IT Leaders Struggle with Bringing Social Networking into Formalized PM Processes

The July 20, 2009 issue of InformationWeek brings us an article by John Soat on how IT leaders are wrestling to bring informal collaboration into rigorous processes such as global project management and product development. I’ve included a portion of that article – including a discussion on how one company is using IWMS vendor Skire’s Unifier product to managing their project, collaboration and communication needs.

I’ve personally worked with several people at Skire during an evaluation of their product and found this article very interesting. Please read on….

The Right Place for Social Networking?

Nevsun Resources is a mining company with headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, and its biggest project is developing mines in Eritrea, a small country on the east coast of Africa. Using a browser-based, software-as-a-service project management tool, logistics clerks, engineers, and project managers are sharing documents, cost outlines, and project schedules across continents, giving CFO Peter Hardie in North America what he calls a “real-time review” of the project in a fairly remote area of Africa. “The spectrum of people using it is broad, and that’s what we were hoping we would get out of the system,” Hardie says.

The system – called Unifier, from the vendor Skire – lets Hardie “bridge the time and distance gaps that exist between the project principals in Vancouver, Eritrea, and South Africa,” he says. It helps Nevsun control costs and track expenditures down to the invoice level.

Social networking norms increasingly are creeping into formal project planning and product development tools and processes. And at many companies, the rules both formal and informal for how to use those social computing tools often aren’t written down. Nevsun’s system let’s people comment and ask questions about a record or specific aspect of the project. But there’s always a way to opt out of the collaboration flow. Asked if he uses the ad hoc communication capability in the Unifier system, Hardie says: “Me, personally? No.” Instead, if he’s reviewing specific costs and has a question, he’ll simply pick up the phone and call somebody.

As almost all business becomes global in nature and business processes increasingly are managed online, companies continue to push the limits of technology created to manage projects and teams across time zones and geographies. The goal is to communicate more effectively, work more closely with partners, leverage ephemeral information sources, and ultimately get as close as possible to the feel of what’s really going on.

Nevsun’s experience with Skire is just one cross-continent example. In product development, vendors such as Dassault Systemes, Siemens, and others are plowing Web 2.0 capabilities into their product life-cycle management platforms, adding collaboration and complexity.

Running alongside these formal platforms is the aggressive use of Internet-centric social networking platforms and tools – wikis, blogs, instant messaging, presence awareness, peer reviews, search – to foster internal teamwork and tap into wider communities of knowledge. Yet IT teams are wrestling with how these tools function in concert with collaboration technology, such as document management, project management, and product development systems. Are they adjuncts, integral parts, or even replacements for tried-and-true software?

Plenty of CIOs also are wary of the data integration, security, and productivity issues raised by the introduction of social networking technology in the enterprise, especially when tied to a process as critical as developing a new product or completing a project. Yet some of embraced the dynamic nature of social computing and turned it to their advantage.

Four Challenges to Ad Hoc Collaboration

Creating Norms. When you have a wiki and formal project or product development software, what conversations happen where? One idea: If it’s tied to a process step, keep it in the formal tool. If it’s about improving that process, go to the wiki.

Breaking Convention. Product development is a high-stakes process. Injecting social networking conventions adds risks. Yet it could be vital to global teams that innovate ideas as well as execute.

Finding Insights. Done wrong, wikis can create islands of insights that the right people will never find.

Conquering Fear. Subject experts might be wary of sharing hard-earned insights, since they see that as their value.

One Case for Twitter – Comcast / Salesforce Case Study

I have now written two articles fully debunking Facebook of having any real project management or business related application. I’ve gone nearly as far with Twitter – only admitting that it’s good for networking and possibly for reaching out for hard-to-find answers when issues on your projects concerning technology or process may arise.

However, I just read the following situation InformationWeek where a Comcast rep was solving subscribers issues by reaching out to them on Twitter. From a pure project management perspective, possibly the best usage would be post-deployment support or possibly lessons learned information, but it’s an interesting read either way….read on…

Frank Eliason, a Comcast Customer-Service Rep, has more than 13,000 followers on Twitter. In the coming weeks, he’s going to help Salesforce.com figure out how to introduce corporate customer-service systems into the world of Twitter.

About a year ago, Eliason and his team of 10 reps, who primarily answered customer e-mails, began to seek out and help customers who were publicly blogging their criticisms and frustrations with Comcast. The team increasingly concentrated on Twitter and its millions of easily searchable microblogs. Eliason’s readiness to help solve Comcast customers’ problems, while calmly ignoring the occasional insults thrown his way, soon made him somewhat of a personality among Twitter regulars. He’s known as @comcastcares.

