Bee a Pyramid Climber
Categories:
project leader,
selena gomez,
only murders in the building,
bumblebee,
dna,
DIKW,
project,
research
Categories: project leader, selena gomez, only murders in the building, bumblebee, dna, DIKW, project, research
|
A wing and a leg. Sounds like a chicken dinner, right? Not in this case. This post is about bumblebee wings, bumblebee legs, pyramids, and the advancement of data into information into wisdom, into data. First of all, let’s talk about that advancement of data. In a book I co-authored with Loredana Abramo, entitled Bringing the PM Competency Gap, we describe this advancement using a puzzle as an example, we look at two axes, the vertical being the “Degree of connectedness” of data, and the horizontal axis being the level of understanding we have of that data. When both are low – that is, the data points aren’t connected (at least apparently) with each other, and we don’t have a high level of understanding of the data, it is indeed, just … data. In our example, we are presented with random shapes of random colors – we don’t know if they have anything to do with each other, and we don’t know what they are. As both of these attributes advance, things change. With a little more understanding and a degree of connectedness, we can tell that “wait a second, these are puzzle pieces!” and we can tell that they are meant to be connected. Moving further up to the northeast, with more connectedness and understanding, we can assemble the puzzle pieces but still don’t know what image is on the puzzle. Finally, with a great amount of connectedness (an assembled puzzle) and recognition of the image, we can see that this is a tropical aquarium.
Photo courtesy of Pensthorpe National park - http://www.pensthorpe.com/animal/barnacle-goose/ Today’s tongue-twister (say that title five times fast!) is brought to you by Branta leucopsis. This is a species of bird commonly known as the barnacle goose (see photo). And although this will be about geese and migration and climate, it will have a project management angle. These days, the weather in parts of the journey north is warmer than it used to be and the birds seem to realize that they're running late. They start to speed up — a lot. A journey that usually takes the barnacle geese a month now takes about a week, the researchers found. It's a marathon: "They fly nearly nonstop from the wintering areas to their breeding grounds," Bart Nolet (a researcher from the University of Amsterdam) says. Even though they make up time on the way (crashing the schedule!), the exhausted geese can't lay eggs right away because they need time to forage and recover — some 10 more days. That means the goslings are no longer able to enjoy that tasty and nutritious "food peak," as Nolet put it. Instead, "when the eggs hatch, the food is already deteriorating in quality, and what we found (in this research project) is that goslings survive less well in such an early year than they do normally." This is where that ‘fixed start date’ comes in. The trigger for this their departure – the dependency, if you will, is not temperature, but light and length of days, says the research. The distance between their North Sea residence and the breeding grounds in the Arctic, after all, is more than 3000 miles (see figure below). The geese, unlike project managers, with excellent information systems with the latest compiled data, information, and knowledge, don’t have any idea of the weather 3000 miles away, they only have the current and very local information on which to make their decisions. Generally, climate change is likely to create this kind of mismatch for animals that migrate long distances. It's harder for them to adjust, Nolet says, when they spend part of the year in a totally different climate This is another example of how changes to the climate remind us of the need to aim at reductions in the causes and to be more aware of the effects and the surprising relationship of climate change to projects, project management, and project management wisdom. "Love your enemy--it will scare the hell out of them." - Mark Twain |
Posted
by 
