Most people own some land and they, and many projects, need to accurately locate the position of their property lines and facilities, but achieving this is far from straightforward.
One reasonably well-known example of this challenge is the Prime Meridian at Greenwich. This historic meridian is a geographical reference line that is marked on the ground, and passes through the Royal Observatory, in Greenwich, London (the dashed line above). But, the Prime Meridian used by your GPS is the solid line 102 meters to the east. The objective of our latest article is to explain why these are different! It is a long story starting in the third century BCE, that intertwines astronomy, map making, navigation, and time keeping.
Scientific understanding of the shape of the earth has changed from the Ancient Greek assumption it was a sphere, to the modern understanding the earth is a shape-shifting mass that approximates an oblate spheroid. This shift in understanding does not change the relationship between latitude, longitude, and time, but the relentless changes in the earths surfaces do continue to affect map making and surveying. Sometimes the change can be catastrophic – this tree was split in two by the Türkiye Earthquake*. But fortunately, most of the time both the magnitude and rate of change are quite small, but for many applications cannot be ignored.
So, answering the question ‘where in the world are you?’ accurately can be remarkably difficult and will change over time. To find out why download our article:Knowing (exactly) where you are is not that simple!
*To do something to help your career, and the Türkiye Earthquake victims, join PM 4 The World for a 24 hour ‘talk around the clock’ webinar bringing together many leading project management practitioners. All donations go straight to UNICEF: https://talk-around-the-clock.com/event-schedule
The creation of an institution, designed to gather all of the information in the world and make it available to everyone who needs it pre-dates Google by 2200 years!
The city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander The Great in April 331 BCE after his army had captured the Egyptian Satrapy from the Persians. He wanted to build a large Greek city on Egypt’s coast with good fresh water and a harbour. Under his direction, Alexandria became the world’s first planned city with streets laid out in a grid and many other features still used in urban design.
Following the death of Alexander in 323 BCE, there was a power grab for his empire among his top-ranking officers and the Ptolemies gained control of Egypt, and made Alexandria their capital. They reigned as Pharaohs until Cleopatra’s death during the Roman era. Within the city, the Great Library of Alexandria, was to become one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. Situated in the Royal Quarter near the harbour, it formed part of a larger research institution called the Mouseion, which was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. This was not the first library of its kind. A long tradition of libraries existed in both Greece and the ancient Near East. The earliest recorded archive of written materials comes from the Sumerian city-state of Uruk in around 3400 BCE, and there were other famous libraries in existence in Babylon and Greece. However, the Great Library would grow to outshine all of these.
The Great Library was most likely founded by Ptolemy I sometime before 283 BCE, but does not appear to have been completed until the reign of Ptolemy II (283–246 BCE). The Ptolemaic rulers intended the Great Library to be a collection of all knowledge, and worked for more than a century to expand the Library’s collections through an aggressive and well-funded policy of book purchasing, and plunder. Any books found on ships that came into port were taken to the library, where they were copied by official scribes. The original texts were kept in the library, and the copies delivered to the owners.
The Mouseion which housed the Great Library also served as home to a host of international scholars, poets, philosophers, and researchers, who the Ptolemies provided with a large salary, free food and lodging, and exemption from taxes. There were numerous classrooms, where the scholars were expected to at least occasionally teach students. The Roman period, particularly after the Christianization of the Empire in the 1st century CE, saw the decline and eventual destruction of this institution.
While the concept of a library is debated, it is certainly more than just a collection of books – ‘any number of books brought together in one place, no more, of itself, constitutes a library than a pile of bricks can be called a house’. Academics generally agree a library needs purpose, organization, and maintenance of its collection (all of which apply to the Great Library), but the sheer size of the Great Library collection posed some unique problems.
First, within half a century of its foundation circa 295 BCE, the collections of the Royal Library had exceeded the space allotted to contain the accumulated books. To that end, Ptolemy III (246–221 BCE) established an offshoot that could house the surplus volumes in the newly built Serapeum, a temple dedicated to the worship of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, situated in the Egyptian district south of the city. Unlike the layout of the Mouseion, of which no records remain, a surprising amount of this temple has survived allowing us an insight as to how it looked and functioned.
This outer library was open to everyone and the medieval text of John Tzetzes suggests there were “42,000 books in this outer library”, mainly duplicates, and lower quality scrolls. There was free access to this collection, people of the city and visitors could take scrolls to read, or attend public readings if they were illiterate.
