I'm sitting in my room at The Residence in the Singapore Recreation Club looking out of the window onto the Padang. T. As happens in Singapore at this time of the year the heavens have opened and I can barely... Dave Snowden http://www.cognitive-edge.com

Google books has the BABOK available for free online reading.

I think this is a great idea from the guys at the IIBA.  Congratulations IIBA on sharing knowledge rather than restricting it to those that can afford to join the club.  It highlights the altruistic nature of the organisation.

• BABOK 2.0 on Google books

One of the most combative industries world-wide is the building and engineering industry. Many legal systems have dedicated construction law courts and others have enacted legislation designed to specifically manage construction industry disputes. In Australia alone, it is estimated the construction industry could save AU$7 billion through better stakeholder and contract management processes that minimise or eliminate avoidable disputes.

Research in reducing theses excessive costs has resulted in the publication of The Guide to Leading Practice for Dispute Avoidance and Resolution. The Guide recommends management strategies to avoid contractual disputes between clients, contractors and other stakeholders, and where disputes cannot be avoided, to manage disputes effectively. Whilst this research was developed by the Australian building and construction industry it has a much wider application and is recommended reading for any manger involved in establishing or overseeing a major project.

The Guide was developed by the CRC for Construction Innovation prior to its closure in 2009. To achieve a balanced view, the CRC-CI engaged with a cross section of organisations in the built environment industry supply chain including the Association of Consulting Engineers Australia, Australian Constructors Association, Australian Procurement and Construction Council, Civil Contractors Federation, Queensland Dept. Transport and Main Roads and Main Roads Western Australia in the work leading to this report.

The CRC for Construction Innovation completed its work on the 31st December 2009 and has closed down. To keep these valuable reports in circulation we have created a repository on the Mosaic web site. The following publications and documents are available to download from the ‘Legal Papers section of the Mosaic site:
 - Guide to Leading Practice for Dispute Avoidance and Resolution
 -  Guide to Leading Practice for Dispute Avoidance and Resolution: An overview
 -  Dispute Avoidance and Resolution (literature review)
 -  Causal Ascription of Disputes (report)
 -  Strategies for Dispute Avoidance (report)
 -  An exploratory study of project dispute pathogens (journal article)
 -  Causal Modelling of Construction Disputes (refereed conference paper)

Download The Guide and associated reports

Here’s an old column I’ve meant to comment on for a while.  Dan Woods’s Jargon Spy is almost always a good read, and his take on The Myth of Crowdsourcing punctures some of the more cherished notions of social media and its power to create.   He goes right for the granddaddy of them all:

Wikipedia seems like a good example of a crowd of people who have created a great resource. But at a conference last year I asked Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about how articles were created. He said that the vast majority are the product of a motivated individual. After articles are created, they are curated–corrected, improved and extended–by many different people. Some articles are indeed group creations that evolved out of a sentence or two. But if you took away all of the articles that were individual creations, Wikipedia would have very little left.  

Human innovation is the history of porting “applications” from one language, media, platform, or form factor to another.  In tech, we’ve moved app after app from pen and paper, to microcomputers, to PCs, and now to mobile.   Crowdsourcing “innovates” in much the same way, leveraging an existing paradigm but not really creating one. 

After all, Wikipedia is just another manifestation of an encyclopedia.  And who do we credit for that, the classic editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which were inspired by Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which built on Chamber’s Cyclopedia, and so on, and so on..?

Filed under: PMO Tagged: co-innovation, Cyclopaedia, Dan Woods, Denis Diderot, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopédie, Innovation, Jargon Spy, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia

Today is the one year anniversary of the NYC R Statistical Meetup. Starting as a small group meeting in a crowded conference room, Josh Reich established the meetup as the premiere gathering of data geeks in the tri-state area. Over the past year we have had 10 meetups, and two more upcoming on the calendar, covering a wonderfully varied set of topics on the application of R.

