky winner of a draw. Modesty that triggered rippling feelings of respect for a person that I have never met before.

Re: Project Management Code: Why Do You Do What You Do?

alianani — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:59:10 -0000

The human behavior is best observed in the stock market because of the mass of data available to the analyst. Herding of investors is a known phenomenon. People follow trend and in doing so they actually reinforce the trend even though it might be wrong. I believe lots of PMs follow trend and they do enforce a misleading trend because others do so. If the trend is to apply excessive control they end up doing that.
The climate of business is as much predictable as the weather forecast is. Only for a short period ahead we may be comfortable wirh the weather forecast. Likewise; uncertainty is very high in project management. The question is what to control? A deciding factor is the changing climate of business. It is uncontrollable and unpredictable. We may follow the trend of attemting to control the uncontrolable to end up in chasing a thread of smoke. We need to innovate new management doctrines for a rapidly changing work environment.
Thank you, Bas for an illuminating posting.

Re: What Is The Best Way To Motivate Team Members?

alianani — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:28:45 -0000

I want to congratulate the two winners. In fact every body is a winner as I am sure every participant added at least an idea or two to his knowledge. All are indeed winners.

Re: What Is The Best Way To Motivate Team Members?

alianani — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 06:14:02 -0000

I have just come accross this aricle, which I find quite interesting. It says:
A first step in developing motivated teams is helping people overcome a lack of motivation to do anything--which, if intense enough, becomes depression. The best model we have of this phenomenon is learned helplessness. People often get the idea that nothing we do matters. But, we can escape from this depression or pessimism into learned optimism.

The link is
http://www.deltanetwork.org...

Re: What Is The Best Way To Motivate Team Members?

alianani — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:41:07 -0000

I have already expressed my views on motivation on this site.
http://advice.cio.com/a-for...
Having stated that then I deprive myself of the originality to be eligible for the E-Book. But wait a minute, please.
There is complexity in motivation and this complexity warrants greater attention. The motivation to give incentives will work up to a certain range (optimal range). Say, somebody welcomes monetary incentives. But this is correct up to a limit, when the same person might seek different incentives such as more work responsibility. We have to watch for this switch-over in preferences. A second point is that within the optimal range there is a feedback mechanism that might lead to non-linear results. For example, giving more money the person will be motivated. This motivation increases his productivity and desirability to do more work, which in turn enhances his eligibility for more financial incentives. These positive feedback interactions lead to surprising results that re not linear.
To cut the story short, incentives produce complex behaviors. Humans are the same: in the stock market it is keeping the balance between greed and fear that generate the complexity of the stock market. Likewise, positive incentives lead to greater greed and threatening incentives lead to fear. It is the balance between these factors that generate complex behaviors and the nearer we are to the edge of chaos the further we are from being able to predict outcomes. Incentives need to be observed to watch for their effect. Observation leads to orientation, decisions and actions. Assumptions of what incentives may do are a faulty approach

Re: Stratification: Organizational Structures In A Pond

alianani — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:41:30 -0000

A refreshing reading on the subject is an article on Team Management: True leadership and teamwork. The link is
http://www.thinkingmanagers...

Re: Increase Your Management Skills By Meditation

alianani — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:42:03 -0000

To read a good review on Agility Equation and comments the following link is informative
http://advice.cio.com/a-for...

Meditation is an experimental endeavor. Mediatation has a positive effect in inducing mental balance. However; finding the right meditation technique and conditions require experimentation.

Re: Introducing The Fish Pond

alianani — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:11:51 -0000

Thank you all for your positive feedback. We are preparing an powerpoint presentation. Besides, we still have many more topics to cover and these topics shall cast more light on the fish pond metaphor. Simplifying complexity is a formidable task, as you are all aware