Introduction

In his recent post Project Community Lee White makes the following statement:

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.

Adoption and use of social media can help “drive” efficiencies. A case in point is the shift from total reliance on inefficient email based communication to more collaborative technologies. Also, experienced project managers will instinctively appreciate how the concept of “community” relates to staff morale and project success.

Defining “Community”

But we also need to be careful how we use the word “community.” The simplest meaning of “community” is “a group of people who share some common goal or interest.”  You could say, by this definition, that the staff members of any project are a “community” simply because they share the project’s goal in common.

“Community” also has a more complex and subtle meaning that refers not only to group members’ sharing a common goal but to internalization of the community’s goals at a more fundamental level than simple agreement/disagreement.

The phrase “sense of community” begins to get at this meaning and refers to a sharing of common beliefs that involves a connection at a more personal or emotional level. Words like “passion,” “devotion,” and “commitment” also come to mind in this regard.

A key component of this more fundamental concept of community is the existence of relationships among the members of the group that go beyond accidental shared interests. Good project managers may want their project staff members to be “passionate” about a project for the simple reason that the more committed one is to a project’s success, the more likely the project will be a success. This goes hand in hand with the desire one has to make all the members of a team successful. The likelihood of a sense of group commitment also increases as the social bonds among project staff members are strengthened. The stronger the social, professional, and emotional relationships are of the team members, the more likely each will go “the extra mile” to make the project a success.

Strengthening relationships

A legitimate question is whether social media and social networking can actually strengthen the relationships among project team members so that the overall goals of the project are advanced. I personally believe this can be the case, partly because I believe that anything that helps people in a project group communication is a good thing.

There are two areas of uncertainty regarding the relationship between social media and project management. The first has to do with the nature of the role that technology plays in helping to “create” a sense of community among a group of people. The second concerns the blurring of traditional distinctions between formal and informal organizations that social media and social networking can cause.

The role of technology

Concerning the role of technology, there are two instances that need to be considered. In the first instance, where a group or “community” already exists, technology may actually strengthen and speed up communications, but it may not necessarily “create” new relationships. For an existing group with existing relationships the role of social media and online social networks can be, at minimum, to enhance the speed with which communication occurs and decisions are made.

But consider the second case, where a project brings together groups of people who may not know each other or who may not have worked together before. An example would be a large corporate project or a project to unify the operations of two merging companies.  When this is the case, social media and social networking systems not only can aid in collaboration and communication but they can also bring people together and help establish relationships despite organizational and geographic distances. In the context of a temporary time-bounded project this is not at all unusual, especially when projects are large and involve multiple teams that span organizational or departmental boundaries. Making it easy for people to communicate and to establish both professional and social relationships can make eminently good sense.

Of course I am not suggesting that creating work products collaboratively, sharing information, or creating problem solving discussion forums, blogs, or wikis removes the need for leadership and direction. The exact opposite may actually be the case because of the independent way many social media and networking tools can be employed. Collaboration is no substitute for leadership, especially when deadlines loom.

Blurring traditional roles

Let’s return to Lee’s use of the term “community.” In any organization we will find both formal and informal groups with much overlap among members and member interests. Formal hierarchical reporting structures may or may not reflect the actual social and professional. relationships among staff members in the organization, but there will always be legitimate reasons for referring to and maintaining the formal structure.

The same is true of projects, especially large projects. On paper a pyramidal or hierarchical structure may exist, but in practice the actual flow of work and work processes is impacted not only by formal organizational definitions but also by the social and professional relationships that already exist or are formed among project staff.

If that is the case, a communications and information management infrastructure that reflects the actual working relationships among the project staff makes extremely good sense.  In fact, a good project manager will encourage collaboration and communication in support of project objectives even if such collaboration bypasses job title and position descriptions that might discourage such collaboration.

Conclusion

“Project community” is an important concept that can reflect not only how a project is organized but also how personal and social relationships can impact how the work is actually performed, It is up to project management to understand the roles of project communities and to support their development and operation while at the same time ensuring that all project participants understand and act upon project goals and priorities.

