Every year and even every month, new technologies, markets and competitors spring up, and today’s businesses have to be agile to be able to face the impending challenges. In such an unstable environment, traditional principles of managing product development may lead companies to failure. If the product requirements change drastically from the time the product is designed to the moment when it is released, it can result in the delivery of outdated products. Otherwise, ineffective change management processes may destroy product development, and the product will never be delivered.New methods in project management Nowadays to be successful, a company has to be fast to adapt. Driven by business priorities, managers use progressive methods of product development aimed to cure the mistakes of traditional approaches. Some of these methods acquired the name of agile project management. These methods originated in R&D departments and now are introduced in marketing as well. Markets change quickly, forcing you to reposition your product. When you introduce an innovative product, it’s not clear how you should promote it and what the customers really need. Very often when innovative products are born, manufacturers and customers may not know how or why the products will be used, so it’s not evident what specific features of a product will or will not be valued. Playing in such markets entails a process of mutual discovery by customers and vendors – and this just takes time. According Clayton M. Christensen’s book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” research has shown that the vast majority of successful new companies abandoned their original business strategies after trying to implement their initial plans and learning what would and would not work in the market. This shows how important it is for a company to quickly evolve its strategy and tactics.What is Scrum? Scrum as a marketing project management methodology Marketing is often executed in project-based manner. That is why a lot of generic project management principles perfectly apply to marketing and why marketing should also be optimized, similar to project management techniques. Agile cycle approaches to marketing may help to overcome problems experienced by marketing executives. One of these approaches is the Scrum methodology, which has originally been developed as an agile software development method for project management. Now Scrum is successfully employed in Agile business transformation by hundreds of different companies, such as Yahoo.com, Wildcard Systems, H&M, and John Deere, in many different fields, with outstanding results. Scrum adopts an empirical approach, accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or successfully defined in a predictable and planned manner. The focus of Scrum is on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements. This method is praised for making the team more productive, reducing risks and maximizing the business value of a developed product and minimizing the period of the development time. Scrum is based on defining sprints - time periods (usually 2 to 4 weeks) during which the prioritized work (sprint backlog) should be done. During a sprint, the team gets together for daily meetings where team members discuss what they have already done, what they are going to do till the next meeting and what prevents them of doing something that they planned to do. In other words, Scrum meetings are supposed to keep teams on track and help members get their work done. At the end of each sprint, there is a brief sprint retrospective at which all team members reflect about the past sprint. According to Ken Schwaber, co-creator of the Scrum meeting method (along with Jeff Sutherland), the purpose of a daily Scrum is to keep teams focused "on their objectives and to help them avoid being thrown off track by less important concerns." Now Scrum is often viewed as an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. Indeed, short and regular meetings can be as important for small marketing teams as they are for production teams. Members of a marketing group may be working on a variety of projects, but they're all working toward the same goal – marketing the company and its products or services. Therefore, every member of a team has to know what the others are working on and what direction the whole team is moving in. Collaborative project management software for Scrum in marketing The Scrum approach to marketing becomes even more efficient when empowered by Enterprise 2.0 technologies. New- generation software, especially tools meant for project management, bring collaboration to marketing and can make it more productive. These applications (I will call them Project Management 2.0 software) let team members easily share information on the projects and tasks they are involved in and help every team member see the whole picture of the company’s marketing strategy. Project management 2.0 software makes collaboration and management more transparent, letting everyone know who is accountable for what and by when. Scrum in marketing makes the possible problems visible at early stages and allows coping with them quicker and with minimal losses. One of the major Scrum principles is “no problems are swept under the carpet.” Every team member is encouraged to describe the difficulties he is experiencing, as this might influence the work of the whole group. Discussing problems early also helps to reduce financial risk. With the beginning of every sprint period, the business owner can change any of the marketing project parameters without penalty, including increasing investments to enlarge consumers’ quantity, reducing investments until unknowns are mitigated, or financing other initiatives. A new approach to marketing requires flexible planning, which is possible with the help of collaboration software. In the ever-changing business environment, short-term marketing plans based on sprints can be much more effective. Marketing managers get an opportunity to switch from one promotion method to another, if the first one proved to be