Dennis Howlett’s The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social media, once you get past the hyperbole of the title and ZDNet’s antiquated requirement to register in order to leave comments, makes some good points.
All in Project Management
I was interviewed yesterday by a Forrester Research staff member about how CIO’s (Chief information Officers) should approach the implementation of collaboration tools (click here for a list of blog posts related to “collaboration”). We talked about the usual adoption issues related to “web 2.0” applications within the enterprise.
Project Management, Social Media, and Defining "Community"
As a continuation of our Conversation about Project Management and Social Media, Lee White in his recent post Project Community states the following:
The point here is not that Social Media, as discussed in earlier posts, directly drives efficiencies, but that it can create a community of project stakeholders that are passionate about the successful completion of a project.
Lee White and I are discussing how social media can be used to support project management. Lee discusses his views on his blog, I discuss my views here, and below you can see a combination of both of our posts.
Project Blogs, Email, and Dual Collaboration Channels
Jim MacLennan, a seriously thoughtful corporate IT manager, recently published Update on Blogs as PM Tools - Tales from the Front Lines. There he made the following statements about the challenges of adopting blogs and wikis in support of project management:
I’ve been looking for ways to describe the different types of collaboration processes that technology can support.
What Should Project Managers Know about Social Media and Social Networking?
I’m a member of the online group SdB+PM Forum, a collective of 825 senior project managers who are also members of the Linkedin professional networking group.
OK, what IS a "project blog," anyway?
I’ve been interviewing technical project managers about their thoughts on the use of blogs as project management tools. Preliminary results are here. One finding is that how you ask the question about blogging and project management makes a big difference in the response.
Presentation: Blogging and Project Management Survey - Preliminary Findings
This presentation is a progress report on the dozen or so interviews I’ve conducted so far in my blogging and project management survey:
Here are selected notes from interviews conducted as part of my project blog survey:
Jeremiah Owyang has an interesting discussion going on over at his blog in The Challenges of Social Media in the Enterprise, why Business and IT need to align.
CIO.com's Seven Reasons for Your Company to Start an Internal Blog lists the following:
1. Your enterprise e-mail applications are not easy to search.
2. Your e-mail is lost in the eye of the “cc storm.”
3. Ex-employees can take it with them.
4. Too much wasted time checking in with colleagues.
5. With blogs, the humble and the egotist both win.
6. Organizational openness and accountability.
7. People might already be using them.
While writing up notes for my Project Blog Survey, I learned from George Dearing about the new MindMeister product, a web based “mindmapping” tool that supports graphical concept mapping, collaboration, and group Skype calling.
I am looking for people to interview (confidentially, if you like) about your personal experiences using a blog to support project management within a corporate or large organization setting.
The best podcasts I’ve heard recently on enterprise adoption of social media are two interviews with Toby Redshaw of Motorola by Dan Bricklin. One is from March of 2006 and the other from March 2007.
Is Innovation Management a Process or a Project?
I've been thinking about innovation management recently in connection with some consulting projects. The question I've been considering is how to best manage the innovation process that surrounds adopting various social networking and collaboration tools.
One can view the adoption of such tools as an innovation.
Web 2.0 and the Manhattan Project
While listening to a podcast of a recent interview with Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I was struck by the question, “What if the Manhattan Project had been conducted using the collaborative and social networking tools we now have?”
Earlier this month in my post What is the Minimum Information You Need to Describe Your IT Projects? I mentioned that a “RACI” statement is a useful way to communicate project responsibilities:
* Who has ultimate Responsibility, who has Authority to make decisions, who must be Consulted about major actions or decisions, and who must be Informed about major actions or decisions.
One blog I read is the Microsoft Knowledge Network Team Blog (registration required). It describes development and features of the "Knowledge Network" product that will accompany Microsoft's upcoming Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 which is also in Beta status.
When considering the potential system integration costs of an enterprise web 2.0 project, one of the first things to do is to identify potential system-related “ripple effects” (if any) of introducing an enterprise web 2.0 system into the organization. We also need to consider the cost implications of addressing and managing these ripple effects over time.