>As a starter on the topic of rapid change, I think the that all the management
>disciplines associated with project management come into play only more so. These
>include setting priorites, utilizing a project planning tool (e. g. PERT chart or Gantt
>chart), evaluating the skills and resources needed, and procuring those resources
>(hiring, contracting and delegating). Most importantly, in between all of the doing,
>there needs to be the prescence of mind to step back and evaluate at appropriate
>intervals.
It seems to me that much is emergent in rapid change... much is
uncertain and the assumptions we started with are developed and
added to ... I do think we need some planning tools but perhaps it
is the *way* we use those tools which needs to develop. A group of
us met some time ago to have a learning review of a major project
we had been working on and one of the things we wrestled with was
the seeming contradiction between planning (at the level of detail
of PERT and Gantt) and emergence .. we need a certain amount of
discipline and detail in planning and we need to be ready to adapt
those plans in real time to recognise the emergent realities...
perhaps one of the clue is to be more disciplined in linking our
plans and assumptions about the future so that as the future
realities emerge we can immediately recognise the parts of the
plan which are redundant. We found this needs an attention to data
gathering - formal and informal and rich flows of information and we
needed to step back and reflect honestly on what the information said
about the plans.... and a readiness to throw the old plans away and
still value them for the certainty they had given us for a while
(even if it was something of an illusion!)
Julie Beedon
VISTA Consulting - for a better future
julie@vistabee.win-uk.net
--Julie Beedon <julie@vistabee.win-uk.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>