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107187386059241069

December 19, 2003 By Chris Uncategorized

From a site called ProjectJazz comes this paper called Playing the Live Jazz of Project Management (.pdf). The paper revolves around five principles that apply to both jazz and dynamic management:

1. Plans are enabling, not constricting.
2. Aberrations are normal.
3. You work with what happens.
4. Order is emergent, not pre-defined.
5. Disorder is not chaotic.

My favourite of these is the one on emergent order:

There is a myth in organization theory that order and structure comes from some strange place out there, that it can be simply imposed upon organized action. This can be seen in project manage-ment, for example in habitual planning beforehand, where master plans and masses of charts are put together to impose structure on the project. In jazz this is reversed. Initial structures are kept to the minimum needed to keep the group together, and order is allowed to grow organically out of the collaboration between the players. As projects always retain some unique elements, neither does their order exist solely in the pre-determined master plans of the project. Just as the jazz mu-sicians find new and functional structures in the act of playing, project managers find ways of doing things in the acts of building.

Link from a newly discovered blog, Reforming Project Management.

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