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

Dynamic Interactive Visualizations

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) 'The eye, the window of the soul is the principal means by which the central sense can most completely sense and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature

In Part I of this series on visualizations we developed a compelling reason how success is related to our people.  To summarize:  Success is related to peoples connections to each other,  not only their  connections but the critical core connections, the quality of those connections and the ownership of those connections.  In the second part we are going to  delve deeper into the current technology for visualizing information.

The purpose of this Part II blog post is to evaluate current visualization and interaction techniques.  Dynamic Interactive Visualization will allow us to abstract the information, effectively analyze data and make decisions.  This is an area that is undergoing tectonic shifts and new techniques are evolving every day.

PMBOK- Project Management Book Of Knowledge- Stakeholder Visualization

First, lets make sure we know who are we talking about.  We are talking about specific people on projects.   ‘A stakeholder is a person or group who has a direct interest and impact on the project outcome and determines whether the project is a success or not’ (Kathy Schwalbe, 2006) .  These people expect that something will be delivered.  Understanding what people want and communicating is the fundamentals of carrying out a project.  PMBOK recommends first we discover the people who can influence a project the most.  Second we classify these people according to their impact. Finally, we rate their interest.

As a starting point we can easily see Figure 10-4 that the Stakeholders who are in the Manage Closely group will require the most time.  For example H and F.  This 2-d image is static.  It can be easily generated on a napkin. The PMBOK guide does not detail how to measure Interest or Power so it has a subjective quality.  Experienced Project Mangers can often gauge interest similar to how Sales People can get a feel for their clients.  But Communicating this to other people, or across cultures may be more challenging.  The PMBOK  describe the  fundamental concept.  This process is as critical as it is universal; discover, classify and rate.

According to Figure 10-4 Visually we can easily see who we need to devote time and effort communicating with.   But we are looking to the future and how we can propel our projects forward naturally, by creating dynamic self illuminating visual information.  I argue that the best way to grasp and communicate about complicated complex project social knowledge, is by using the enormous visual bandwidth available to us.

An Analog tool to visualize stakeholders can be as simple as a chess, checkers set.  This type of very low tech item can be used for example in an environment in which computer skills are very limited.  Or it can also as a part of brainstorming team to capture what a group is thinking about.  The idea is that the pieces would be symbols of stakeholders, the board could be laid out similar to the “Figure 10-4″ from PMBOK 4 page 294.  The people can be elevated by placing the chess pieces on the checker pieces to create relativity.  String or colored pipe cleaner could be used to represent the connection between these people so that the critical nodes can be clearly identified.  An out of the box solution for sale commercially is Net-Map Tool Box.

How Infuential are your stakeholders?

This has great potential as part of a team building meeting and with a little creativity this can be imported with cameras both still and video to share and capture the knowledge.

Doctor Lynda Bourne of Stakeholder’s Circle has a Stakeholder specific visualization tool.    This Project Management Tool is specifically designed to identify, prioritize, map, engage and monitor people working on a project. From the literature it shows a type of visualization known as a  “Tree/Radar Map”.

More on academic research in this type of visualization is being done at University of Trier this visualization technique can be used ‘to represent weighted dynamic compound digraphs, which express a sequence of directed and weighted graphs where nodes correspond to leaves in a hierarchy’.

Time Radar Trees.

This is a technical description but we can easily visualize how the stakeholder nodes of influence can combine with actual activities and events in a project.  The inner Radar graph could be the project and the outer radars or thumbnails could be the stakeholders.  Personally for me, This type of visualization is eerily similar to what I imagine in my mind when I am cognating project social abstracts .  How can we consider the holistic project details and how the stakeholders influence ebbs and flows over time?  It is very difficult for us to express these abstract concepts using only words or pen and paper.

Academic  Research is rapidly evolving and new tools are being announced every day.  I have spent quite a bit of time exploring Doctor Tamara Munzer’s research.  This research is very detailed and informative.  Extreme granularity can be found in her Accordion Drawings.  This research is exploring how to visualize complex information for example `a system designed to support the comparison task for large trees of several hundred thousand nodes`.  This is fabulous research to process information and find the patterns and most likely could apply to the ultra complex mega projects.

Email Post Historical Visualizations

MIT has an interesting tool they used to view email and frequency over time, you can view some of the images from this project  Visualization of Social History.

Unfortunately it is not interactive, this is a concept that Project Managers could adapt for usage.

Stanford’s University Pat Hanrahan .  His presentation on Self Illuminating Phenomena is particularly inspiring.

Self Illuminating Phenomena Down Wash Voritces

I am a fan of a visual that can show our project status update dynamically based on some quantifiable metrics that describe our stakeholders expectations.   Ideally, we would like to have something in which we use all the tools available to us a project managers such as interviewing, modeling, analyzing relationships to let the Phenomena Self Illuminate.  As Doctor Hanrahan describes “A self-illustrating phenomenon is an image that is generated automatically as a result of an experiment. More importantly, it is an image that exposes the phenomenon behind the observation.”  This is precisely what we are looking for.

Part III to follow…..

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……