Social media was a big theme at the PMI Global Congress North America and the Leadership Institute Meeting in Dallas, Texas, last month. Many of the presentations touched on the idea that new ways of working were making project management more challenging but also more fun. Speakers like Gina Schrek, Kris Reynolds and James Kane talked about how social media is in common usage amongst the Generation Y employees and how they expect to be able to use these tools at work. There was lots of Twitter activity at the Congress as well: search Twitter for the hash tag #pminac to see all the discussion.
Social media tools give us different ways to interact with stakeholders and to really be able to provide information to users in the way they want to receive it. The ways available to us for interacting with users have changed.
Websites enable interaction
Social networks (in case you don’t know) are tools like LinkedIn and Facebook. There are also workplace equivalents, that also form part of the internal telephone directory. This is one use of Web 2.0 technology, that moves us away from static websites into a more interactive environment.
You can receive ‘push’ notifications when things change or your friends update your status, but if you want to make a change to your profile, you have to go to the website itself either directly or via an app to post your updates. The social network becomes the hub around which you and your friends or colleagues hang out. The website become as virtual water cooler.
Email is replaced with messaging
Instant messaging tools (is there an alternative, non-instant version?) like Messenger and other chat software enable you to talk to people with the same software, provided that they are online at the same time as you.
This is a great tool for project managers who want instant answers to questions, or to ask colleagues something in private while they are working at the offices of a client.
Multiple sources are being replaced by dashboards
We aren’t seeing this operating successfully a lot at the moment, but I predict it will a growing trend. Personal dashboards will bring together information from disparate souces and present it to the user in one screen. Applications like FriendFeed are going in the right direction.
For project managers, we could expect to see the latest updates from Seavus Project Planner or our project management tool, on the same screen as latest emails, Tweets, status updates from Facebook and LinkedIn, new entries to the corporate wiki and who last made a change to our Google Docs.
This will start out being separate personal and professional dashboards but I imagine they will end up blending the two together as the boundaries between personal and professional lives blur.
Documents are being replaced by wikis and blogs
Document management is one of the hardest things to do as a project manager, and it doesn’t take long before the document management system you have set up is completely overrun with documents called the wrong thing, filed in the wrong directory.
This is being mitigated by rich search, which means that wiki entries and blog posts can be searched in natural language. Better search makes it easier to find what you are looking for and also what related items may be available. Hyperlinks in blogs and wikis mean that project team members can jump between items when they find something related. It is also easy to see who last updated the entry and when they did so. This way of being able to navigate around multiple text entries speeds up finding what you are looking for and encourages information sharing.
I don’t think that wikis and blogs will completely replace documents, but they could go some way to replacing meeting minutes and informal file notes. You will probably still need a project initiation document and some method of getting formal documents signed off. Zapproved is one tool that can do this online for you, but moving executive management to electronic sign off might be a challenge!