You know you’ve been off the wires when you don’t even make the Planis list. I’m just plain not on it.
- Haiti’s Palais National in Ruins
So on the real, Haiti hit me like a sledgehammer. Many of my best friends are Haitian with family in Port au Prince. I have some weird connection to Haiti. Back in the day, when I was a single mom grad student with two kids under 6, someone funded a trip to Haiti for me. I was studying UN Peacekeeping at the time, and somebody anonymously informed my professor that my trip was paid for. My second trip was again on a UN Peacekeeping tip, where I developed the program to touch base with the Haitian people about thier perceptions of the UN Mission. A sort of a stakeholder analysis mixed with customer survey tour. The idea was to figure out what worked and what didn’t work when conducting an information operation. Check that out here if you’re interested.
Anyway – I was just really stunned for a while. As you probably were too.
But, I was fortunate to find the Crisis Camp people, a group of IT professionals working with International Development professionals on using extreme programming to stand up applications that assist responders in the field. Crisis Camp meets over weekends. I would say the first two weekend were more like Joint Application Design sessions and they have now moved into full development mode. There’s still stuff to do if you want to volunteer. Some things can be accomplished from the comfort of your own home.
Honestly, the CrisisCamp folks are amazing. They’ve come up with databases, firmware, hardware, apps, mobile apps, collaborative sites all in a few weeks. And this is working stuff. I believe they represent a new model in software development – the CAMP model. Imagine you can get all your project leads, your developers, your users together for all day development sessions week after week. The whole team works through requirements together, then builds, then reviews, then refines, then builds again. We PM pros should think about this a bit more. The idea is to remove all distractions, and focus in on the thing that needs to get done. Have the right people in the room who can make it happen. Its sort of like agile on steroids – but different in that its not just the developers. You do the whole thing…from strategy development, to PMO setup, and then development… in concise blocks of time. So instead of say, talking to stakeholders over a series of months to determine a CRM startegy in a large organization, you have a camp with all the key decision makers in the room and the goal is by the end of the day to come up with a strategy. (You may need a few more given the reality of office politics…but just follow me on this one). Once the strategy camp is done, they hand off to the project camp. A project camp would have team leads, requirements, networking, design, build, project management and determine a project strategy. Then say the requirements team could meet with user groups in all day camps to figure out requirements. etc. etc. The camps aren’t like cabins in the hills, they can be in a conference room, for example.
The idea is a timebox approach. Instead of trying to arrange around exisiting business rhythms, you create a short term business rhythm (a camp for one day). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say ‘if we could just get all the decision makers in one room, we could figure this all out.’ Basically, that’s what the camp model is about.
I know that there are plenty of caveats to this model, but I’ve heard the the Air Force does month long camps when they are developing capability documents. So rather than shop for comments throughout the organization via email, they just get all the heads in a room and hash it out. What takes the Army 3 months to do, takes the Air Force a less than 1.
And key to the success of the camp is the collaborative online real-time information web site. All projects need to have this. It’s fast becoming the standard; not having a collaborative project site in this day and age is like not having email in the 90s. Ya just gotta do it.
Professionally I’ve been swamped too. I’ve been fortunate to work on developing a model for Quality Assurance for one government agency and helping our team assist another agency develop a PMO for a large project. The lines between week day, week night and week end are all blurred at this point.
And, in this short time, I’ve learned some new techniques – more about the Integrated Master Schedule, and creating business intelligence metrics based and sourced from agency goals, traced through to process risks and controls. I’ll get more into that in my upcoming blog posts.
But the biggest growth point for me was this:
Fit no stereotypes. Don’t chase the latest management fads. The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team’s mission
General Colin Powell
Because on this new PMO project, I’ll be honest with you, my role is a little undefined. And that threw me for a loop because I’m all about documentation and clarity and definition. It took me a week to realize I was trying to fit a stereotype of the ‘on-site consultant providing big bad project management know it all expertise.’. Fortunately for me the bullshit meters at the client site are quite high, and I’m a big enough girl to know when people aren’t reacting to me the way I want them to, it something I’m doing, not them.
So I quickly adjusted and decided…hey, I’m going to be ok by observing the team, and following their lead. The situation is dictating the need here, not me. And supporting them, rather than directing them, is the way to go.
If you’ve read this far down, thanks for hanging in there on a long long post. Glad to be back.