unsuccessful during the sprint period. It also becomes easier to clarify due dates of every small, but important task, to each member of a team. For example if a team is getting ready for a fair, it should be clear about who is responsible for preparing handouts, who will make a presentation about a product and who will design the company showcase. With Project Management 2.0 software, like Wrike for example, it becomes possible for everyone on the team to contribute to the plans, edit and update them. New-generation software brings stakeholders and partners into the collaboration process. Their input and feedback will help shape the marketing agenda along the way. The clients can be involved, too. In fact, the principal aim of every marketing team is understanding customers’ needs and helping clients achieve their goals. In today’s enterprises, achieving the heightened customer loyalty – what brand marketers refer to as “emotional lock-in” – is especially challenging when an organization is dealing with tens of thousands or even millions of customers. Empowered by the new-generation software, Scrum lets you involve your clients in the marketing process and take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds. Collective intelligence helps to improve the quality of products and services and make them fully satisfy the consumer’s needs. Scrum lets you promote your product not for a client, but together with your client. Customers can be involved in various ways. For example, they can literally participate in the development process by sending their feedback and contributing to the plans. So, as we can see, innovative management methods brought to marketing make a company more agile and let it respond quicker to the needs of the emerging markets. It makes a company even more successful when empowered with Enterprise 2.0 tools that bring collaboration into organizations. They help improve communication and turn it from one-way (from a company to its customers) to two-way (from a company to its customers and back), helping to improve products and services. Now you know the Scrum basics, you can see how helps a company make its marketing policy nimble and lets it promote its products with lower costs, avoiding unnecessary money and resource spending and helping to reveal possible mistakes in the initial planning. The result is maximization a company’s benefit.
Terri describes a game-changing approach to management that is based on the concept of being plugged into each one of the organizational dimensions — people, technology and organizational processes — simultaneously. Oftentimes, managers underemphasize one of the components; say, they address the people and organizational processes, but overlook the technological dimension. Or conversely, some consider technology to be a lifesaver, and the only thing they need to focus on. The balance of people, technology, and processes is something that I think is really important for any organization. I refer to this triangle in my previous posts. So it was a pleasure for me to meet Terri and discuss this topic, as well as find out more about her new book. Naturally, our conversation went way beyond defining who exactly qualifies as a "plugged-in manager", as we proceeded to talk about the role technology plays in modern business. To learn more about the concept of a plugged-in manager, learn the best ways to leverage technology, and hear some interesting examples from Terri's experience (as well as my own) I invite you to read the transcript of our conversation in this blog post. And now we want to know: In your work, do you put more emphasis on people, processes or technology? Do you consider yourself a plugged-in manager? P.S. You can get your own copy of “The Plugged-in Manger: Get in Tune with Your People, Technology and Organization to Thrive” on Amazon. Transcript below: Andrew: Hi everyone, it’s great to hear you on our podcast today. And let me introduce our honored guest. Terri Griffith is a professor in Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business. Located in the heart of the Silicon Valley, she studies how we mix together the technology of work (everything from telepresence to the size and type of tools a crew would use to build a fence), the way we organize to do this work (virtual teams, collaborative leadership, innovation strategies), and the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the people we work with. Terri has just released a new book called “The Plugged-In Manager: Get in Tune with Your People, Technology, and Organization to Thrive.” The book addresses an important topic that’s very relevant to what I usually write about: how we become more productive, how we work together both in the same office and in virtual teams. Terri, it’s definitely an honor and pleasure to have you here today with us. Terri: Thank you very much! Andrew: Let me jump straight into the questions. And the first one, I think you can already guess what it is. Could you tell the listeners who exactly the plugged-in manager is and how he or she is different from most managers we see. Terri: First I’ll say that anybody can be a plugged-in manager because I think individual contributors, as well as managers, teams and even organizations, can be plugged in. They make sure that, as they think about an organizational practice, as they think about getting their work done, they think about the people — so what the skills are that the people have, how long they’ve been in the organization, the kinds of things they like to do. They think about the technology tools that they have available to them. So, like you said in the introduction, everything from telepresence to collaboration tools, to the kinds of tools we would use to build a fence, all those are the different kinds of technologies that we have at our disposal. And then what are the organizational process issues that we need to address as we think about the work that we’re trying to get done. A plugged-in manager is somebody who’s going to think about all three of those at the same time and going to understand that you have to