All of this activity has also generated a large set of data, and what better way to celebrate anniversary of our group than to analyze that data using R?

Meetup Descriptions Word Cloud

First, I downloaded all of the meetup descriptions into a text file (yes, I copied and pasted them) and created a word cloud.

This was actually very easy in R, taking only about 40 lines of code.

There is probably a better way to specify the X and Y coordinates in order to minimize word overlap, but after some trial and error runif gives decent results. The above cloud actually provides interesting insight into our group. As you can see, we are focused on analysis using specific R packages, particularly with respect to graphics. Also, the Conways remain a dominate force in all things data and R.

Member Activity Time-Series

Meetup.com provides organizers with lots of data related to a group’s activity. They provide information on the growth of the group, as well as the number of people joining and RSVPing events. Below is a combined chart of this data.

The data was generated by Meetup.com, so here the trick was getting everything into a single data frame and dealing with missing data and formats.

UPDATE: I tweaked the chart a bit to show the data more clearly, as well as have the true number of members along with the total number of “active” members. For some reason the data provided on group size does not start until mid-August 2009, so I have used the number of people joining the group before then as an estimate.

Note that the total number of members has been divided by 10 for scaling. I am not completely satisfied with this graphic, but it does provide a good illustration of the cyclical nature of member activity and the constant rate of growth for our group. Also, it is nice to see the number of RSVPs increasing—perhaps we are writing better descriptions.

The code and data used to generate these charts can be downloaded in the ZIA Code Repository. As always, I welcome other analyses and suggestions.

I've been asked a lot by many different researchers how they can get their hands on behavioral data logging programs that work on cell phones, such as in Nathan Eagle and Sandy Pentland's landmark Reality Mining study. Ben Waber http://www.media.mit.edu/~bwaber/

As you may have guessed by the absence of performance reports, Operation Dunk 2010 was stalled for a bit.  I allowed the demands of work and family to get in the way, but we’re back on the beam.  Luckily, the damage wasn’t too great, as I have remained active. 

Weight — Up2.5 lbs from week 4 (251.5 from 249)

Wii Age — I’m at 37, which is down from my last two reading of 45 and 55.

My balance and endurance has been clearly improving.  I believe that stems from my concentration on the obstacle course, as that contains a jumping motion and gives a pretty decent 2-5 minute workout per run.

Filed under: PMO Tagged: capabilities, capability building, deliverables, goal-setting, KPI, New Year's Resolutions, performance reporting, weight loss, Wii, Wii Fit

In a series of weekly pieces for The New York Times, Steve Strogatz, a marvelous network scientist, has been very good. My favorite so far, which gets right into balance theory and transitivity, is this one. Follow him on Mondays... Stan Wasserman

Listen to this story and think about how and why project stakeholders react to your project outcomes.


Experience is only part of the story.  Memory, and it's related but different perceptions of what really happened is another - even more important - part.

On Tuesday I start another semester of teaching PM to a bunch of students enrolled in a Masters of IT.  I've been doing it for two years so far.  This is my third.

Teaching is an interesting job.  It's tiring lecturing and delivering all the time.  I am still working on maturing my delivery so that there is less talk (by me) and more action (by the students.)  The great bit is working with people who want to learn.  (Which fortuitously I also get at my day job.)

If you are relatively new to this blog you may not have seen the slide decks i put together.  If not, take a look at it over at Slideshare.  Share it with our team if you think they'll find it useful.
The Project Management Process - Week 1
View more presentations from Craig Brown.

If you are attending the CHI 2010 conference in Atlanta and are interested in social media network analysis, consider attending this tutorial:

CN03: Introduction to Social Network Analysis
Time: Monday, 12 April 2010, 11:30 to 18:00
Organizers: Marc A. Smith, Panayiotis Zaphiris, C.S. Ang, Derek Hansen
Benefits
This course provides an overview of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and demonstrates through theory and practical case studies how it can be used in HCI (especially computer-mediated communication and CSCW) research and practise. This topic is of particular importance due to the popularity of social networking websites (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc.) and social computing. As people increasingly use online communities for social interaction, new methods are needed to study these phenomena. SNA is a valuable contribution to HCI research as it gives an opportunity to rigorously study the complex patterns of online communication.

