Experiments
Open questions about how projects work.
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Project notes and linked examples
Gimmer: processes to plans
Turn process rules and resource assumptions into candidate schedules.
Lawrence’s main Petri → SMC → WBS collection: related models, generators and explanations, including earlier experiments.
Build a small refuge halfway up a cliff.
How can Petri-net processes become a WBS and schedule?
processes, wbs, schedule
Integrated risks & tasks
Cows, concrete and shared access: compare original sketches, corrected wiring, process sets and alternative executions of a small resource model.
Pour the foundations before the cows take the lane.
Can tasks and threats be understood through one process model?
processes, risk, composition, category theory
Project Co-design
Four wildlife-crossing essais: compose a complete crossing, construct a delivery path, compare programmes and size remote monitoring power.
Reconnect two habitats across a busy road.
Can a feasible finished system be delivered through acceptable stages?
co design, trade offs, staging, category theory
Bricklaying a Rotunda
A collection of experiments around project dynamics, lenses and trajectories.
Build a circular brick wall, course by course.
How can we explore changing project states?
dynamics, models, category theory
Local to Global
Two lines of enquiry: early Tangled Triangle sketches ask how AI interprets interfaces, topology and system architecture; later experiments test local-to-global consistency.
Fit a control centre onto the Tangled Triangle.
When do local project views fit together?
consistency, wbs, category theory
Programme Decision Sequences
Models, worksheets, worked paths and IT decision games for acting under uncertainty. The experiments catalogue distinguishes live simulations, tutorials and historical reports.
Choose now; learn more before the next decision.
How should a programme act as uncertainty unfolds?
decisions, uncertainty, programmes
Gimmer: higher-autonomy experiments
Agent-led trials of package boundaries, partial progress and feedback.
A parallel Petri → SMC → WBS investigation. Agents choose bounded next steps and repeat build, test and review loops as compute permits.
The same refuge, with the awkward handovers left in.
How far can repeated agent-led experiments advance the same aim?
processes, wbs, higher autonomy
Project Spines
Six tabs on schedule spines, antichain slices, finite shed construction, review loops, vacillation boundaries and project-controls interpretation.
Build a mountain-refuge shed, one dependency at a time.
What can schedule structure reveal beyond dates?
Origin: Codex consolidation of the Hollman project-controls prototypes
schedule, project controls, posets, antichains, github pages, side project
Functors for Projects
Browse experiments in functors, adjoints, sheaves, wiring diagrams and finite colimits, including the grounded-theory coding illustration.
Describe one project in more than one useful way.
How might mathematical structures illuminate project work?
category theory, models, project management
Building a Wall
Project wiring diagrams, beginning with a construction essay on readiness, reusable modules and computed checks, alongside eight earlier explorations.
Build a wall that is ready to receive a roof.
Can explicit interfaces turn project work into reusable blocks?
wiring diagrams, composition, readiness, category theory
Gimmer: broader collection
Explore procurement, observations, change and different accounts of the refuge.
Observation, binding, procurement, ontology and change experiments outside the Petri → SMC → WBS collection and higher-autonomy work.
Deliver the refuge—and keep its different accounts connected.
What other project questions can the Gimmer scenario explore?
observation, procurement, ontology, change
Solway Tunnel Ontology
Ontology and WBS experiments using a tunnel scenario, with a separate knowledge-graph audit.
Imagine delivering a tunnel beneath the Solway.
How can a project ontology connect to a plan?
ontology, wbs, knowledge graphs
Portfolio Wave reading map
Explore the public source–project–topic projection through the Portfolio Wave view of the concepts graph.
Follow a reading idea into a project experiment.
How do sources, themes and projects connect?
knowledge graphs, sources, projects
Tag Concurrence Graph
Concepts-graph views for reading collections and a dated React app-catalogue tag map, with explicit source and refresh information.
Find connections in a shelf of tagged reading.
Which concepts occur together in reading and app collections?
knowledge graphs, sources
Knowing enough to act together
Find information arrangements that let each person choose.
Compare route cues, completion reports and direct inspections. Discover which information arrangements let the handlers choose a passage and the curator decide whether to reopen.
Move an oversized whale exhibit through a museum.
When can a physically possible move be chosen through local information?
knowledge, coordination, project state
Meta Project Innovation
An early trial of demand challenge, evidence and planning choices.
Frontier Lab explores five independent lenses on one case. Demand challenge and evidence sensors connect to this foray's original candidates; their combined practical value remains open.
Move customer data to the cloud, questioning the inherited scope.
Which changes to planning could make the project itself better?
project management, planning, evidence, innovation
Counterfactual programme steering
Inspect causal assumptions and compare simulated interventions in an early essai.
Project Causal Lab pairs a causal-graph explorer with a separate programme-policy model. An early Counterfactuals trial, with the boundary between assumptions, fitted data and causal evidence made explicit.
A delivery team considers more automation, extra staff or a lower WIP limit.
What would change if we chose a different management policy?
causality, counterfactuals, decisions, simulation
Bracken Vale: useful project interventions
Try editable models and evidence-linked drafts against an ordinary checklist, table or workshop diagram.
Practical trials explore project decisions, relationships, measures and evidence-linked drafts in a fictional railway. Inputs and results stay inspectable; practical human benefit remains to be tested.
A small railway has renewals to plan, decisions waiting and several accounts of what matters.
Which small interventions help project people see and do something useful?
project management, decisions, evidence, relationships
Compare approaches across the portfolio
One shared challenge. Nine ways to reason.
Nine approaches from across these experiments, applied to the same fictional mountain-refuge brief. Gimmer supplies the shared test case; the comparison spans processes, dynamics, agreement, co-design, semantics and decisions.
Custom GPTs now live in the Library →.