Blogs have emerged as a serious project management tool.
This isn’t your teenager’s blog. Project managers are increasingly using blogs — more specifically, blogs installed behind an organization’s firewall — as a means to streamline and enhance communication on their projects.
To understand the potential business value of these tools, it helps to view the role of project blogs in terms of the business objectives they support, says Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D., a project management consultant based in Alexandria, Virginia, USA. Mr. McDonald also maintains a personal blog about collaboration, social networking, and other issues related to technology adoption and management.
He is quick to note that blogs shouldn’t replace other management and communication tools in a project manager’s arsenal, but instead should complement them.
“Even highly technical people can have some ignorance about the potentially wide range of functionality that blogs have and the role they can play,” Mr. McDonald says. “When I started asking people about their use of project management blogs … a lot of them seemed to think I was advocating the replacement of highly structured project management tools. That’s the exact opposite of what I think should happen.”
For more information on what technologies may be right for your project team, check out these resources:
Blogs, Wikis, Webcasts: utilization of state-of-the-art communication instruments for project management — a conference paper on the PMI Marketplace.
The PMI Information Systems Specific Interest Group (ISSIG) — which includes the Virtual Teamwork with Real Results blog by Nick Matteucci.
A blog by Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D., about managing and living with technology.
What a blog can — and should — do is help cut down on a project team’s e-mails and meetings, notes Kathy Schwalbe, Ph.D., PMP, a professor in the Department of Business Administration at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, author of several textbooks on project management and the director of communications for the PMI Information Systems Specific Interest Group (ISSIG).
As e-mail is circulated among team members, key messages can often get lost in the clutter of forwards and replies. A blog centralizes the discussion and keeps things on a more linear track. It can also serve as a way to generate lessons learned after a project’s completion, and allow people in different areas of an organization to interact and share tips with each other — whether they’re on the same project team or not.
“If your project deals with marketing on some level and people in your marketing group are on your project blog, you can gain insights into their needs that might take weeks or months to uncover otherwise,” says Nick Matteucci, partner and co-founder of the portfolio and project management software provider VCSonline, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Mr. Matteucci is also a frequent blogger on the ISSIG website. “Blogs are more organic and less filtered than formal information gathering.”
Before diving headfirst into the blogosphere, however, project teams should consider the technical requirements and security issues within their own organizations. Mr. McDonald and Ms. Schwalbe point out that having an enterprise system is usually better simply because it is more secure than a hosted blog.
“Also, if you are going to have higher-level functions such as downloading and sharing of documents or other things besides simply posting, you absolutely should have your IT department involved in setting things up,” Mr. McDonald says. “Any time you have an interactive and collaborative service, it needs to be available in a standardized and easily used fashion throughout the organization so that a programmer or CFO or anyone else can go to the same place, see the same thing, and be able to understand what to do.”