mix them together. So if we’re going to use a particular technology tool, we may have to provide some training, and it may work out better if we have a certain kind of individual that we’ve already hired. On the other hand, if we have a bunch of expert employees, we may not have to provide so much training. So the people would reduce the amount of organizational processes we might have to deal with, even though we were choosing a pretty sophisticated technology. I think the big difference is plugged-in managers, plugged-in organizations, they don’t seem to think about there being a magic bullet — that if I just had that technology, or if just hired that one person, or if just changed this one organizational process. They know that’s never going to work, it’s always going to be some combination of the people, the technology and the organization that really make something work well. Andrew: I absolutely agree with you. This triangle of people, tools and processes is definitely crucial. And in my career, I’ve seen a lot of organization overemphasizing or underemphasizing part of that. My opinion is that people definitely are the cornerstone in that. Because, obviously, people make the choices on tools and processes, but other components, nevertheless, are also very important. Do you share the same view in terms of priorities between those three? Terri: I’d say those priorities are right, but I’m thinking about Andrew McAfee’s new book “Race Against the Machine” or even Jonathan Zittrain’s book, where they talk about how a lot of our work is being taken over by the technology itself. You know, an algorithm might be choosing what articles are going to get presented on a newspaper, rather than an editor. And so, at the tail end of the whole distribution of how we might think about how the choices get made. I’m going to say people play the biggest piece because they are generally the ones doing the work. But I think as we move into the future, we’re going to have to keep a pretty open mind. Is it a technology that’s making this choice for us? And it may be the case that, originally, it was people who wrote the code that is making that choice, but it’s going to become more of an open question as we move forward. Andrew: Yes, that’s definitely an interesting view. I’m a big fan of AI (artificial intelligence), so definitely one thing that I see on the market today is the concept of the big data, right? That we accumulate more and more data, and we come up with more and more sophisticated algorithms to process that data and build intelligence out of that data. So that’s an interesting angle. And one other insight that popped in my mind is that, obviously, some people are key to the success. But then processes and tools actually help them influence other people on the team. It’s kind of an interesting flow where you may have a champion, somebody who is either creative or smart or experienced or versatile in change management. And then, through the use of tools and technologies, they actually multiply that knowledge or culture power. Going back to the plugged-in manager and to your definition, do you see many managers right now who you could say are really plugged-in, or is there still a way to go for all of us? Terri: I’m not sure about you because the technology your company is putting out is pretty plugged-in, in my perspective. But I’m a little bit sad to say that it’s more rare than it is common for me to get into a conversation with someone and to immediately be able to say: “Wow, that person gets it, that person’s completely plugged-in.” We collect a lot of data about this, and we continue to collect it because we want to make sure we have a tool that will help us assess different levels of how plugged-in you are, and then hopefully we’ll be able to change the kind of training and workshops to be based on the kinds of results that we’re getting. While a lot of people think they are plugged-in, when we actually put them in situations where we want them to make choices, often they are biased toward taking the shiny technology. And they’ll go rank a technology solution higher than a solution that includes the technology, the organization and the people. We’re doing whatever we can to make that change, and we would like it to be really common for somebody to sit down and say: “All right, we have a new team project we need to do. What are the technology tools we are going to use, who are the people that we need to have on this team, and what’s our process going to be? Is it going to be a very face-to-face kind of process? Is it going to be more virtual? How are we going to approach the problem? And just have it be super common that everybody goes through that kind of three-point checklist of people, technology and organizational process. But I’m not seeing that yet. Andrew: I like Gartner’s hype curve. They do an aggregate, but even when we look at the particular person or organization, oftentimes what happens is they get excited about a shiny tool, but they hope that the tool will solve their problems by itself, and they don’t make their organizational challenge, and then it drops, and they become naysayers. They become the other part, and they develop a culture of “everything is already invented.” Then I talk to those people and ask them: “Do you remember the time when we didn’t have mobile phones, Skype, e-mails, so it makes them think. If you put it in perspective, technology does change our life. You can’t delegate everything to the technology. You have to control the process, but technology does change our life in a big way. Starting from something that we consider everyday, like giving a phone call and air travel and obviously e-mail and everything else. As we look at it, more and more work becomes informational work. And that actually goes hand-in-hand with that trend of the big data that we’ve just touched because it reinforces it. There’s more and more informational work, the information systems become more and more sophisticated, and there are more and more helpful tools. Back again to the plugged-in managers, I think this concept is