GUILLERMO

Notes on project risk management

I wrote this note while I was working in SSE Onshore Wind Farms to help project management teams to anticipate risks and increase their capacity to deliver on time.

Consulting Projects Which Mobilize Change and Innovations

I recently wrote a paper based on my experience running and mobilizing projects that are geared towards bringing change and innovation.

While traditional project management practices may work well in operational projects where the desired outcome is already known and has been delivered many times before, they fall short when looking to bring a large change or innovation to a company. We see this in the rate of failure of innovation projects - greater than 50%.

In this paper, I explore and share what I've seen as the skills and sensibilities involved in leading a successful change project. I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions, or comments so please send them my way or post a comment below.

Energy Distribution

A project I led & designed in the UK with Vision Consulting Group.

photo from Flickr - Broo_am

 

 

 

Lessig and basic, basic repairs to our Representative Democracy

 

Representative Democracy is delivering very poor service to the citizen. Time to fix it. It doesn't need disruptive innovation, just basic repair...Basic, very basic citizenship... fight against corruption, especially when it is at the center for our institutions and so ubiquitous and so covered by pompous language that nobody gaf about it. We need the schools to educate the kids to take the addiction out of papa, as they did with tobacco!!!!... just start moving, just do something that can accumulate, just move in a systematic direction... as Plato would have said, it time for the pendulum of the Republic to swing toward mechanisms of distributing agency that are more in tune with the spirit of the city, the polis.

The Bird's Nest

Ai WeiWei, Herzog & de Meuron, Li Xinggang, Enerpac, 1.3 billion humans, CCP, 42,000 tons of Chinese steel, Baosteel, Wuhan Iron and Steel, Q35, Q460, CITIC consortium, Beijing Municipal Government, IOC, ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, polytetrafluoroethylene, pervious concrete, Arup Lighting, 7,811 square meters of grass, CATIA advanced 3D model-based design software, Chinese ceramics, plate tectonics...

Less management, more value

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall we have experienced a couple of hypes and a succession of disastrous pseudo-landings combining a blend of illegal wars, financial crises, and expensive dinners in which the attendees were subtly or forcefully struggling about avoiding the bill and setting up others to pay for it. We have a collection of epic moments: Beijing's Tienanmen; Moscow's Red Square defense of democracy; the Arab Spring; the students asking for better education in Chile; and the British astonishingly - jaws loose - observing Murdock's news empire pinching mobile phones and bribing their officials.

In these years there were also some incredible events: the silicon integrated circuits powered Internet achieved 100K hosts twenty four years ago and over 904 million hosts yesterday; we've entered into a new geological era: the anthropocene. We are clouded, mobile, and earth-bound. Not a molecule of this was managed, it simply happened. All of this was carefully managed: it happened by neither chance nor fate. Everything was a wave of translations and trials of strength in a vast pluralistic network. Value has been produced, destroyed and distributed.

This is the world in which we "manage" a vast value-chain that delivers value to multiple constituencies. Some of them humans, others non-humans; some beautiful and powerless, others tyrannical and grey. The people that manage are people engaging in conversations through their natural voice. Are they task-controlling freaks? Decision makers? Team leaders? Agile-lean teams? Game players? Everything at once?

We want fewer people managing, and more people playing and adding value in value games. More people putting their life in everything they do, less people selling their time.

Game architecture and game mentorship are becoming the essence of management. That's what we did with SSE Onshore Renewable Energy in Scotland and it works!

Bica Coffee House

Coffee treated as if it were great tea, in an austere, functional Bauhaus setting, hundred yards from Rockridge BART Station. A 24 inches mac display fully devoted to trains real time departures and arrivals. No comments on musical ambience. A horizontilly mirror, 4 feet by 10 feet. 6 tables inside, 2 outside, 2 bar seating areas (one very nice in front of a glass wall.

The big short

Here there is a great map about Michael Lewis book. Short investment has become a great game after the invention of CDSs. First, it has produce enormous value to the private investors that have played the game, and second, it has made a great contribution to transparency, performance and market organization. The Big Short has been a good reading to me.

USA Banking performance: Credit quality improving?

Credit quality has been improving for a few quarters in a row -however, USA mortgages are not expected to improve anywhere soon-. CFOs' of some banks are "optimistic" about their assets quality... while they may be more nervous about new regulations and "de-intermediation" -reduction of people willing to use their services-... so, the optimism looks shallow. There are no interesting proposals coming from bankers about restructuring financial services industry... except consolidation, and that pathway drives to the wrong place: criminal complacency and legalized unethical compensations  "... don't worry, we are too big to fail".

Educational environments and emergent virtues

Jane McGonigal thinks the opposite of games and gaming is not reality, but depression. In ten years from now, playing games in synthetic environments (MMORPG) will become a skill that new generations will perform at a virtuoso level. As a result of that a new range of dispositions will be available for that generation: urgent optimism, social fabric, blissful productivity and epic meaning. A whole new educational environment of planetary scope has emerged in a decade, with enough force to tackle our "real" contemporary challenges.