the Bridger » Knowledge management

July 4, 2010

Project managers must be consultants and must behave like consultants – it’s a bad day for “permies

Filed under: Knowledge management, project management, soft skills — Tags: human motivation — admin @ 12:03 pm

Ed Taaffe has enjoyed a twenty year career in management with the past ten years spent in Project management and takes a special interest I human motivation as a management tool. In this piece he explains why the consultant relationship with the client and the project team is critical to the success of projects.

This argument has nothing at all to do with the perennial disagreements between Contractors and “Permies” in the IT industry, though it does go part of the way to proving the contractor viewpoint right.

What does success look like?
First let me be specific about the project failures we are addressing. There are all kinds out there and as any good problem solver or six sigma practitioner will tell you, there is more than one way to apportion blame and define cause.

What I am specifically addressing is the high proportion of projects that get closed down, or arrive late enough , or sufficiently over budget, or of sufficiently low quality to be deemed a failure.

These projects all started off wit everything in place and going fine, then at some point they began to drift and continued to drift unchecked until they ended up a failure.

My assumption is that since many projects defy totally accurate prediction of time and cost, there is a built in expectation that budget, scope and or duration may have to move at some point, if this is done and agreed then there is no project failure. Project failure occurs when the rot sets in and it is ignored, or when the project is set up with immovable boundaries and finishes outside of them.

Knowledge management holds the key

Within the technology world there is a particular inability to understand the nature of knowledge and it is mostly equated to data, or at best and not often, to information. The trouble is that neither of theses viewpoints is helpful.
It is OK to believe that a software process demands a precise piece of data to work correctly and to live in a virtual world of absolutes as do many technically minded people, but that doesn’t wash in the real world and there lies the corpse of many a CIO.

in the real world of doers, makers and shakers, decisions are made by people and the key ingredient is not the data, but the implicit and tacit elements of the way the people interpret information.

Bear with me, I’m almost done with the boring stuff.
Cognitive Dissonance

Leon Festinger produced a study in 1957 at Stanford University whereby he clearly demonstrated that when somebody has reason to present an argument that is actually at odds with what he believes, he naturally alters is opinions as a result and finds himself agreeing much more with the argument that he previously disagreed with strongly.

It’s not hard to imagine how and why this might occur and there is plenty of further work exploring this aspect of the phenomenon of Cognitive Dissonance, however the most interesting part of the experiment carried out by Festinger demonstrated that when a reward, or threat was used to force, or induce the person to argue against his own beliefs or judgement, then the effect of Cognitive dissonance was lessened, or missing altogether.

Clearly the mind has no trouble in understanding the idea of being paid to hold an entirely objective opinion, which it seems almost incapable of achieving under other circumstances.

Implicit and tacit knowledge

Interpretation of information and comparing it with learned responses and experiential knowledge and bias is the essence of implicit and tacit knowledge. It is therefore critical, naturally that the information is interpreted in a fairly objective way if the resulting knowledge is to be accurate and reliable and good decisions made.

Take the situation where the project manager has been indoctrinated and reaffirmed again and again that the project is on schedule and will not fail, or will not slide and he has sent out the RAG reports and made reports and presentations to stakeholders and boards convincing them that everything is going well, how do you expect he will react to data, or information telling him that several key tasks have slipped and there are issues looming?

It’s all in state of mind

The fact is that if our project manage is part of the culture and one of the pack and he feels the pressure to make this project a success, he will convince himself so strongly of this that he will behave exactly like Festinger’s students did in his experiment back in 1957, he will fail to see, or assimilate that which contradicts what he has been told to believe by the peer group, that which is contradictory to the crowd consciousness.

The answer is simple

The project manager must be an independent consultant and he must be a facilitator only.
He must have no personal stake in the success or failure of the project in terms of hitting dates, amounts, or quality targets, but he must be someone who talks straight, keeps the “permies” honest, ignores the crowd pull and tells the Empror when he is wearing no clothes.

Comments (3)

November 14, 2008

About the author

Edward Taaffe has a 10 year record of achievement in project management in both the private and public sectors ranging from negotiating with local authorities to use centralised shared services to introducing ground breaking technology to government and convincing them of the benefits of early adoption.

