Dennis McDonald's Web Site

By Dennis D. McDonald 

• This post responds to Lee White’s Tools of Communication in Project Management.

Lee, there is no way that you are going to convince me to manage a multimillion dollar project with hundreds of employees and multiple vendors without a formal, structured budget, a schedule, a defined set of tasks, or a defined set of responsibilities that can be communicated. I will also insist on an appropriate set of formal tools to efficiently keep track of all the “moving parts” — including the budget.

At the same time, I realize that success requires communication and collaboration, so here’s my wish list:

• A centralized project intranet with integrated reporting tools, content management, and collaborative content development (e.g., blogging and/or easy to use wikis incorporating version control and version access).
• Voice, text, and video communication among all project staff, complete with “presence” indicators to tell when individuals are online and available to converse.
• An easy way to create and dissolve both permanent and temporary workgroups.
• Integrated time reporting so I can see what project and non-project work my project staff are committed to, now and through the forseeable future.
  
• Personalized web pages that incorporate individualized views of tasks and responsibilities (including dependencies, what’s late, and what’s next).
  
• The ability to mix and match control models so that both discrete, defined tasks as well as more flexible group oriented agile work techniques can be incorporated into the same overall management and reporting structure.
  
• The ability to  link an object to a discussion thread that can be tracked over time, bookmarked. tagged, and made universally searchable.
  
• Universal search against all objects, universally available tagging, and universally available RSS feeds (and an easy way to subscribe and unsubscribe).
  
• Automated support for tagging.
• Automated support for updating skills and expertise profiles based on project communications and work accomplished.
• The ability to view all project activities and associated objects at a 30,000 foot level and at a micro-level, and the ability to customize, store, retrieve, and display updates to these profiles over time.

What am I missing? 

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• This post is part of the series A Conversation about Project Management and Social Media which includes posts by Dennis D. McDonald and Lee White. Lee responds to the above post on his blog in Project Language Translation.
• Note to vendors: I KNOW that many of these features are already available in off the shelf products. Comments that are thinly disguised sales pitches without a sincere effort to contribute to this discussion will be mercilessly and gleefully deleted.