Project Management & Social Media

Project Management, Social Media, and Defining "Community"

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:06 GMT

Introduction

As a continuation of our Conversation about Project Management and Social Media, Lee White in his recent post Project Community states the following:

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.

This blog post is a response to Lee's statement.

Defining “Community”

I agree with Lee. Adoption and use of social media can help “drive” efficiencies. An example is what happens in a shift from total reliance on inefficient email based communication to more collaborative technologies. This was mentioned by several of my survey respondents last year when I asked about project management and blogging.

Experienced project managers will also appreciate how the concept of “community” relates to staff morale and project success. But we 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 that, by this definition, 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 also to their internalization of the community's goals at a more fundamental level than simple agreement or disagreement.

The phrase “sense of community” begins to get at this meaning. It 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 when discussing the concept “sense of community.”

This goes hand in hand with the desire one has to make all the members of a team successful. The likelihood that project staff members experience a sense of group commitment to the project also increases as the social bonds among project staff members are strengthened.

The stronger the social, professional, and emotional relationships are among team members, the more likely each will go “the extra mile” to make the project a success. This is one of the reasons that some project managers engage in “team building exercises” in an attempt to establish and solidify relationships among project staff members.

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: the role of existing communities, and the development of new communities.

Social media and existing communities

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.

Social media and formation of new communities

When this is the case, social media and social networking systems not only can aid in collaboration and communication; 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.

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 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 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.
Note: an earlier version of this post was published on March 4, 2008 as Response to Lee White's PROJECT COMMUNITY Post and is being re-published here in order to make it part of this blog's main RSS feed.

Response to Lee White's PROJECT COMMUNITY Post

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:42 GMT

By Dennis D. McDonald

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

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.

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.

Project Community

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 04:14 GMT

For the past few days I have had a myopic obsession with the word “community”. So, of course, I began to wonder what happens when you combine the concepts of Project Management with the concept of Community. The first thing that pops into mind is the community of people that are project management practitioners. A worthwhile area of investigation, but I want to look at something a little different…

What happens when we think of “the project” (any project) as a social object? By social object, I mean, something around which conversation naturally emerges. If the nature of a project was so compelling that people chose to talk about it out if interest, as opposed to out of requirement, it could really change the complexion of project effectiveness.

I am not talking about getting rid of PM tools, I am just saying that if people were passionate about a project, there would be less need to beat them about the neck and shoulders to meet deadlines. The point here is not that Social Media, as discussed in earlier posts, directly drives efficiencies, but that is can create a community of project stakeholders that are passionate about the successful completion of a project.

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 13:00 GMT

Speedbumps on the Way to Creating a Blog Based Micro-Community

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 04:21 GMT

By Dennis D. McDonald

Lee White and I recently initiated an experiment, described here, that consists of our writing about a specific topic (project management and social media) on our respective blogs. Lee writes a post on his blog, I respond on my blog, then we combine and display the posts and the comments we receive in a single RSS feed. (Click here for the current feed.)

There have been a few bumps along the way that have generated an end product — a single displayable combined feed — that's not yet 100% of what we had hoped for. This is partly due to the RSS sources our blog services generate, and partly to the types of freely available tools we're using to generate and display the feeds.

As blogging services Lee uses WordPress and I use Squarespace. Each service automatically generates an RSS feed that is associated with posts that are tagged in a certain way. It's easy to use a service such as Feed Digest (there are other services we haven't tried yet) to generate a combined feed that each of us can display. Lee links to the combined HTML feed generated by Feed Digest (click here) and I've been experimenting with scripts generated by Feed Digest as well as my usual RSS display tool Grazr (click here).

One thing we've noticed is that the combined feed generated by Feed Digest frequently lags behind the input feeds generated by our individual blogs. We're investigating possible solutions since we'd prefer to see a combined feed that immediately reflects when we publish items on our blogs.

I've also noticed that the Grazr service sometimes has difficulty reading the combined feed generated by Feed Digest. I've been communicating with Grazr about this, who has been VERY cooperative, and I believe a fix is on the way.

So far we have not found a simple way to include in the combined feed some of the comments that are linked to our original posts. Both WordPress and Squarespace automatically generate RSS feeds for comments, but they do not appear to automatically subdivide those feeds by the tags we assign to the original posts. (I've tried using the keyword searching feature that Feed Digest provides to filter feed contents but haven't yet gotten it to work.)

