Project management consulting and training for social change organisations.
Thanks, everybody :)
Cake recipe. Icing recipe. Party details.
anniversary, birthday, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment
Happy International Human Rights Day! One year to go until we reach the 60th anniversary of the UDHR. As Irene Khan lays out in today's address to the Elders in Johannesburg, we've made significant progress over the last six decades, but still have a long way to go before we make it real. I am simultaneously positive and outraged.
Happy International Human Rights Day!
activism, amnestyinternational,humanrights, importantprojects, irenekhan, internationalhumanrightsday, nptech, theelders
Today is both International Project Management day and World Vegan day! Happy days! Not sure why International Project Management day has moved (last year it was November 2) but wow — what a combination of important events if you ask me (last night I was out with friends and they asked me which day was more important to me, which one meant more — I couldn't choose).
Hug your project manager and please go easy on the animal products today. Happy International Project Management and World Vegan day!
activism, environment, food, green, importantprojects, internationalprojectmanagementday, noanimalproducts, nptech, projectmanagement, sustainability, vegan, worldveganday
Just got an email saying Important Projects has been nominated for a New Media Award by the New Statesman in the category of Information and Openness. W00t! Very exciting. I'll never win it (I'm up against my clients, Greenpeace UK and Amnesty, the organisations I've been able to openly provide information about, along side many other amazing organisations, like mySociety), but wow. Thanks to whomever nominated me :)
But hey — if you want to nominate me in this category, please do, or if you want to comment on or rate the nomination, likewise :)
importantprojects, informationandopenness,newstatesman, newmediaaward, nptech, shameless, voteforme
There's an interesting event happening on May 9 in London called Participation 2007: Who's Leading Who? It will explore the state of ecampaigning and feature a few of the people at the forefront of this important and rapidly emerging area (i.e. people from Avaaz, Oxfam, Greenpeace, BBC World Service Trust, and FairSay).
You can learn more and register here!
ecampaigning, ECF, fairsay, importantprojects, participation
Thanks, everybody :)
anniversary, birthday, importantprojects, nptech, projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment
Today is International Project Management Day, the purpose of which is to:
I'm happy to see "quality of life projects" in the list of included-but-not-limited-to project types. All important projects are quality of life projects, IMHO :)
Happy International Project Management Day!
importantprojects, internationalprojectmanagementday, nptech, projectmanagement
Download the Vegan Society's new booklet, "Eating the Earth"!
Happy World Vegan Day!
activism, environment, food, green, importantprojects, noanimalproducts, sustainability, vegan, worldveganday
Shakespeare, Richard II
(act 5, scene 5, lines 42-49)
AND NOW DOTH TIME WASTE ME.
projectmanagement, timemanagement, importantprojects, shakespeare, richardII
Alright — Phillip, Rolf and I have been having a conversation about whether personal time management training is more important for not-for-profits than project management training, given that (to quote Phillip):
Initially, I thought we were debating this in terms of whether not-for-profits could or should put (to quote Phillip again) "traditional, top-down project management processes into practice." Red herring! Turns out we're debating whether personal time management training is more important than project management training for not-for-profits given that (again, says Phillip) "...many people don't have an accurate picture of their available time." Ahem. Alright, then!
I agree that understanding available time is critical to getting things done, especially when you're working on a number of things at once (and as not-for-profit staff always are). And I do recommend looking at David Allen's book — at the very least, his time-management-as-martial-art metaphors are very cool ;-)
The point I'll make in this post is this: very often, when folks working for not-for-profits are overextended and/or unable to manage their time effectively, the root cause is organisational (i.e. cultural), not individual. Culturally, not-for-profit organisations need to understand and value the concepts fundamental to good project management before individual staff are even in a position to manage their time effectively. It's ironic, but many not-for-profit organisations working for sustainability often do so in a very unsustainable way.
An example: when work is planned, effort estimates for individual tasks should be provided by the people who are going to perform those tasks, and not by the individuals/ teams/sponsors who may need the work done.
projectmanagement, timemanagement, training, nptech, importantprojects, community bandwidth, phillipsmith, rolfkleef, webofchange
Back in August of 2004, I met and became friends with Phillip Smith, founder of Community Bandwidth, organizer of Social Tech Brewing and co-convenor of Web of Change. Since then, we've had quite a few great, really enjoyable conversations over pints about project management and the not-for-profit sector — about whether or not project management processes are "lightweight" enough to work with social movement projects, whether or not "traditional" project management makes sense on community/volunteer-based and/or open source projects, and so on.
Now Phillip has posted a piece on project management vs. time management, arguing that for not-for-profits, training in the latter is more important than the former because few not-for-profits are in a position to put "traditional, top-down project management processes into practice." Ahem.
While I don't disagree with Phillip on the value and importance of personal time management training in the not-for-profit sector (very different from project time management training and a topic for another post), I'd like to address the whole "traditional- project-management-is-heavy-weight-and-top-down" thing briefly.
