Respect, understanding, trust, responsibility, growth all these words mean different things in different cultures. People from one culture may be acting respectful, but the interpretation of another person is disrespectful. When people feel dis-respected they have to act to save face. A great Global Project Manager knows dis-respect is a root cause for meaningless conflict, and preempts negative with a positive attitude. The leader uses vision to bind diverse stakeholders to a common goal. For example: Some of us might eat spaghetti with a fork and spoon, some of us might eat ramen with chopsticks but for this project we are going to join hands and get it done together. As a team we need to invent our own shared understanding of how to communicate. For example how quickly to respond to emails or requests for information. This is best done by communication.

Shareholder management is a concept that simply says that the owners of the company are the number one metric. The president of the company makes authoritative decisions like a Military leader and controls the resources to maximize profits for the owners of the company or the Shareholders. The concept is simply maximize profits for the Shareholders.

Why do we use “Stakeholder Management” on Global Projects? Why not just follow the simple commands of the leader above us? Stakeholder Management utilizes the concept of Salience. Salience is relative importance based on context. Stakeholder Management is complex and it has the goal of Maximizing value. Stakeholder Management assumes that we can align the organizations Business Values and the End Customers values. How we do that is by understanding where both dimensions will be in the end. The team creates a complex quality matrix that traces the process of creating value back to the origin.

In Global Project Management the Customer is King. The project manager facilitates complex matrix management by getting the different cross boundary people together. Face to face is recognized as the best way, but of course we can utilize technology and modern cloud computing to approximate as a virtual meeting. The Global Project Manager fosters innovation by getting disparate specialists to recognize the links in the chain. The Global Project Manager helps the team to build the network.

The team needs to recognize that the next person in the the process is the Customer @Saladis. The process or network customer has the responsibility to clearly communicate what are their metrics for success. The process or network “vendor” has the responsibility to confirm that they understand. The team members are simultaneously transacting as vendor-customer. Sometimes they need to be merciless egotistical bosses that demand the correct grade and quality. At the same time they need to be entrepreneurial capitalists that engineer value to fulfill their customers orders efficiently. How do we do this?

Clarify Requirements

Manage Expectations

Continuously Improve

People are connected to Project Success

Specifically, we need to understand the people that are connected and critical.   The problems we face is complexity.  Complicated projects span countries, time zones and cultures.  As Project Managers we need to set a goal to expand our knowledge.  We have to develop an artifact that dynamically communicates peoples hidden relationships in an explicit visual image. How can we do this?  We are going to explore.  First, where is mankind in terms of social networking? Second, visualizing social networks.  Finally, what would be the ideal solution for Project Managers.

"Rapid Growth in Soical Networks"

Why?  The BBC reports that each friend you have increases your earnings by 2%.  Perhaps, another reason is related to some research completed in December 2008.  ”Dynamic spread of happiness in a large network“.    The conclusion is not very surprising.  Peoples happiness depends on the happiness of whom they are connected to. Sounds pretty good!  An intangible quality of a successful project is the happiness of the people working on it.  If we look at the social aspects of game success in World of Warcraft, a study shows that it is not the quantity of people that determine winning.  Online winners are more likely related to their interconnectedness or closeness.

Cirlce of Friends

From the February 26th Economist Anthropological studies show that people can only mange about 150 friends.  Internal Facebook studies show that the most active stable groups are remarkably small.  Men will leave comments with about 17 people and women about 26.  We already know this we usually say something like “small circle of friends”.   Think about it…. If you are a man, are there 15 people you stay in close touch with?  For a women, do you have more than 25 close friends? Tight small groups of people are the most stable. Information spreads through our networks.  Some people think that the information will spread similar to a virus.  It will take some time to build and than once it reaches the tipping point it will accelerate until it peaks and then retrace.  The way these ideas spread are related to the type of person.  Gladwell describes 3 types of people.  “Connectors are the people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”  Mavens are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”  Salesmen are “persuaders”, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills.” This is related to recent information how Google cancels an incubation project.  The New York Times interview of  Jeff Hueber “When evaluating nascent projects, Google takes a hard look at interest – and in these cases, the interest simply wasn’t there… They were not especially popular with customers; they had difficulty attracting Google employees to develop them.” So we can see that.  Success is related to connections;  the critical core connections, the quality of those connections and the interest of the ideas of those connections.  If we can focus our management efforts on people who can connect and spread good information we can be more successful. More to Follow……

Ryoan-ji or ” The Temple of the Peaceful Dragon” is on the north-western edge of Kyoto. When we walk into Ryoan-ji temple grounds, we can feel peace because it is nestled in the trees and mountains. We can stroll along the 600 year old paths beneath cherry trees next to tranquil ponds and fragrant gardens.

When we enter the tea house there is a special type of Japanese Dry Rock  Garden pronounced “karesansui”.

Ryoanji Dry Rock Garden

We can view rocks emanating from sand waves. We can ponder the emptiness and the spaces between the rocks.

We also learn there are 15 rocks. What makes this somewhat special is that we cannot view all 15 rocks at once.

All of us; who have seen this garden, want to see all the rocks.

Legend has it from the proper perspective the enlightened master may view all the rocks.

We can view this as a metaphor for good Project Management Communications.

People can see parts of a project very clearly. Different people can see different parts. Good Projects identify the people involved, and their perspective in relationship to success. People are important for a happy satisfying project.  To foster creativity; an essential ingredient for new ideas, people have to have expression channels. People, may never see the other rocks.  Different people will need to know the nature of the other rocks and conversely they need to be able to express the fine grain detail of the rocks they can perceive.

Good skills involve understanding the layout of the garden, where the best position is to see all the rocks in the garden. Communicating with people means understanding not only what they know but what they don’t know or cannot see. Good skills also involve knowing the nature of the information.  By “nature of the information”, I mean that what to say, when to say, how to say and if to say is essential.

So our job as Project Managers or Masters of our Gardens is to become enlightened and to express the nature of the rocks that are impossible to be seen by others in the proper place and time. We can visualize that The Master Japanese gardeners designed these special places as lessons to let us contemplate knowing and not knowing.

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Photographs of Ryoan-ji dry rock garden by Frantisek Staud

Positional photographs of Ryoan-ji dry rock garden.

Article by Robert Higgins