Then the media came calling, and in recent months, several newspapers, magazines, and television networks have profiled Eliason. His technique is to tentatively approach Twitterers critical of Comcast, rather than offer up advice that wasn’t asked for. “I never thought I’d become famous on three words: Can I help?” Eliason said.

Now Salesforce wants Eliason’s help. It recently announced an add-on for Salesforce CRM that lets companies track and aggregate customer complaints on Twitter. Eliason and his team will be testing the offering, which is scheduled for general availability in the summer. It’s a perfect fit, since Comcast is already a customer of Salesforce CRM’s Internet (a.k.a. “cloud”)-based software services.

CRM for Twitter will include a dashboard for tracking and monitoring topics on Twitter, the replies to those topics, and whether customer issues were resolved, and it will alert customer-service reps to volume spikes on certain topics. The app will be integrated with Salesforce’s Knowledge Base, which reps use to look up answers to customers’ questions and problems.

Pricing will start at $995 a month for five agents and support for 250 customers. This isn’t Salesforce’s first social networking attempt: In January, it announced an app service that companies can set up to have customers come to them on Facebook (the searchable Twitter approach wouldn’t work with Facebook, since users’ “walls,” where they would post comments, operate on an invitation-only basis). Still, using a team of salaried employees to seek out disgruntled customers on the Web may seem counterintuitive to the typical big-business approach to customers service; that is, stock a phone bank with as many low-cost workers as possible that follow scripts in a database.

But Salesforce executives said during a recent InformationWeek briefing that maybe that’s not the best approach. Perhaps, they suggested, companies need to move beyond the call-center mentality and start reaching people at the place they’re increasingly going to complain about things and get help from others: the Internet.

Twitter, of course, is used by just a small fraction of Comcast’s customers, and Eliason’s team is a tiny speck in a pool of 30,000 customer reps at the company. Still, Eliason said his team has helped solved about 21,000 customer issues on Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs, and other social networking sites since starting the work a year ago, and he envisions a day when perhaps thousands of Comcast reps can use the CRM for Twitter application.

“This allows us to be much more efficient because it’s going to tie into Knowledge Base,” Eliason said. “My team is the guinea pigs.”

There’s also a big-brother quality to a software service that helps companies find what their customers are saying about them and then intervene. Eliason said it’s all in the approach.

“My advice to companies considering this is that you don’t try to interfere with a conversation,” Eliason said. “If someone is commenting about Comcast, we may not give the answer right off the bat. We don’t force ourselves into a conversation. Instead, we throw the ball in their court, with, ‘Can I help?’ ”

Twitter has also proven to be an “early warning system,” Eliason said; customers will tweet about a Comcast problem before calling customer service.

In some situations, Eliason’s team has known about issues before a Comcast call center. Last year, Comcast reps working on the East Coast at 7 a.m. saw a few late-night tweets about a network problem in San Francisco (4 a.m.). The call centers serving San Francisco didn’t start getting calls about the issue until three hours later, when most Comcast customers in the area were waking up and trying to sign on.

Based on his experience with Twitter, Eliason believes that public social networks will prove to be far more important to businesses than they may are expecting. “Engaging with customers is what works, not PR or marketing or customer-relationship ‘management,’ ” he said. “People respect a company when it’s not about the message, it’s about the personal relationship.”

This article was written by Mary Hayes Weier for InformationWeek. It did not appear in their print publication but was available to subscribers online through an alert download at www.informationweek.com/alert/socialnetworks.

Mistakes matter: post-project reviews

Whether you call it post-project review, lessons learned, post-implementation evaluation or any other term, looking at what went wrong on a project and working out how to do things differently next time is a key way to improve project success.

Most project managers accept the need to do lessons learned activity.  Some even do it.  But the sessions are normally at the end of a project when the team is itching to get on to new things.  You won’t all be working together again for the foreseeable future so it isn’t really relevant to understand why Sonia made that decision or what Frank would do next time to avoid that error.

These are the main problems project managers encounter with running this type of end-of-project review meeting:

• People feel unable to express their true interpretations of the project
• People are unwilling to contribute if their manager is there as they don’t want to appear negative
• People mix up the person and the act and feedback gets very picky and personal
• People don’t care about what happened: they are focused on the future
• Everyone says the project went like a dream and there is nothing constructive raised about areas to improve
• The area that cannot make it to the meeting is targeted and all the failings are blamed on them.

All these issues are to do with human interaction, which is a major skill for all project managers.  A skilled facilitator will be able to head off these issues during (or even before) the meeting.  For more on managing the people stuff and the soft skills of project management, have a look at Anthony Mersino’s blog, EQ4PM.

