The Worksite Experience

For Worthy Practice in Project Management as CSP

Any worthy practice - in law, medicine, or project management - develops largely from experience, but not just any experience. The experience must be worthy – heart, head, and hands, dialog, regular performances, and community are all essential. Worthy experience is constructive, cooperative, cumulative, efficient, visual, and personal.  To those wishing to manage projects as a collaborative systems practice, this is the experience Cogent Language offers by way of its worksites. 

Constructive

Worksites are experiential, task-based, and cloud native. Users can build and share work products that can make a difference in their worlds: models, prototypes, plans, or decisions.

Cooperative

Worksites enable cooperaton in real time with other persons, organizations, and or communities. Users can take on the challenges of collaboration under time constraint, a challenge that is often called "leadership".

Cumulative

Worksites enable users to progressively elaborate their work, individually or in a team context.The main learning activities are not topics or questions - they are tasks that users do. Task sequences build on previous tasks and topics, with users able to incorporate the knowledge of others and to inform concrete products relevant to their projects by knowledge they have accumulated. 

Efficient - Fast or Slow

Many organizations these days move at internet speed. It is no accident that collaborative systems constructs and methods now surging in importance are in sync with the agile mindset and lean approaches.  However, before building any products at all, many projects these days require building relationships, community, and shared values. These take time, empathy, and, well, a collaborative systems practice.  

Fortunately, our Worksites can "work" fast or slow. 

To bring participants up to speed quickly, they enable users to move fast. There are multiple levels of guidance, ranging in granularity from the level of  rationale, approach, and methodology down to that of detailed, step-by-step instructions including thumbnails showing "what done looks like."  User's need only use advice at whatever level fits. 

For individual review and follow up at "my pace", worksites also provide references to relevant online resources,  with a preference for short videos.  For the longer term work of building relationships, community, and shared values they enable recurring consideration of major challenges at levels of values and rationale, approach, work stages, work product, workflow, and tools.

Visual

 At its core, a collaborative systems practice aims to "show", that is, to prototype – to evoke sensibly – its systems in focus. Today  we are all immersed in smartphones,  TV's, videos, and our visual social networks. Also, workers in global organizations and those with lived experience to whom we aim to give voice often do not speak the same first language. These are all reasons why a collaborative systems practice relies less on prose and grammar, and more on lucid, logical models. 

It is thus no surprise that classic project management work products such as the WBS and Gantt chart are visual systems models. So are agile's burn down charts, Kanban boards, and product backlogs. 

On Cogent Language worksites, explanations and task work are set out by way of diagrams, tables, and other systems models corresponding to those in global projects and the operating world in general.  Much of the work on worksites is done by making use of and constructing visual systems models. 

Personal

If your learning in collaborative systems practice isn't personal, it isn't cogent. Such learning  should give you significant choices about what you want to focus on, what systems you want to design, and most importantly, what projects you would like to work with and on. How else can your learning stay connected with your realities and your ideals? 

"Buy-in" drives motivation and learning. It comes largely from you having meaningful options about topics and participation. "Getting your way" is not a distraction or side-trip. It is skin in the game that accelerates learning and improves a collaborative systems practice.  

For this reason, worksites and bundles of them in our courses, offer multiple learning paths. So, after you enter a worksite or sign up or a course, you have meaningful choices about specific topics and learning activities. You have options among worksites to work on in a course, and  options in any given worksite. These enabling you to tailor templates and workflow to your preferences. Also, in our courses, class size is small so that the course coach can really coach, supporting you and/or your team along a learning path fit to your constraints and your goals.

To leverage past and current project experience to accelerate collaborative systems practice and to deploy learning in current and furture projects.  the new, and the new to problem solve and transform the familar.