No not unless your project is building a garden shed for your dad. Anything that involves a small change to a small number of people is challenging. Something that involves a big change to a lot of people, then there are likely to be events.  Harold Macmillan was asked what will likely blow any government off course. His reply was his famous quote, ‘Events my dear boy events’. A posh quote from an Eton educated prime minister  whose government was permanently discredited by one big event, the Profumo affair.

Today another Eton educated prime minister is in danger of  losing his credibility, as another big event, the Murdoch hacking scandal gains momentum. In projects as well as life, it is events that define projects.

Traditionally we attempt to control events in projects through the management of risks and issues, we are asked to predict their impact and likelihood. However as Profumo and Murdoch illustrate, we cannot foresee their timing, speed, ferocity, damage, implications, fallout and legacy.

Managing fast moving events requires a different skill set, which does not include Gantt charts, but there is little in current project management training that prepares us for this.  As a start, imagine the neighbours popping round to tell you that the concrete for the
base of your dad’s shed, has been poured on to their garden.

 Game on!

Google dominates the information web, but Facebook dominates the social web.

Google wants a share of both, so Larry Page has been working hard to deliver Google+.

Initially you would not give Google a hope in hell of moving in on the Facebook space. Would you join your friends  down the pub for a pint, or go to a new flashy coffee store and sit on your own.

Despite the failure of Google Buzz, a brief foray into a sort of Twitter / Facebook fusion,  Google is too big and too clever to let social networking lie. The prize for who gets the next iteration of a phenomenon, that in the UK started with Friends Reunited and MySpace  and has now spawned Linkedin and Twitter, is too big.

Some commentators have dismissed the launch of Google+, and see it as a geeky friend arriving at the party late and missing all the fun.

However the timing may be right, Facebook is beginning to haemorrhage, it is no longer cool if your mum is chatting to your school friends.  Google+ Circles enables people to share different things with different groups of people more easily, so differentiating between friends, family, colleagues, team mates, work mates and your boss.  Isn’t that more how social interaction really works.

The vertical integration that Google has with Android and Chrome will enable ‘instant upload’ photo sharing and face to face chats via Google+ Huddle. Google+ Sparks is a rebranding of Google Reader etc, tabbing and sharing stuff on the web.

This is so much bigger than just networking, it is Google’s latest attempt to pull all the utilities we use on the web into one place i.e. social networking, mail, communicator, broadcast, office suite, cloud. A Facebook substitute is the killer app which will drive people to the site. So much of social networking is no longer buddy to buddy, companies are desperate for intimate contact with their customers. That Coca Cola, Google+
page is going to cost a lot of money.

When Apple introduced the iPhone,  it made other mobile phones look like GPO handsets.  The smartphone was born.  The way was clear for Apple to forge a considerable lead before the competition bounced back with the Google Android OS.

Apple’s lead with the iPad is not so dominant. The competition was quick to retaliate with Android tablets of their own, and  lurking in the shadows were the e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook.

Whilst a lot of attention has been on the iPad it would appear that the more humble e-reader has been gaining ground. Research by Pew looked at take up in the States, and e-readers have increased rapidly over the past six months, from just 6% to 12% of adults owning e-readers today. In comparison 8% of adults have tablets.

There is a 3% overlap, so 17% of people have a device to read digital books. Lets assume the total market is about the size of that for MP3 players i.e. 44% of adults, then we begin to see the remarkable move from print and paper to screen. A shift that is rapidly gaining pace, with around 40% of potential users already committed.

In May Amazon announce that it now sells more e-books than paperback and hardback combined.

This month, John Locke was the first self publishing author to reach sales of 1 million digital copies, and his latest bestseller, is a self-help guide titled “How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months”

In the past few weeks the Waterstones book chain, was sold by HMV to Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut, however the indicated direction of travel is likely to be more coffee stores with books attached, rather than visa-versa.

We are living through a revolution for the printed page, every bit as big as Caxton’s printing press, but what has taken five hundred years to blossom could be all but gone in the next five.

A recent study from  the University of Florida has reviewed the most recent research on the anti-aging properties in red wine, and described in a very balanced report how the miracle ingredient resveratrol has the potential to improve health and help prevent
disease.

When tested using purified enzymes, cultured cells, and laboratory animals resveratrol is shown to have anti-aging, anti-carcinogenic, anti-inflammatory, and anti-oxidant properties. Research has yet to prove the same effect in humans, but as one of the authors of the report, Heather Hausenblas says:

“We’re all looking for an anti-aging cure in a pill, but it doesn’t exist. But
what does exist, shows promise of lessening many of the scourges and infirmities
of old age.”