Several folks via Twitter and Linkedin Bloggers have suggested we try using Yahoo! Pipes to create a unified feed. I'm looking into this.

However, I'm a bit leary of devoting a lot more time to this. It is an experiment, after all. But I have also been thinking about some of the broader implications of this experiment.

The question arises as to why Lee and I don't just create an online group where people can read and comment on our posts. Why, after all, try to do something like this “micro-collaboration experiment” using blogging tools that have to be supplemented with external services to accomplish what we want?

That's a valid question. The experiment originally grew out of our desire to do something collaborative concerning one of our common interests. We decided to try this approach since it appeared to provide a means of generating and strengthening interest in our own blogs, as opposed to creating a temporary third physical location somewhere else on the Internet. While it's exceedingly easy to create a specialized group using services such as Facebook or CollectiveX, we thought that keeping links, feeds, and traffic associated with our existing blogs, would be preferable.

Plus, we weren't interested in establishing a full-fledged “community” around this topic, preferring instead to keep things simple by focusing on existing tools for tags, feeds, and comments. Starting a “group” would add another layer of complexity since group tools tend to be “walled gardens” and usually have more features than we really wanted to have to manage. (Facebook is littered with moribund groups and we didn't want to fall into that trap.)

Lee and I are a couple of consultants shooting the breeze about a common topic on our blogs that we think will interest other people. The idea is that anyone can join in via comments, and we then make it easy to follow the “conversation” via a combined feed.

We know it's probably possible to accomplish everything we want via some original “programming” but that puts the project into another realm of complexity.

I've also wondered how this type of application — creating temporary collaboration “communities” that remain “blog-centric” — relates to efforts such as OpenSocial and DataPortablity.org (I recently wrote about those efforts here).

Those efforts arose out of a desire by some to simplify and standardize the management and sharing of identity and relationship related information.

Lee's and my interest is a it different. We simply want to create and combine information generated by ourselves and by people who comment while using the inherent features of our bogging platforms, without having to involve a “third party” such as a social networking service or platform.

Should the ability to do this type of targeted sharing be a standard feature of web based publishing platforms, i.e., should it be possible to establish such a specialized cross-web-site area for discussion without having to resort to external third party tools or services?

In other words, if someone wants to create a unique “space” for a discussion of a specific topic, should it not be possible to set up a specific tag (Lee and I are using “PMandSM” which stands for “Project management and Social Media”) that supports a variety of sharing and tagging features that propagate among participating blogs without having to involve “walled garden” types of online networking services or all the other features and functions of online social networks? And if such a feature were available as a standard feature of web based publishing services such as blogs, would dedicated online social networking services actually be necessary?

There Is No "One Project Management Tool to Rule Them All"

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:10 GMT

By Dennis D. McDonald

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.

A Conversation about Project Management and Social Media

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:30 GMT

By Dennis D. McDonald and Lee White

Lee White and I are discussing how social media can support project management. Lee discusses his views on his blog, I discuss my views here, and the two are combined below (scroll down). Note: some of the below links take you to posts elsewhere on this blog, and some take you to posts on Lee White's blog. Also, if you can't see the combined list below, the “unified RSS feed” can be seen by clicking here.

Feed Digest display:

Grazr display:

Project Language Translation

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:04 GMT

Now we have a conversation going…

Dennis's response to my last post:

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.

First, let me disclose, the majority of my PM experience has been with smaller projects than the ones Dennis is referring to. Therein may lie part of the difference of opinion.

{lunch}

As I pondered this post over lunch, I realized that Dennis and I maybe talking apples and oranges. My issue is not with the use of traditional PM tools for their intended use. No, what bothers me is when we try to use those tools “as is” to communicate to stakeholders. Think about it, if you are a Project Manager, what happened the last time you showed a 1000 line plan to your business sponsor?

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.

As I look at Dennis's “wish list”, most of the items deal with this translation from the inner jargon to an understandable conversation, and do it with a social media mentality.

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 13:00 GMT

Michael Auzenne comments on Response to "Tools of Communication in Project Management"

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:50 GMT

Dennis,

Nice requirements ... of course, it's just a tease at this point. ;-)

One of the fundamental issues of geographically-dispersed, large projects is the lack of *relationships*. In an environment where self-interests are often at conflict with others (I'm assuming a resource-constrained environment), lack of *relationships* is incredibly destructive. Although it's hard to replace face-to-face or even phone conversations, perhaps Social Media apps can help. I'd love to see some evidence of that.

Mike