Let’s say that you can handle the people side of things and are interested in the output.  At best, this type of ‘what went well, what we could improve’ or ‘pluses and deltas’ meeting only helps the people in the room.  The lessons rarely get cascaded on to other projects so while each individual might benefit, the way that organisation runs projects will not whole-heartedly improve.

One way to counteract this is to schedule lessons learned sessions more regularly through the project.  Make it part of each gate review, or part of the closure before you move to a new phase.  Or schedule sessions at significant moments in the year like the end of your financial year or just before things slow down for summer.  Making reviews more regular enhances the likelihood that the lessons will be learned and implemented.  A policy of continuous process improvement will also get your team used to the idea that changing the way things are done is part of the project process.

Part of your role as a project manager should also be to improve the quality of the projects that your company does: it’s good professional practice to feedback to the other project managers any key points that you have learned that you think they could benefit from.  There are various ways to do this: your regular project managers team meeting, via the PMO or informally through an email to everyone.  Some organisations have a lessons learned database and this could also be a mechanism to share stories if one is available to you.  There are also other online tools like The Mistake Bank, but be careful not to post anything confidential to your company on an external website, even if you think it will help other project managers.

Next week I’ll be looking at how to make changes stick once they have been identified as part of the lessons learned process.

Knowledge Managment News

A heretical view of knowledge management

For a long time, I have felt that there are multiple, significant problems in how the information technology industry has branded and sold knowledge management.

First, given that we barely know how to reliably produce information, I felt it was arrogant to assume we knew how to reliably produce knowledge. Second, knowledge representation as a field has been going on since Aristotle and is still undergoing widespread change and innovation (as described in my April 6 column). Thus, for industry to claim to have products to solve that problem seems a bit disingenuous.

Finally, what the knowledge management industry has latched onto — probably because of its limited success in this area — are collaborative applications such as Web portals, blogging, discussion groups and wikis as the mainstays of knowledge management. The idea is that logging and sharing experience, in any medium, equate to capturing and managing the knowledge of your organization. But although informal discussions can contain knowledge, it is equally likely that they do not — and there’s the rub.

Read the entire article here.

Chiarelli urges support for knowledge management tools

Federal knowledge officers need to keep championing the practical value of systems that help users make better decisions, not just process greater amounts of information, said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff.

He also warned against giving in to bureaucratic barriers that stand in the way of getting critical operational information into the hands of those who need it.

“What I’ve found as a leader who’s stepped up in the Army [is that] the higher you get, the more people want to deny you t information you really need,” Chiarelli told a gathering of public-sector professionals at the 10th annual Knowledge Management conference April 28.

Read the entire article here.

Blogging on Enterprise Portals

Since a couple of the last few posts have focused on certain aspects of the Sharepoint 2007 server ( MOSS 2007 ) i decided to do a small article on how Blogs were implemented in this environment. Given the fact that a number of you have used this platform at some point of time this might be of use to put to practice some of the blogging strategies we talked about earlier.

Microsoft realized that in creating a content authoring platform they couldn’t afford to leave out the one aspect that has revolutionized the method by which content authoring is being tackled today, namely blogs. So in an effort to harness Blogs and promote their use in a corporate setting Microsoft introduced Blogs in their latest version of Sharepoint.

Being true to Blogs Microsoft hasn’t tampered too much with the basic layout, which means there is a seamless transition to corporate blogging for people who are already familiar with the concept of personal blogs.

They’ve incorporated a complete gamut of features that we’ve come to expect from any Blog.

Some of these are :

• Comments
• Categories
• Blogroll
• Search
• Permalink
• RSS feeds
• Calendar

Using the Sharepoint platform allows for certain additional features to be incorporated into the Blog. You can now publish information on your blog via e-mail’s, this includes sending documents as attachments ( something most blogs don’t support ). API support for word 2007 actually allows you to directly interface with your blog and submit content through a word document on your desktop. Advanced features like Sharepoint permissions can be inherited and used throughout the Blog.

Multiple Authors can contribute to the same blog, and since the Blog ( like most of the features on Sharepoint ) is built on Webparts it really allows an amazing level of customization. Mobile View allows users to access blogs on Sharepoint via their mobile phones, a very useful feature as the percentage of people living on their Blackberry’s, Treo’s, iPhone’s and other smart phones seem to be growing at an alarming pace.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of using the Sharepoint Platform to host your Blog is the fact that you can get details like user contact info and such as the application interfaces directly with the organizations exchange server. A feature that most corporate would definitely find very useful.

All said and done I’m still a fan of Wordpress and Microsoft has a long way to go if they want to deliver a blog tool that meets the demands of professional bloggers.