“The main potential reason is that resveratrol is a super-powered anti-oxidant and it seems to kind of attack those free radicals, and free radicals are present in most diseases and aging.” In fact, free radicals get a lot of the blame for speeding up cell death and making people far more susceptible to disease as they get older.

The rush is on to synthesize resveratrol into a medicine, but that is no fun, far better to anti-age disgracefully with a beautiful Cabernet Sauvignon.

With their brand in tatters, and their products looking like a betamax tape in an era of 3D video streaming, their situation is so dire that Nokia are forecasting that their Q2 results will have fallen off the scale.

Last month Nokia discontinued their much heralded Ovi digital platform that was launched in 2007, and today it was revealed that Nokia have dropped out of the top 10 most searched for phones, the iPhone 4 tops the list followed by the HTC Desire S. The Nokia E7 could only make number 12.

Nokia still has 11bn euros cash in the bank, but it has to decide, does it want to spend that in a one off rush to revitalise their brand and products, or is it time to divest their handset business and diversify into different niche technology where the pace is not so hot.

Remember Nokia started out in rubber, paper and cables and moved into niche mobile telephony when handsets were the size of bricks. They have done it before, it is too soon to write them off now.

Today I have been working on a new project, I know near enough what needs to be done, but I don’t have enough information to understand how the tasks fit together.

It reminded me of the famous Morecombe and Wise sketch, in which Eric plays the piano to the world famous conductor Andre Previn. As Eric says, “I can play all the notes, ……”.

Welcome to the Eric Morecombe School of Project Planning, “I can list all the tasks,…… but not necessarily in the right order”.

The assumption is that the senior management in the organisation who have taken the decision on behalf of the organisation to implement the change will have created the conditions for that project’s success e.g. people will have been informed about the project, they will be aware of the implications of the change, they will clear about why the organisation should take this action, and what the benefits are.

Pigs may also fly.

Most likely you will find that people who will be most affected by the change may only have a vague notion about what’s occurring, but it has been left to you the Project Manager to sell the idea as well as implement it.

When you find yourself in the invidious position of being dumped on, here is some advice:

•  Stay independent, it is not your job to take sides. Neither can you be a jobsworth….’just doing my job’. Professional detachment is required.
• You will have knowledge of the business case, and the requirements, use this evidence to show that change is necessary and possible.
• Be diligent about details, check back with senior management. It is not your job to justify the change, but you must be an expert in what and how it will happen.
• Any change is uncomfortable in the short term, build into your plan the actions necessary to make the change easy to assimilate. You will understand the  situation on the ground better than anyone else.

Remember if you have been dumped on you are probably being lined up as the fall guy. If the project fails it is down to you, if not it is down to someone else.

However a few weeks back, as I hurried through the concourse I noticed a Minister on one of the big Sky News screens dismissing the TUC March for the Alternative. Although 400,000 people marched at that rally to protest against the government cuts, the Minister on TV maintained the cuts were necessarry…blah…blah, last Labour government…blah…blah, Greece and Ireland…. blah… blah, but incredibly there is now little mention of cuts to the government ‘back office’.

As I pointed out in one of my last posts, although ‘back office’ cuts became a mantra of the ‘how’, around public sector cuts in the lead up to the election, there is now little mention of these ‘easy’ gains eleven months on.

Ministers it seems have now began to realise how difficult these cuts are to achieve, because the back office is in reality outsourced. In a recent Audit Office review it was found that literally thousands of different contracts exist across central and local government, the police and quangos etc, but the vast majority of these contracts were with just five suppliers. Each of these big companies are not going to give ground without a fight or at least compensation, they have hundreds of contracts which are stitched up years into the future.

The Government is appointing procurement commissioners to sort out this tangled outsourced web, but however big their talk prior to the election, cutting costs in any office is going to take years to achieve.

Could you do the same for your projects, or have they morphed so much since the original PID, that the objectives are now a bit wishy-washy. You have a few days over Easter to ponder just what the project is that you are spending your working life sweating over. If you don’t understand what it is, stands to reason, that others in the organisation will think likewise.

So think about your key project and put it into a sentence, try to make it focused and succinct, then when you get back to work reaquaint your team with what they are working for and use it to drive success.