I recently finished an eight month Project Management Certification course. I learned several new things and I am now in the process of reflecting on them. One was about the role of Project Managers, which are not necessarily the same people as the manager in an organization.

Then there's that ancient problem of "...working on X project, and Y just isn't happening". As far as there being a "people problem" or "teaming problem" that gets vented in a blog or two I agree it rarely helps (if at all). One thing I re-learned in this course work was that teams work when everybody wants them to work. If one person is not engaged or committed to a shared vision (as it were), the team is certainly in danger of failing.

For example, the team I was on in the course (for eight months) got along incredibly smoothly and produced an outstanding final project. In most of the teams I am on in academic settings, I have had excellent experiences. Contrasted to a project I am working on at work, we've been struggling for over year on something and still have no firm or consistent agreement of direction, consensus, or teamwork and certainly little or no confidence in leadership (what there is of it). Some people on the 22 member team are refusing to work on the project because it's seems so pointless to do so.

One of the recurring things I see in the contrast of the two situations has been that in the academic teams that do well, it seems people set aside ego and hidden agendas, the team draws together to focus on the product (or ends) to make. In the work place, such a condition is rare. The incentives are vastly different, too: in an academic setting, a team of students working on a project have a hard deadline with irreversible consequences (the grade the individual receives). In the work place, the incentives for any single team members may be at odds with any other one. And forget about getting egos to take a back seat to some common goal (my experience).

So, venting on a blog is a lot like venting in an email. They’re both tools for communication and I’ve used both for venting. In the end, such venting serves me as a cathartic mechanism but I am still left with the same problems. If such tools were used for positive ends, that is, if I took more time to think about what positive changes to make and put those ideas on my blog, that might make a difference (at least for myself). i think i'll give it a try.

As you and I know, blogs can serve all sorts of purposes. I suspect even the vent-your-spleen variety can serve a value beyond that of the spleen-venter. It's just that in a relatively closed environment, the venting ends up taking on a much larger nature than it was probably intended.

What's that saying? Give praise in public and criticism privately. I think that might apply here too.