Project Collaboration Roundup – leading change, teamwork groundrules

Posted on 05. Aug, 2011 by ger in New Ways to Work

Agile Project Collaboration Roundup 2 (seeds of change)

Seeds of Change (by Clearly Ambiguous)


We’re now in the quiet weeks of August, what better time to recharge the batteries and think a bit more strategically about your business? Here’s some interesting posts and articles we found on the interwebs recently.

If you want to lead deep organizational change

Steve Denning outlines the four story types you need. By way of example he uses “leaders and managers have to unlearn the management practices that were so successful in the 20th Century but so unsuccessful today.”

    We now know precisely how unproductive traditional management is—declining rate of return on assets (one quarter of what it was in 1965), declining life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 (less than 15 years) and lack of engagement of workers (only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her work.)

It’s not enough to quote facts and statistics though. It’s not enough to force people to change by dictat. It’s not enough to send a pep talk email to everyone in the organization or film a town hall meeting.

    Prose remains unread. Dialogue is just too laborious and slow. By contrast, leadership stories can get inside people’s minds and affect how they think, worry, wonder, agonize and dream about themselves and in the process create – and recreate – their organization.

If you’re wondering what kinds of career paths will be of value in the coming decade

Lynda Gratton on the CorkBIC newsletter suggests Grassroots Advocacy, Social Entrepreneurship and Micro-Entrepreneurship. This will bring real challenges in terms of coordination and project management:

    they will be part of a much larger collaboration of many thousands of people brought together to experience economies of scale. Whatever the mechanism of coordination, we can expect a greater proportion of the valuable work in companies to be carried out by people working independently.

If you are interested in some simple groundrules for teamwork

Kristóf Kovács published three simple principles for effective teams:

  • ASK: If a task is not clear
  • DEBRIEF: It’s not done until you reported it done
  • WARN: If a deadline you know is important will likely be missed

More details on his site. It’s all about clear communication.

If you’re in Ireland and you’re interested in Agile Quality Strategies

SoftTest are organizing a couple of events in August on 10th (Belfast) & 11th (Dublin). David Evans an uber experienced agile coach and consultant will be talking about agile testing and quality. The event is free and sponsored by InterTrade Ireland, Sogeti and Software Skillnet.

Thanks for reading

We hope you found something useful. If you’re interested in a collaboration / project management platform that can guide your teams to be more effective, check out Goshido.

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