Earlier this week my friend Graeme Thomas and I used the 3-cloud approach in a workshop titled "Programmers may be from Mars, Customers may be from Venus, but why does everyone think that Project Managers are from Uranus?' at an Agile conference in London. The premise of the session is that most conflicts between Project Managers and their staff are caused by systemic conflicts rather than bad people. We used my "conflict calisthenics" approach to teach the participants how to construct and then evaporate 4 common conflicts between PMs and their staff. We then constructed a "generic" conflict based on the symptom clouds.
The session was extremely well received judging from the verbal and written feedback. I'm especially pleased how quickly everyone picked up the callisthenics approach - the 40 participants picked up the idea of conflicts much, much faster than I've ever seen before.
You can download the powerpoint presenation and Excel spreadsheet I used here: http://www.clarkeching.com/2007/11/are-project-man.html.
Clarke Ching
www.clarkeching.com