Social network theory views a network as a group of actors who are connected by a set of relationships. Actors are often people, but can also be nations, organizations, objects etc. Social Network Analysis (SNA) focuses on patterns of relations between these actors. It seeks to describe networks of relations as fully as possible. This includes teasing out the prominent patterns in such networks, tracing the flow of information through them, and discovering what effects these relations and networks have on people and organizations. It can therefore be used to study network patterns of organizations, ideas, and people that are connected via various means in an online environment.

Audience
We welcome practitioners and academics interested in computer-mediated communication, universal design, and social software. No background knowledge about Social Network Analysis or statistics is required.
Origins
Versions of this course were delivered as tutorials at HCII 2007, 2009, Nordi-CHI 2009, INTERACT 2009, the INSNA Sunbelt Social Network Analysis Conference, the 2009 Communities and Technologies Conference and is scheduled to be run this Summer at the Stanford Media – X workshop and the 2009 Social Computing Conference . The content of the course is also part of the Inclusive Design course at the Cyprus University of Technology and has been taught in the context of a class on Communities of Practice at the University of Maryland, College of Information Studies. The course is constantly being revised and modified to account for current trends in this dynamic and emerging research area.
Features
Upon completion of this course, participants will:

• understand the basics of SNA, its terminology and background;
• be able to transform communication data (e.g. YouTube, MySpace etc.) to network data;
• understand the different possible presentations of social networks, e.g in a matrix or a sociogram;
• know practically how SNA can be applied to HCI (especially CMC) analysis;
• get familiar with the use of standard SNA tools and software in general and the NodeXL social network analysis add-in for Excel in particular; and
• be able to derive practical and useful information through SNA analysis that would help designers cultivate more successful online communities.

Instructors

• Dr. Marc A. Smith is a sociologist and Chief Social Scientist at Connected Action Consulting Group, a provider of fine quality social media analysis platforms and systems. Smith specializes in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. He founded and managed the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington and is now leading the development of social media reporting and analysis tools for Connected Action. Smith lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. [ Marc@connectedaction.net, http://www.connectedaction.net, http://delicious.com/marc_smith/]
• Dr. Panayiotis Zaphiris is the departmental coordinator and an Associate Professor at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology. His research interests lie in HCI with an emphasis on inclusive design and social aspects of computing. More information can be found at http://www.zaphiris.org .
• Dr. C.S. Ang is a Lecturer at Kent University, UK. His research interests include social aspects of computer games, computer-mediated communication and agent-based simulation of social networks.
• Dr. Derek Hansen is assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College of Information Studies and the Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information. Hansen focuses his research and teaching on social computing, mass collaboration, consumer health informatics, and information services.

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I will attend and speak at a symposium being heldMarch 24-25, 2010 at the IE University Department of Communication in Segovia, Spain.  The topic is: Transnational connections: Challenges and opportunities for communication.

“The Symposium aims to generate discussion on cutting-edge ideas in political communication, encourage international cooperation and unite scholars and practitioners.”

The symposium is organized with Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Organizer and founding Dean of IE School of Communication, Samuel Martín-Barbero notes that the event will gather:

“More than forty international panelists, moderators and speakers (who) will not only reflect on the state of the field, but will also discuss cutting-edge advances in theory, research and practice.”

I will attend along with my colleague John Kelly, from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University and Founder of Morningside Analytics.

Here is the Program, a link to the Registration, and the Twitter stream for the conference.