When Phillip says "traditional project management," I think what he really means is "bad project management." Not-for-profits do not have the time or money to apply project management processes inappropriately (and nor do/should other types of organizations). But "traditional" project management does not suggest that they do so — according to the PMBOK, "project management is the [appropriate] application of knowledge, skills, tools & techniques to project activities to meet project requirements." If the project management processes being used on your project are too heavy-weight or inappropriately top-down, they are not being applied correctly. And that's bad project management, traditional or otherwise.
projectmanagement, timemanagement, softwaredevelopment, nptech, importantprojects, community bandwidth, phillipsmith, socialtechbrewing, webofchange
Thanks, everybody :)
projectmanagement, softwaredevelopment, nptech, importantprojects, anniversary, birthday
Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide. During this idle time, the mysteries of science and space continue to elude us. What if each of the world's estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity's most pressing issues?
To make this vision a reality, Important Projects has joined World Community Grid, and is encouraging its network of friends, colleagues and associates to contribute their idle PC time in support of the Human Proteome Folding Project.
World Community Grid establishes a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. And World Community Grid is safe and easy to use.
To join, go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program. When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid's server. Your computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.
Important Projects is asking that people who join World Community Grid become members of Team Important Projects. As part of the team, members will earn points for Team Important Projects as well as for themselves. Important Projects will then publicize the points it earns as an association back out to its network.
World Community Grid will address global humanitarian issues, such as:
What is grid technology?
Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. This capability can be applied, on a global scale, to very large and complex problems for the benefit of humanity.
And the benefits are proven. In 2003, IBM was one of the sponsors of a smallpox study that took advantage of grid computing. This study, using today's largest available super computers, would have taken years to complete. With grid computing, this study was completed in less than six months and identified 45 potential smallpox-treatment candidates.
Join World Community Grid as part of Team Important Projects today!
I've been a member of the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-op (TREC) and a shareholder in the Exhibition Place turbine since 2002, and am very excited to have been elected to serve on the WindShare Board of Directors for 2005 and 2006. WindShare is a truly important project, developed by TREC to provide an opportunity for citizens to generate emissions-free electricity, and intended to profile wind power as a solution to smog and global climate change in a highly visible setting in Canada's largest city (the Ex Place turbine is the first utility-scale turbine in an urban environment in North America).
WindShare is also intended to profile community-based initiatives for the development of renewable energy, which it's doing a fantastic job of to date — WindShare was named Organization of the Year in 2004 by the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) in recognition of the co-op's efforts in "furthering the wind energy industry and the development of wind energy technology in Canada."
Again, I'm very excited to have been elected to the Board and look forward to volunteering my services to the co-op over the next 2 years.
Happy holidays :)
Last night I went to TradeStorm, an information technology/not-for-profit networking event organized and facilitated by Alex Sirota of NewPath Consulting (a great night — I would encourage both freelance IT consultants looking for meaningful work and not-for-profits looking for professional technology assistance to get involved in the next event). The evening was organized around a series of presentations, the most interesting of which (for me, at least) given by Allenna Leonard and Joe Truss on a facilitated group decision making and consensus building process called "Team Syntegrity." I'd read about Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes before, and understood the "doing more-with-less" efficiency principle, but was blown away to learn that Stafford Beer (founder of management cybernetics) had applied these principles (and specifically, the structural principles of the icosahedron) to the development of a collaborative, non-hierarchical, consensus-based decision making process that teams all over the world are using to optimize their effectiveness and efficiency while making group decisions and solving major problems.
The Team Syntegrity process is described in the book Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity — I haven't read it yet, but my understanding of the process is this: a team with an important question to answer (referred to as "the opening question") selects a group of 30 representatives to participate in a facilitated 2-3 day series of group discussions (referred to as a "Syntegration"). The group breaks down the opening question into 12 discussion topics, participants vote on which discussions they'd like to be involved in over the course of the 2-3 days, and people are assigned to discussions in teams of 5. The numbers 30, 12 and 5 are taken from the icosahedron, which has 30 edges and 12 vertices (with 5 faces meeting at each vertex).
As I understand it, the idea behind the process is that by mirroring the structure of the icosahedron in the communication design of the Syntegration, maximum efficiency is obtained (i.e. in the same way Bucky domes guarantee the efficient and unobstructed circulation of air and energy), and cross-linking and cross-pollination between people, teams and ideas is guaranteed. I'll post more once I've read the book — in the meantime, The Syntegrity Group website does a much better job of explaining the process than I have here :)
I've attached a very interesting slide to this entry — this is the "meta-topics" matrix Phil Dwyer was involved in developing a little while back. This matrix provides "importance weightings" for 39 social issues relative to 5 meta-topics (ecodesign, globalization, human/animal rights, pollution and sustainable agriculture).
Based on this matrix (and the research that went into developing it), climate change and nuclear power/weapons are the 2 issues that rank most important, as they both relate to all 5 meta-topics in one way or another.
But how were the meta-topics selected for the purposes of this matrix? Phil, can you comment?
From Time and the Art of Living, by Robert Grudin.
What makes a project important? For me, a project is important when its products benefit a social purpose or create social value. And to the same extent, when team members consider the work involved meaningful because they care passionately about the planned project outcomes.
What makes a project important?