very important. But why do you personally consider this is a game-changing approach to management? Terri: I think it goes to the number of organizational changes, either technology changes or organizational process changes that fail. And the number hasn’t changed in decades! We’ve been collecting data about organizational change failure for a long time. The number hangs around 50%. So 50% of all organizational changes, either technology or process changes, don’t do what the people who set out to implement them think they are going to do. And generally it’s because they don’t manage the implementation process very well. Oftentimes, what they’ve done is they thought: “Well, if I just make this one silver bullet adjustment, and I parachute this change in, everything is going to be different.” And it just doesn’t work that way. As a result, that’s just painful as a professor of organizations to stand up in front of a class and say, “Here are all these ideas about great things you can do to improve your organization, but by the way, 50% of the time they are not going to work for you,” I would like to see that change. It’s almost painful, too. I was giving a talk on this issue last night, and they asked, “Why would you spend two years writing a book? And I said, “Because it’s painful for me to see the situation where someone’s only focused on one of those three issues.” I thought about the United States TSA, our transportation safety authority that brings us all that fine effort that we go through, as we come to the airport. And for the most part, that was a technology change. That was: “We’re going to run this technology, and the technology demands that you take off your clothes, and the technology demands that you take off shoes. And we’re going to focus on that technology.” I think all the fighting and unhappiness that goes along with going to the airport now didn’t have to happen if they had thought about their stakeholders a little bit more and thought about how they could integrate stakeholder needs into the process that they need to make airport security good. But they didn’t think about it that way, as far as I can tell from reading the external reports. Andrew: Yes, I think that’s a great point. Now, in your book, you speak about three key practices for the plugged-in managers. Can you please briefly describe them for the listeners? Terri: Absolutely. The way I like to describe it is that here we’ve been talking about 3 dimensions: the people, the technology and the organization, and then we also have these 3 practices. So if we just keep in mind the number 3, maybe it’ll all help to stick a little bit. So the first one is “Stop, Look, Listen,” and even though it has three words in it, it’s still just one practice. But the idea is that you stop and you look. Can you say who are the people who are going to be impacted by this? What is the technology that we’re talking about? What do I have available to me already, or what might I need to go buy, and then what’s the organizational setting that this thing has to go into? By stopping for just a moment to reflect on what the current status is, and what the opportunities are that are out there, what the different choices are. And I think that keeps us from grabbing for that shiny thing and forgetting about all the rest. So if we just say to ourselves: “I’m going to go into this process. I’m going to think about a new way of doing things.” First thing I’m going to do it, I’m going to stop and look, and then after I take that first step, I’m going to start to listen. Well, I took the first step. What was the feedback from that? And is it going well, or do I need to make some adjustments? So “Stop, Look, Listen” is the first practice. The second practice is really the most powerful one, and this is the issue of mixing, mixing together those 3 ingredients: the people, the technology and the organization, in a way that makes sense. And I’ve shown this a couple times, as putting out on a table all the different ingredients for a chocolate chip cookie, and if you look at those ingredients, some of them are pretty tasty on their own, but for the most part, we’re going to have a better outcome once we mix it together. We’ve got to mix it together in the appropriate proportions for what we’re trying to achieve. And so mixing becomes the key. I like food a lot, so mixing and thinking about mixing a great meal or mixing a great dish is the way I kind of keep that one in my head. And then the 3rd practice is — really, you were talking about it a little bit — how do you multiply or leverage your advantage? And it’s through sharing. Sharing is the 3rd practice, and I’m going to kind of think aloud as I work in a team setting or think aloud as I talk to a group of executives and say, “Always look how every time I assess a situation, I’m always looking at the people, the technology and the organization. And always see how I’m trying to figure out what the blend is. I’m not going to try and change everything all at once, but I’m going to change a few things as I go along, and then gather up the feedback. But as I talk aloud about that process, I share the process, I’m doing 2 things. The 1st is that I’m spreading the idea of how to be a plugged-in manager, but the other one is, as I teach that idea through sharing, it means that the next time we go to make an adjustment, they are already going to know what we have in mind. I won’t have to implement the idea of being plugged-in, as well as implementing whatever the changes are that we’re looking at. Instead, they are already going to be aware of that part. So sharing is an important one, if we want to expand or leverage the impact that we can have in our organization. The 3 practices are “Stop, Look, Listen,” the reflective piece; then mixing, which is really where the heavy part of the process takes place, to really find out what a good combination is going to be; and then sharing, just to make it easier down the road. Andrew: Those are indeed great practices. There was the PMI Global Congress in Dallas, and I was invited to speak on virtual teams, and I