I will speak about “Analyzing Internet social media: visualizing the social networks in computer networks”, details follow:

Social media systems on the Internet are sociologically interesting: why do some online groups succeed where others fail?  How do different collections of online media and populations of authors differ from one another?  How do patterns of contribution vary and how do these differences illustrate the roles people play within their communities?  Several visualizations of patterns of contribution and connection in a range of Internet social media including web boards, enterprise social networks services, and personal email are presented to illustrate the range of variation among social media repositories and between types of contributors.  These images suggest that a more comprehensive overview of social media can generate sociologically relevant findings, improve community management tasks as well as provide features that can improve search and ranking of user generated content.  A freely available tool, NodeXL, will be demonstrated to perform basic social media analysis tasks.  Extending these tools to include mobile social software (“mososo”) data sets is a major new direction.   In the not too distant future, mobile devices will possess a range of sensors and become  more “socially aware”.  When phones routinely notice each other the nature of social interaction will change dramatically.  How will places and  locations change when machines become socially aware?  In this talk, sociologist Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist for Connected Action Consulting Group, a provider of social media analysis platforms and services, will describe these new technologies and some ways of thinking about their implications.

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The Annual Meeting of the Israel Internet Association (http://www.isoc.org.il (English)) was held February 22-23 2010. I spoke at this year’s meeting: http://www.isoc.org.il/conf2010/agenda.php?lang=en

Part 1

Part 2

The previous year’s conference website is at: http://www.isoc.org.il/conf2009/program.php

The Israel Internet Association is the official Israeli Chapter of the Internet Society.  Their annual meeting is a central event of academics (sociologists, psychologists, business and law) as well as industry participants from sectors including mobile cellular companies and internet service suppliers.

My talk title: Analyzing Internet social media: visualizing social networks in (mobile) computer networks Abstract: Social media systems on the Internet are sociologically interesting: why do some online groups succeed where others fail?  How do different collections of online media and populations of authors differ from one another?  How do patterns of contribution vary and how do these differences illustrate the roles people play within their communities?  Several visualizations of patterns of contribution and connection in a range ofInternet social media including web boards, enterprise social networks services, and personal email are presented to illustrate the range of variation among social media repositories and between types of contributors.  These images suggest that a more comprehensive overview of social media can generate sociologically relevant findings, improve community management tasks as well as provide features that can improve search and ranking of user generated content.  A freely available tool, NodeXL, will be demonstrated to perform basic social media analysis tasks.  Extending these tools to include mobile social software (“mososo”) data sets is a major new direction.   In the not too distant future, mobile devices will possess a range of sensors and become more “socially aware”.  When phones routinely notice each other the nature of social interaction will change dramatically.  How will places and locations change when machines become socially aware?  In this talk, sociologist Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist for Connected Action Consulting Group, a provider of social media analysis platforms and services, will describe these new technologies and some ways of thinking about their implications. Photos from the trip: Share and Enjoy:

By now we should all have an idea what Kano analysis looks like. There are basic, performance and excitement classes of requirements. You generally have to work your way through the basic ones before you can start to address the other categories.

I have been reading Daniel Kahneman’s work on decision making and found he’s got some concepts on the importance of reference points for decision making. He talks about “Bernoulli’s error.

Are you with me?

I’ll back up two steps and cover the “Bernoulli’s error” concept here.

Basically this is the guy who gave us the normal distribution. The thing he came up with is decision making ‘should’ be based upon logic and rational thinking. It’s also fixed on a particular reference point (i.e. the day you analyse the situation and make a decision) and the decision extends into the future.)

So, an example; You need to work out the best car for you.  The Aptera 2e may be the right choice. It was always the right choice, and it always will be. At least until a better car comes along.

But.

If you are already driving the ZAP Alias, the decision to migrate to the Aptera may be a different one that if you are driving something a little older.

The mistake that Kahneman identifies and articulates is that our reference points change over time. What we perceive as valuable, or risky today, is different from the past and will be different in the future.

Kano recognises this and sees that what can be an ‘exciter feature’ today will eventually be commoditized.