• 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 will respond to the above post on his blog. Our posts in this series along with selected comments will be listed here.

• This post responds to Lee White’s Project Language Translation.

Lee makes a very good point in his last post:

The trick is for the project manager to find some mechanism to present the project content in a more consumable format, and to allow the stakeholders to effectively respond without having to learn the “syntax”. Enter Social Media.

I’d take that even farther. The project manager needs to be able to “tune” the message for a variety of audiences. If you follow traditional RACI definitions you can see that the communication options appropriate for different interest groups are quite different:

• Responsible - The role is the person/team responsible for the deliverables of this contract/service.
  
• Accountable - Ultimate Decision Maker in terms of this contract/service
• Consulted - Who must be consulted before action is taken on this contract/service. This is 2-way communication. These people have an impact on the decision and/or the execution of that decision.
• Informed - Who must be informed that a decision or action is being taken. This is a 1-way communication. These people are impacted by the decision or execution of that decision, but have no control over the action.

The channels and media you use to communicate with individuals in these groups will differ just as the message you use will differ. The added dimension with the availability of social media (click here to link to a definition of social media) is that the project manager has the ability to establish a relationship with the “community” of individuals in these different groups.

This is why, as you scan the currently available tools available to project managers, you see that, increasingly, traditional “project management” features are being supplemented with collaboration and social networking features for those instances where back and forth interaction and group information sharing and discussion are important.

Social media can be viewed as doing more than just offering a more targeted way to interact with a project’s interest groups. For some people social media represent a fundamental shift in control; when you transform a one-way conversation to a two way conversation you imply by your actions that you care about what people will be communicating back to you. Not everyone is comfortable with this, including some project managers who are accustomed to having their word taken as “law.”

A question I will pose to Lee is: are there particular situations — or types of projects — where social media tools are particularly appropriate? 

• 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 will respond to the above post on his blog. Our posts in this series along with selected comments will be listed here.

• 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? 

***

• 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.

While interviewing project managers for my blogging and project management survey I encountered several people who didn’t use blogs but did use wikis. This made it clear to me that it’s important to specify what we mean by “social media” in connection with project management. Below I suggest a couple of definitions I think might be relevant to our discussion.

Here are definitions of “social media” and social networking” I used here:

Social Media are collections of data and information that are developed collaboratively and/or shared interactively among individuals and groups. Examples of social media are blogs, wikis, shared bookmarks, and group rating systems.

Social Networking is the use of special processes and technologies to support the discovery, formation, and maintenance of personal and professional relationships. Examples of commercial social networks are Facebook, MySpace, and Linkedin.

I’ve also become somewhat partial to the more general concept of “technology enabled collaboration,” which I defined here as follows:

I include in “technology enabled collaboration” the  variety of communication or information management technologies that make it possible for people to (a) discover common interests, (b) exchange information about those common interests, and (c) build and maintain personal and professional relationships over time that reflect those interests. These categories include both traditional technologies (e.g., phone, email, teleconferencing) as well as newer collaboration and social media and social networking technologies such as blogs, wikis, group messaging, social networking, and social bookmarking.

Lee White in his blog post Re-Imagine Project Management makes the following statement:

Once a project is underway, the most important role of project management is to keep everyone coordinated, i.e. to facilitate communication. If you think about all of the gantt charts, and cost estimates, and dashboards used on a project, they all serve one purpose; to effectively communicate what is going on. If these tools do not accomplish this function they are useless. Social media again can play a key role, because at its heart social media is about communication.

While I certainly agree that communication plays a major role in project management and that social media have an important role to play in project communications, I don’t want to underestimate the importance of the formal tools of project managent. Both are needed, in my view. Formal project management tools can serve as starting point for communications about who is supposed to do what, and when. The larger and more complex the project, the more important role communications plays — and the more inmportant formal tools are in order to keep track of the many different “moving parts” in a large project.

Still, a plan by itself is not enough, project charts and reports are not enough, and communication by itself is not enough. Both leadership and collaboration are needed. Leadership provides direction and judgement, and collaboration involves people working together towards a common purpose. 

Back to you, Lee!