brought out the topic that in virtual and distributed teams, a lot of communications are asynchronous, compared to the team that is co-located in one office. And in that environment, sharing is really crucial because you not only want to tell people what to do, but you also want them to understand your thinking. Exactly what you said, thinking out loud, so they know your reason, and even though the communication is asynchronous, and you are not necessarily there to make the decision for them, when they need to make, it they know your reasons, so they can make a similar decision, so it’s very aligned with what you’ve just described. So in your opinion, this approach, does it differ between SMBs and enterprises? And if so, how? And if we’re speaking about enterprise, will it work for all levels, or does it differ as we start speaking about enterprise-wide changes and things like that? Terri: I think it’s just an issue of scale. So in a small or medium-sized business, it will be easier to demonstrate the process. Even if it’s a small organization that is virtual, it’s just easier because you’re talking to fewer people. You have more opportunity to clarify what your meaning is and clarify the approach. But even at an enterprise level, some of the top executives have the skills that they’ve learned to be plugged-in through experience, they’ve learned over time, and they are already practicing these approaches. They may not be calling it plugged-in management, but they’re certainly doing it. And as I think about executives at Microsoft that I got to talk to for the book, that would be a big organization looking at how to manage a virtual team between Washington and China. Then if I look at some of the startups that I was able to talk to in the book, they’re all doing the same practices, it’s just the matter of scale. In the larger organizations, and I’m thinking about Nucor Steel — as I say, Nucor Steel, the largest steel company in the U.S., and I think the largest recycler in the world (metal recycler). And for them the process that I would describe as being plugged-in, to them it’s just the new core way of doing things. They’ve been building that approach since the 1960s, and it actually came from the top, which I think may be a little bit rare. Often what I see is people in the middle of the organization find that these are good approaches, and then as other people see their success, they learn from that. So it’s almost a top or bottom-down of that process in larger organizations. If you are a big enterprise, and people are practicing plugged-in management, that’s a lot of leverage, very successful. Andrew: Now I only have a couple questions left, one would be, could you share with us some interesting anecdotes that might illustrate concept of your book or your research? Terri: Certainly. I often think about sailing, as a process that helps people learn about being plugged-in. I have a sailboat, and I have a crew of other people on their boats. A sailboat itself is a technology, and so if you think about the size of the sails, the size of the mast, the size of the boat, everything has to scale appropriately. Also because I’m a woman, I’m not as strong as some of these big football-player-looking guys who might be on the America’s Cup boat or something like that, and because of that I have to use more pulleys. I have a lot of pulleys on my boat because I don’t have that much strength, but I can use the technology to increase the strength and increase the benefit of the strength that I do have. Sometimes in class I’ll draw a picture of a sailboat that has 2 sails, and then I’ll draw a picture of a sailboat that has 3 sails, and we’ll talk about the difference. As for someone who isn’t a football-player-strong person, it’s harder to pull up one really large sail. Maybe I’d be better off pulling up two smaller ones. How do you make those choices, and how do you keep those choices top of mind? And it really does back to this idea of reflection. If we’re just charging ahead, we’re not going to be thoughtful and think about the different options we might have. So if we do that “Stop, Look, Listen” practice, we’re going to think of a few more options and maybe make a slightly better choice. Then the other example I have is probably a little more standard. Here at the university, we haven’t been all that modern about our own collaborative practice. As you can imagine, as somebody who writes about collaborative practice all the time, it’s been a frustration for me. But we’re finally moving ahead and looking at our communication and collaboration and even workflow. And I’m getting to practice these very things myself. I’m the chair of this university task force on communication and collaboration. And I can see why some people are drawn to simply make a decision and move ahead quickly. We keep pulling ourselves back and saying, “No, let’s not focus on the technology, let’s focus on the work to be done. Keep those examples top of mind. And then we’ll bring in the technology as we need to.” Both of those, both the sailing and this collaboration task force have been great learning experiences for me. Andrew: Yes, I think that sailing was a great metaphor because oftentimes people just go with the flow, especially if the user of technology and the decision-maker are not the same people. If their CIO chooses the software for business users, they are not necessarily going to be the most happy and productive with the defect or the most marketed choice, or the most feature-heavy choice, or the most complex choice. So that’s an interesting metaphor because they are not those football players oftentimes; they just want to get the work done. So applying your ideas about plugged-in managers, I know you already gave a lot of good advice. Before the closing, what would be the final advice that you’d give to project managers and business managers for getting their work done more efficiently. Terri: It’s all going to come back to the “Stop, Look, Listen” idea, but once you’ve done that “Stop, Look, Listen,” and you’ve moved into mixing together what your choices