Another example for the business casers out there. A return on a project of $10 million a year sounds okay now, but what if a better opportunity comes up later? Does our decision to go for $10Mpa stand?

And at the more detailed level, a system requirement that sounds like a basic and mandatory feature today might become irrelevant later, as more becomes known about the way users interact with the system itself.

Of course you eventually have to commit to something and you can’t just keep abandoning projects or requirements as something better comes up. You have to be able to see where you are and where your next step will take you. Divining too far into the future is pointless and results in ‘analysis paralysis.’

We (Cognitive Edge) would be really grateful if you would be prepared to share your thoughts, fears and hopes about the current state of the world post the financial cris. What are the implications for public service? How will our... Dave Snowden http://www.cognitive-edge.com

In Jan and Derek's article I linked to yesterday there is a set of statistics from the IIBA 'Practices survey" from 2008.

"Whilst the most regularly used diagramming technique was flowcharting (63%), when it came to formal diagramming notations, use case led the way (55%) followed by data flow diagrams (42%), activity diagrams (38%) and context diagrams (34%). Entity relationship diagrams were still widely used (30%) and BPMN came in at 13%."

These tools and their spread is interesting. Something to consider is the likely response bias. The IIBA is still a relatively new organsaition and so the respondents are likely to be people who are particularly engaged in the development of the BA community.

I suspect the respondents are a little more experienced than the average, probably a little older as well.

Does this mean the survey is biased towards older, less modern techniques?

And if so, does this mean that there are a set of proven and pragmatic tools that are being ignored by the newer generations of Business Analyst?

Everyone that writes on the role of the business analyst eventually has to cover their take on what the role actually is about.

One of the best articles I read when doing research for my own position was by Jan Kusiak and Derek Brown. Last year I met Jan at the BA World conference and had a friendly argument about the value that a BA should provide.

My take went straight to the top of the startegic apex. A business analyst needs to be able to link their contribution to the organisational mission.

Jan countered with the fact that BAs develop their career over time and usually come out of frontline operations areas, first as an SME in either a business area of technology domain. He explained that a fledgeling analyst needs to master the basics of the role; communication, systems thinking and so on, before elaborating and extending their capabilities.

It takles a while, it seemed he was saying to me, for a typical analyst to really build their skills to a level that gives them the ability to get to where I think they (we) should be operating.

Fair enough. Everyone has their own path.

Anyway, RQNG has just published an updated version of Jan and Derek's take on "What is a BA."

If your work with business analysts, if this is your job today, or if you want to become a BA this is a great read.

• What is a Business Analyst

Shawn Callahan and I are helping to organise an inaugural “Business Narrative” conference within the International Storytelling Festival in Singapore September 6-8 2010. This is going to be a very practitioner oriented conference looking at approaches and techniques that bring value to the organisation. We’re now launching our first call for case studies to be shared at the conference from the Asia Pacific region (details below). I do hope you’ll pass this post on if you think you know somebody who’ll be interested. Shawn and I will both be happy to answer any questions you have.

Call for Case Studies: Origins – Asia Pacific Business Narrative Conference Sept 6-8 2010 Singapore

In early 2009 we (Shawn Callahan and I) wanted to see if we could put together a conference on storytelling for business. Our concept was for a very practical, workshop-focused conference, designed to help Asia Pacific business people apply story approaches to boost business performance. But we weren’t sure if anyone would come!

So we organised a two-day masterclass on business narrative as part of The Singapore International Storytelling Festival, and the festival did a wonderful job in telling people about the event. We waited anxiously to see if anyone would register. Did Asia Pacific organisations really value storytelling as a legitimate and effective business technique? I called Shawn in Melbourne a couple of weeks after we announced the event: registrations were coming in fast. We were booked out months in advance.

This year we want to build on that success and focus on the many story practitioners in our region to create an event where we can learn from each other while also expanding the awareness of narrative approaches among the region’s organisations. We’re looking for proposals for case study presentations from within the Asia Pacific region to share what you have done and what you have learned.