Second, making information freely available is one thing, being able to find that information is altogether a more complex undertaking. In addition to the outer library, the inner (Royal) Library is said to have held another 400,000 mixed books, plus 90,000 unmixed books. But, how could scholars navigate this vast collection in order to use it in any sort of efficient way? Finding the information you needed requires a system.
The starting point was assigning texts to different rooms based on their subject matter. The first Librarian, Zenodotus made an inventory of the Library’s holdings, which he then organized into three major categories:
The first category included history books, edited and standardized literary works, and new works of Ptolemaic literature.
The second included holdings used for comparison and in the creation of the standardized works mentioned above. Included in this category were also letters and maps.
The third group comprised original writings in foreign languages, many of which had been translated into Greek, and which, in translation were included in the first group.
Within each of these divisions he then organized the works alphabetically by the first letter of the name of their author. This was one of the first uses of the principle of alphabetic organization. To maintain the collection, library staff then attached a small dangling tag to the end of each scroll, which contained information on each work’s author, title, and its subject, so that materials could be easily returned to the area in which they had been classified, but this also meant that library users did not have to unroll each scroll in order to see what it contained. This was the first recorded use of metadata, another landmark in library history.
Zenodotus’ methods overlaid an ordering principle on the entire collection of the Great Library which continues to be applied in libraries through to the current times. But, as the collection grew a more detailed structure was needed. This was implemented by Callimachus of Cyrene; he divided the collection into the main realms of literature as generally agreed at the time. Then within each of these divisions, he shelved all the authors in alphabetical order by the first letter of their name. This scheme is a classic taxonomy, Aristotle (384-322 BCE) is often credited as the first great taxonomist and his ideas may have been influential in the design of the system.
This approach took care of the shelving principle, but Callimachus went a step further. As a finding aid, he produced the pinakes, or “Tables of Persons Eminent in Every Branch of Learning Together with a List of Their Writings”. While the entire one hundred twenty scrolls of the pinakes have not survived to this day, the pieces of it that have survived show this was one of the first known documents that lists, identifies, and categorizes a library’s holdings. Within the pinakes, Callimachus listed works alphabetically by author and genre then added metadata in the form of a short biographical note on each author, which prefaced that author’s entry within his catalogue and sometimes a summary of the scroll’s contents.
How great was the influence of the Great Library of Alexandria on the development of knowledge is hard to define, it was probably significant. What we do know is the systems used to lay out the library, and classify the documents carry through to modern times and the next level of detail, indexing the contents of books did not occur until the 13th century CE.
The advantages and disadvantages of the free-form Google search over the structure of a well designed taxonomy, and an annotated catalogue are the search will look at ‘everything’, but the list of documents produced has had no vetting for quality, accuracy or relevance. When managing knowledge, more is not necessarily better.
At a more practical level, Mosaic’s Project Management Knowledge Index (PMKI) is a taxonomy of project management papers and articles. The Taxonomy is available to download, use and adapt as well as the articles, papers and reference materials: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI.php
For most of human history the primary way of communicating design information was through the use of models. For example, construction of Florence’s new cathedral, the Santa Maria del Fiore, was based on a 30-foot long scale model of the structure complete with details of the buildings finishes, decorations and dome. Construction started in 1296 and by 1418 work had progressed to the point where construction of the massive dome was needed (how the dome was built will be the focus of a later blog). Fast forward 250 years to 1673, and Sir Christopher Wren had the great model of the new St Paul’s cathedral in London built at significant cost.
The models were not the only design process, drawings of floor plans and elevations were undoubtedly used as were architectural details and sections, traditional knowledge held by master masons, guilds and other institutions defined proportions and other structural norms, standard templates were used to cut stone, full size drawings, and/or models, were made for complex detail elements, and for significant features such as large Gothic windows the design would be traced out at full size on a floor and the stones cut to fit. There were multiple systems used in combination, but very little in the way of a standard approach to documenting a design.
This started to change in 1794 when the École Polytechnique opened in Paris. It was established by the National Convention as the École Centrale des Travaux Publics (“Central School of Public Works”) under the leadership of Lazare Carnot and Gaspard Monge. It took its present name in 1795. Originally under the direction of the Ministry of the Interior, its function was to provide its students with a well-rounded scientific education with a strong emphasis in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, to prepare them to enter one of the national institutes of public works, or the military, as engineers or technical specialist. This concept gradually spread world-wide.
The second major advance was the formalization of orthographic projection, a part of the branch of mathematics called descriptive geometry. The book Géométrie descriptive (1798) by Gaspard Monge, a French mathematician, is regarded as the first to formalize orthographic projection. The concepts published by Monge facilitated the mass production of interchangeable parts required by the factories of the industrial revolution.