Often referred to as a Bridger^TM Ed’s career has followed a path that combines almost ten year as a marketer and sales manager, where he acquired and polished his communication skills to a second career as a Software engineer and innovator. Edward uses many modern communication tools such as Prince 2 and Agile to support and frame communications in his projects, but he has always maintained that without the skills he brought with him to the table form his previous experiences he would have been poorly equipped for some of the challenges he faces on a day to day basis.
Today, Edward provides Project management and Product development expertise as an Interim, or short term consultant as well as providing training sessions, reviews and coaching for project teams and Product management teams worldwide.
Edward recently took up blogging as away to reach out to fellow professionals and form strong relationships for knowledge and idea sharing. You can contact Edward directly via the details below or connect via Linkedin. Ed[at]thebridger.co.uk

Comments (0)

October 9, 2008

The five stages of an IT project

Filed under: Knowledge management, Organisational change, Systems, project management — Tags: coach, defines four, disillusionment, madness, monkey, persecution, project 1, project management, taaffe, thng — admin @ 8:16 pm

1. Enthusiasm for the goals
2. Disillusionment with the progress
3. Search for the guilty
4. Persecution of the innocent
5. Praise for the nonparticipants

Einsteins definition of madness was “someone who keeps doing the same thng and expecting a different outcome.”

Johari’s theory defines four aspects of knowledge and ignorance.

Knowing what you don’t know,

knowing what you know,

What you don’t know you know

What you dont know you don’t know.

The third is a terrible waste and the fourth will make a monkey of you every time.

Wise up and get some training, get a coach, or get someone else to do it.

Ed Taaffe

Comments (0)

May 29, 2008

Tim Berners Lee is on the money yet again.

Filed under: Internet, Knowledge management, product development — Tags: Internet, Knowledge management — admin @ 6:21 pm

There’s been some hype going around that the internet volumes are beginning to clog it’s arteries and that there are issues ahead.

TBL reacted to this by saying something to the effect that; the internet is not at risk form volume of information but volume of misinformation.

Let’s just think about that. There was a time, long before Google, when a tool called webcrawler claimed to index every document on the internet and as I recall, it went damned close. Today nothing can do any better than scrape the surface and what is more, there is little appetite for doing it.

It was incredible what you could find with a bit of patience back then. For me the quality lay in the surprise. I was exploring as opposed to searching. In those days surfing was something a few cool people did instead of watching Corrie. Nobody has time for surfing now though.

The novelty became the business tool, became the competitive advantage became the essential productivity tool in less than a decade. Not only do we not have time to explore for nuggets of knowledge and correspond with interesting knowledgeable people around the globe, we need filters to delete 80 % plus of our mail, we are trying to develop trusted networks to find people it is safe to talk to and our problem in finding the information we once only dreamed of, but now rely on for survival, is one of wading through the rubbish to get to it. I suppose this effort counts in that equation, but if you can’t beat them, well!
My point is this, if you don’t know something, or worse still you don’t know that you don’t know, then more information, data, or even knowledge is probably not going to help you and in fact, it is inevitable that before long you will find several contradictory experts.

So where did it go wrong?

Man’s access to and use of knowledge has always involved trusted sources, be they books, or advisers and when things were really important, second opinions were critical.
It was never important to be right, just to be trusted. All sources were expected to be wrong sometimes, but far better than no knowledge at all

My favourite description of knowledge is the one that says it is “to know”. That implies it is known by a person. In scientific terms it is often broken down into explicit, implicit, and tacit.

Let’s explore this concept for a moment;

Very little knowledge is explicit and it generally refers to hard data in my view, though some will argue otherwise.

The fact that john selected b as his favourite response out of abcd is explicit. It’s not much use though.
Let’s jsut assume that we all now what the context of absd was, 100 replies like this would make up a useful block of explicit knowledge.(data in my book)
What that information tells us (implicit knowledge) , may be that the males prefer B and the females D. However, an experienced researcher might spot the fact that it had nothing to do with gender but, was a result of colour blindness, or another aspect lost on the rest of us. (tacit knowledge)
At this point you have the full package and you are reasonably safe to make a decision of some sort.
My view and most business people would go along with me, that any less than the full pcakkage would be dangerous indeed.

If we follow that hypothesis and set these standards for knowledge and if we measure the internet in this way, there is an enormous need for reliable knowledge that combines at least the first two elements if not all three, in order to be truly useful as a source of knowledge.

So far we have succeeded in creating a few working proptypes of semantic modelling and inference engines that are capable of implying a level of information int the raw data out there, if and when we ever find a way to implement it.

Here are my questions:
Where does the internet serve this need for knowledge?

Is it ever likely to get be achieved?

Is this need actually worth serving?

What would success look like?

Would more information or even more knowledge lead to better decisions with any degree of consistency?

Ed Taaffe

Comments (0)