Monday 16 January 2012

The Human Face of Transition


One of the people I’ve connected with through Twitter is Bas de Baar. He’s The Project Shrink and in his own words he makes ‘complex people stuff less complex’. I like the way Bas writes and I particularly like the way he uses hand drawn images to simplify difficult problems without trivialising their importance. In a recent post The Project Story Circle. Talking About Transitions he’s used a simple yet very effective drawing. A circle as the cycle of a project and through the centre of it a horizontal line representing the project itself. The two halves can then be viewed as project and non-project time. Read his post for all the details because here I’m picking up on one particular bullet point he makes:

This will focus attention on the transitions organization-project and project-organization.

What Bas suggests is that the shape can be used when discussing projects and where in the circle people join, become active, and where they expect problems to occur. As a delivery specialist I see companies and their people struggle repeatedly with transition from project to organisation and believe the struggle can be simplified by using this drawing. Let’s take a look at an approach to change management and transition that most will be familiar with then see how this simple drawing could help.