A design drawn using orthographic projection has 1:1 proportions on all views and dimensions that are not annotated can be scaled from the drawing accurately. The problem is the drawings are not easy to read or understand without some training or explanation.
The economy offered by a drafting a set of drawings, that in most cases made the building of a model unnecessary, linked to the invention of the blueprinting process by John Herschel in 1842 accelerated the spread of technical drawing to most industries and created the role of draftsman.
Organizations everywhere are struggling with the requirements of returning project planning and delivery to pre-COVID levels, which in turn creates a range of communication challenges. They need to prevail over the global threats of staff and material shortages, the demographic changes to the project workforce and the general reluctance of project teams members to resume full-time face-to-face modes of working. These are complex issues for organizations and may need courage to introduce innovative flexible work modes and to introduce new people strategies to acquire and retain project workers. It is a great opportunity for innovation and flexibility, and will require a measure of audacity from often conservative organizations. To achieve these ambitious goals, they must ensure that communication and people management strategies match any changes they plan to introduce, and even more important, to ensure adequate consultation with their people.
Teams are central to project delivery, but the current situation of ‘living with COVID’ presents a series of challenges including the challenge of acquiring and supporting teams and team members, and dealing with the residual issues of the pandemic such as anxiety, loss of control over the work product and re-negotiating work-life balance. New modes of working create advantages and disadvantages from the perspective of both workers and organizations. But, how best to manage teams in the new hybrid mode, based on the learnings from the previous decade’s use of virtual teams and deal with the urgent emerging issues such as, shortages of experienced staff, and how to reform training, acquisition and retention of project team members.
We now live in an age where Google search is ubiquitous, and the ‘find’ function in Word and PDF documents is almost instantaneous, but this was not always the case. This article traces the development of indexing from its start some 800 years ago in the 13th century, through to modern times as well as and providing links to a number of specialized search engines that are free to use.
The world of business is moving increasingly towards storing and exchanging documentation almost exclusively in electronic formats. While document management tools solve many problems typically found in paper-based systems, they also introduce a suite of new issues and challenges. The focus of this article is highlighting a few of the more important factors needed in an efficient system: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/Mag_Articles/AA008_The_challenge_of_e-Documents.pdf
Most projects are required to produce weekly and/or monthly reports for their client as part of a contract, or as part of an internal set of reporting requirements, or both. But is this style of reporting valuable or are better options emerging? Projects create reports! Most projects are required to produce weekly and/or monthly reports for their client as part of a contract, or as part of an internal set of reporting requirements, or both. But is this style of reporting valuable or are better options emerging?
Our latest article ‘Are Traditional Reports Past Their Use-by Date?‘ discuses the problems and challenges of changing from reports to a real-time dashboard to communicate project information.
One of the realities of life is every once in a while, you are going to become embroiled in a dispute or argument that is emotional and personal. This article maps out a set of strategies that can help you stay focused on using communication to achieve a pragmatic outcome you can ‘live with’ – win-win is nice, but you cannot control the other person’s emotions so you need to focus on how you behave and your objectives: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/Mag_Articles/SA1063_Communicating_in_Conflict.pdf
How engaged should your stakeholders be? Or how engaged do you want them to be? In an ideal world the answer to both questions should be the same, but to even deliver a meaningful answer to these questions needs a frame of measurement. This post uses ideas from 1969 to propose this framework!
In July 1969, Sherry R. Arnstein published ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’ the A.I.P Journal[1] looking at citizen participation and the consequential citizen power over a range of USA government initiatives designed to enhance the lives of disadvantaged people in US cities. The typology of participation proposed by Arnstein can be transposed to the modern era to offer a framework for discussing how engaged in your project, or program, your stakeholders should be in actively contributing to the management and governance of the work they are supposed to benefit from.
Modern paradigms such as ‘the wisdom of crowds’, ‘user participation in Agile teams’ and ‘stakeholder theory’ all lean strongly towards stakeholder ownership of the initiative designed to benefit them. These views are contrasted by concepts such as technical competence, intellectual property rights, confidentiality and the ‘iron triangle’ of commercial reality (often backed up by contractual constraints).
The debate about how much control your stakeholders should have over the work, and how engaged they should be in the work, is for another place and time – there is probably no ‘universally correct’ answer to these questions. But it is difficult to even start discussing these questions if you don’t have a meaningful measure to compare options against.
