A project is a temporary social system where people come together to work towards a common goal. The key to successful project management is therefore to understand how you make a temporary social system perform better. Young, clever and creative, Gen Ys bring a welcome perspective to project management as teams become increasingly virtual and global. Gen Ys grew up with unprecedented access to technology and information, don’t hesitate to challenge authority and expect their opinions to be heard. Here is how to apply that mentality to your project team: Be flat. Unlike their parents, Gen Ys are more comfortable in organisational structures that are less hierarchical and have fewer layers of intervening management. For a generation that has grown up with the ability to broadcast their opinions and thoughts to the world using blogs and social networks, a top-down organisational structure can be restrictive and hamper creativity. Applied to a project...

A couple of weeks ago I woke up from a dream where I had found out the ultimate design for the next generation of Projectplace. It was so amazingly simple and awesome. At least I felt so. I told my self that I should sketch it down the very next day at office and laid my head back down, snuggled closer to my wife – and slowly returned back to deep sleep. The morning came and… Well. I did remember that I had some great ideas. But, I couldn’t remember the ideas. And that wasn’t the first time. For some strange reasons my brain always have a fight with me when it’s time to go to bed. I say to my self that I really need to sleep, but it won’t let me. Instead it always continues in an even higher speed – solving problems, remembering those small meetings I have to attend tomorrow...

Working time is most often spent on email management, meetings and conversations around the topics your team is working upon at the moment. Your focus is on ticking off issues on your to-do list and naturally as you proceed your day you change your focus numerous times. A good day when you have been really efficient and have ticked off many issues from your list you feel really great!  However, this way of working is not optimal for exploring new solutions. In order to do that you need to work some other way. In the design team of Projectplace, we had for a long time felt we could do better design if only we could spend more time exploring new ideas on a regular basis. We realized we needed to do something different and discovered a concept that Australian company Atlassian called FedEx days.  We decided to try it out. The idea...