 Reforming Project Management |
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Friday, April 25, 2003
Can Blogs Aid in the Role of Management?
Management by Blog? Some see it coming, but it's not here yet. writes
Jimmy Guterman in this week's Business 2.0 Barely Managing column.
Blogs are popular. This business blogging thing is like a solution looking for a problem. So where might the problem lie? How about the ongoing articulation and activation of the network of commitment? Guterman offered these observations: The internal weblogs I've seen work are those that track an idea's progress from offhand notion to fully matured proposal. I have seen three such blogs, always-on virtual whiteboards that have sped development and kept the status of projects clearer than they'd been before.Weblogs can fill a gap in the systems and practices of coordinating action by providing a tool for the team. Some think management's job is to control what is happening on our projects. Let's leave that job to an informed team with appropriate tools. The Role of Management
I've written in this weblog about the linguistic action perspective as it applies to projects. Greg Howell and I have authored a paper to be presented at the International Group for Lean Construction in July 2003 at Virginia Tech. The paper is titled Foundations of Lean Construction: Linguistic Action. I can't publish the paper here ahead of time, but I've decided to explore some of the key points. I'll start by sharing an altogether different view of management.
Fernando Flores, often referred to as a practical philosopher, offered the following definition of management in his doctoral dissertation titled Management and Communication in the Office of the Future, 1982, University of California Berkeley. Management is that process of openness, listening, and eliciting commitments, which includes concern for the articulation and activation of the network of commitments, primarily produced through promises and requests, allowing for the autonomy of the productive unit.At the time he was speaking about the work in the offices of business. However, he could have been writing about projects. Flores is saying that work is accomplished by eliciting commitments with one another. Management's task is to see to the effective workings of the systems and practices employed for making and delivering on those commitments. We can think of projects as temporary business endeavors. There is no time for the processes and systems to mature as they would in the usual business setting. Projects complete too quickly for that. The temporariness of projects calls for more attention, not less, at the outset of a project on the design of the systems and practices that together manifest the "articulation and activation of the network of commitment." Examples of coordination systems and practices include forums for planning, agendas for detailing tasks and assignments, protocols for capturing commitments among participants, open-item lists for working off unresolved questions, routines for coordination meetings like the daily Scrum. Too often project teams default to what the leader did on the last project or whatever is called for in the company policy. This robs the project of an approach that fits the circumstances and complexities of the situation. Visit the Archives for more postings |
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