Arnstein’s paper is founded on the proposition that meaningful ‘citizen participation’ is ‘citizen power’ but also recognises there is a critical difference between going through empty rituals of participation and having real power to affect the outcome of a process. This poster was from the May 1968 student uprising in Paris, for those of us who can’t remember French verbs, translated it says: I participate; you participate; he participates; we participate; you (plural) participate; …… they profit. The difference between citizen participation in matters of community improvement and stakeholder participation in a project is that whilst civil participation probably should mean civil control, this same clear delineation does not apply to stakeholder engagement in projects. The decision to involve stakeholders in a project or program is very much open to interpretation as to the best level of involvement or engagement. However, the ladder of engagement proposed by Arnstein can easily be adapted to the requirement of providing a framework to use when discussing what is an appropriate degree of involvement of stakeholders in your project or program.
There are eight rungs in Arnstein’s ladder; starting from the bottom:
Manipulation: stakeholders are placed on rubberstamp advisory committees or invited to participate in surveys, provide feedback, or are given other activities to perform which create an illusion of engagement but nobody takes very much notice of the information provided. The purpose of this type of engagement is primarily focused on making the stakeholders feel engaged rather than using the engagement to influence decisions and outcomes. The benefits can be reduced stakeholder opposition, at least in the short term, but there is very little real value created to enhance the overall outcomes of the project.
Therapy: this level of stakeholder engagement involves engaging stakeholders in extensive activities related to the project but with a view to changing the stakeholder’s view of the work whilst minimising their actual ability to create change. Helping the stakeholders adjust to the values of the project may not be the best solution in the longer term but every organisational change management guideline (including our White Paper) advocates this type of engagement to sell the benefits the project or program has been created to deliver.
Informing: informing stakeholders of their rights, responsibilities, and/or options, can be the first step towards effective stakeholder participation in the project and its outcomes. However too frequently the emphasis is placed on a one-way flow of information from the project to the stakeholders. Particularly when this information is provided at a late stage, stakeholders have little opportunity to contribute to the project that is supposed to be delivering benefits for them. Distributing information is a key stakeholder engagement activity (see the Three Types of Stakeholder Communication) but there have to be mechanisms for effective feedback for this process to maximise its potential value.
Consultation: inviting stakeholder’s opinions, like informing them, can be a legitimate step towards their full participation. But if the consultation is not combined with other modes of participation this rung of the ladder is still a sham, it offers no assurance that the stakeholder concerns and ideas will be taken into account. Effective participation includes providing stakeholders with a degree of control over the consultation processes as well as full insight as to how their inputs are considered and used. In the long run window dressing participation helps no one.
Placation: at this level stakeholders have some degree of influence although tokenism is still potentially involved. Simply including stakeholders in processes such as focus groups or oversight committees where they do not have power, or are trained not to exercise power, gives the appearance of stakeholder engagement without any of the benefits.
Partnership: at this level power is genuinely redistributed and the stakeholders work with the project team to achieve an outcome that is beneficial to all. Power-sharing may seem risky all but if the right stakeholders with a genuine interest in the outcome are encouraged to work with the technical delivery team to constructively enhance the project’s outcomes (which is implicit in a partnership) everyone potentially benefits.
Delegated power: In many aspects of projects and programs, particularly those associated with implementation, rollout, and/or organisational change, delegating management authority to key stakeholder groups has the potential to significantly improve outcomes. These groups do need support, training, and governance, but concepts such as self-managed work teams demonstrate the value of the model.
Stakeholder control: In one respect stakeholders do control projects and programs but this group tends to be a small management elite fulfilling roles such as sponsors, steering committees, etc. Genuine stakeholder control expands this narrow group to include many more affected stakeholders. Particularly social projects, where the purpose of the project is to benefit stakeholders, can demonstratively be improved by involving the people project disposed to help. But even technical projects can benefit from the wisdom of crowds[2].
In summary, the framework looks like this:
The biggest difference between the scenario discussed in the original paper and stakeholder engagement around projects and programs is the fact that different stakeholders very often need quite different engagement approaches to optimise project outcomes. Arnstein’s 1969 paper argued in favour of citizen participation as a single entity and the benefits progressing up the ladder towards its control. In a project situation, it is probably more sensible to look at different groups of stakeholders and then assess where on the ladder you would like to see that group functioning. Some groups may only need relatively low levels of information to be adequately managed. Others may well contribute best in positions of control or at least where their advice is actively sought and used.
Do you think this framework is helpful in advancing conversations around stakeholder engagement in your project?
____________________
[1] Arnstein, S.R. AIP Journal July 1969 pp:216 – 223. A Ladder of Citizen Participation.
[2]The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.
Projects create reports! 
Pat Weaver
Lynda Bourne
Aavssitedev's Blog