The conference has three objectives

• To build a network of practitioners to deepen the practice of storytelling and story use in organizations.
• To create awareness of the broad utility of narrative techniques for dealing with business issues, their capacity to humanise the workplace, and to help organisations deal with complexity and
  uncertainty.
• To inspire leaders to take the first steps in applying narrative techniques in their businesses.

Conference design

The event will have three parts:

Day 1 will be a closed practitioner’s forum for the conference speakers and case study presenters only. We will spend the day sharing what we have learned from a practitioner’s perspective. The day will be designed for dialogue rather than presentations.

Day 2 will be a public conference where practitioners will present case studies that illustrate the effectiveness of story-work; and

Day 3 will consist of a set of 1/2 day workshops to enable attendees to build their business story skills in specific areas such as coaching, organisational change, leadership development and communication.

Do you have a case study to share?

We are seeking expressions of interest to share a case study at the conference. We are particularly interested in stories of working with narrative in organizations, across private, public and non-profit sectors. They should clearly illustrate the value of how stories and storytelling can be used to meet the organisation’s business needs.

Case presenters will:

• Participate in the closed practitioners’ forum on 6 September
• Share their case study in round table discussions in the morning of 7 September
• Offer to share a technique they have successfully used in a “techniques marketplace” session in the afternoon of 7 September
• How we will select the case studies

We will select case studies based on:

• richness of the case for learning
• transferability of the lessons
• demonstrated impact
• innovative approaches
• geographic representation
• representation of different kinds of organization

Please send a short description (a couple of paragraphs) to both Patrick Lambe (plambe-at-straitsknowledge.com) and Shawn Callahan (shawn-at-anecdote.com.au) before 22nd March. We’re also happy to trade ideas by email or Skype if you want to develop an idea before you decide to put a more formal description together.

This is question a lot of people ask me: Can we show network changes over time? Can we find out, if we made a difference? Will we even be involved long enough to be able to make a difference in people’s networks? Well, while networks evolve over time and you rarely know what the networks will be like 10 years after your project left, I would say that developing networks is actually something where external projects can show a specific strength:

They are by design boundary spanners.

Most people and organizations who are long term members of the system maintain “mature” networks and one thing that networks tend to do as they mature is to become more and more homogeneous – you link up with people (or organizations) of you type, people of similar social standing, interests, ethnicity, age, occupation etc. The project that comes from outside brings all the links to the outside world with it. But also within the local context their interactions are often less constrained by routine and social norms. This is why making introductions and facilitating (adding content to) links between unlikely partners is one way how development projects can become engines of innovation.

A project that links informal businesses to the formal banking sector does exactly that. Because normally the informal business people would stick to their informal financing sources (informal lenders, family, contracting), while the banks would stick to their formal big clients. What happens, if an outside actor brings its status and backup capacity to bear to convince banks that it might be ok (or even profitable) to do business with female informal rice par-boilers? The radical changes in the women’s networks can move them from being contract par-boilers to being independent business women. Independent? Well, the case below is from a strongly Muslim context, so the women still have to rely on their male family members for most contact to the outside world.

Network with intervention

These pictures show a combination of the networks we gathered from women who had not participated in the project (network 1) and those who did (network 2). The color of the nodes is according to gender (pink: female, blue: male, gray: composite actor, male and female). The size of the dots indicate the height of the influence tower. In picture 1 the interview partner is “contract par-boiler” in picture 2 the interview partner is “par-boiler group”.

My colleague Rick Davies has started a list of SNA software especially from the perspective of practitioners and consultants who want to use the software without spending a scholarly life of studying them first. Very interesting. With positive and negative aspects of different packages. If you know have experience to share, he’d appreciate comments. And even if you don’t, his website is definitely worth going to – if you have some time at your hand, because you are basically guaranteed to loose yourself for a while in the depth and scope of his knowledge documentation around monitoring and evaluation – with a network twist.