are, the simplest way I have of describing that is you don’t have to be an expert, you don’t have to be a technology expert, you don’t have to be a management expert, you don’t have to be a people expert, but what you have to do is have an appreciation for all three of those being important, and then to be able to put yourself in the shoes or in the minds of the other stakeholders and really think about the work design as a negotiation. We all negotiate. We either negotiate well or we don’t, but we all at least know how to do that. And think about the organizational change. The thing that you’re looking at, as you’re trying to be a plugged-in manager, think of it as a negotiation and have the different issues of the negotiation that you have on the table be all those different options. So is it going to be a big team or a small team? Is it going to be a team that has core members, or is everyone going to be equal? Are we going to use this kind of collaboration tool or that kind of collaboration tool? Are we’re going to have experts on the team, or is everybody coming from the lower levels of the organization, and they’re going to have to learn on the job? And what’s the negotiation that I might go through that’s going to come up with the solution, that’s going to be best for us? I like to take a practice that we already understand at least a little bit, and so if everybody’s done a negotiation, then everybody has done a little bit of this mixing that I’m talking about. Andrew: I think that’s great advice to wrap up, and I welcome all listeners of the podcast and readers of the blog to go to amazon.com and check out Terri’s new book “The Plugged-in Manager.” There are both hard cover and Kindle versions available, and if you like the book, feel free to leave a great review on Terri’s work. Terri, thanks a lot for your time today. I hope the readers will enjoy it, and I hope the rest of you day will be great! Terri: Thank you so much. I’m going to go tweet about the conversation because you made me think about some new ideas!
Project Management 2.0 is an approach to managing projects that is brought to life by the use of Web-based, emergent, collaborative project management software and that focuses on collective intelligence, productivity and project leadership as the basic factors of project success. Here’s what I mean by some of the specific words in this definition. “Emergent” means that the software contains mechanisms to let all people involved in a project contribute to project plans and knowledge, so that the plans become more realistic and true-to-life, and project knowledge evolves over time. “Collaborative” means that the software is designed for groups of people or whole organizations to work together in an intersection of common goals by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. “Collaborative” also does not mean “excluding leadership.” “Project management software” covers many types of software, including programs for scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration, communication, quality management and documentation or administration systems, which are used to organize processes and operations on a project. “Collective intelligence” refers to the joint capacities of a group of people to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language and to learn. You are welcome to compare this to the Wikipedia definition. Examples of Project Management 2.0: Use of Web-based project management and collaboration platforms by Capgemini, Chicago Transit Authority, Australia's Defense Force and millions of other organizations. Fedora Project Wiki -- a place for end users and developers of the Linux-based operating system called Fedora to collaborate. What a Project! blog, which serves as a home to many projects at once. Use of other project blogs (Plogs). A project blog is a blog that is customized to record a project, or a deliverable task, with its goal, procedures and status changes. It includes a "completed" status, which puts an intended end to the blog when a project is completed. Not Examples of Project Management 2.0: Use of personal blogs written by people involved in the project. These are for individuals, and although these blogs may contain opinions and information on project management, collaboration and the nature of projects, blogs like these do not imply teamwork and the achievement of common goals. Use of most traditional software systems, like Microsoft Project. As discussed earlier, they’re not emergent and are not focused on collaboration. Use of email and “classic” instant messaging for communications on a project. These applications do not allow interactions between people to be visible to the whole project team. You may, of course, argue that this definition is too tool-centric. Well, when trying to elaborate on my old definition of Project Management 2.0, I was thinking about the role of technologies in this emerging trend, and I came to the conclusion that we should not underestimate the influence of technological innovations on the way we do business, communicate and live. Following Manuel Castells, who wrote many scientific works on the IT Revolution, I’d say that “information technology is not the cause of the changes we are living through. But without new information and communication technologies, none of what is changing our lives would be possible.” This, in turn, brings me to the idea of a balanced project triangle: “people- processes-tools.” Tools are only a part of this chain, and this part is neither most important, nor insignificant. In order for a project to run smoothly, all three parts should be in balance. Now I’d like to find out what you think about this updated definition. I’m looking forward to reading your comments.
My session was not meant to be just a regular speech. I wanted to create a discussion and share the stage with other E2Open participants. That is why many of the slides in the presentation contain questions to the audience. Email Is Dead... Long Live Email! from Wrike I thought it would be a good thing to continue this discussion here, in this blog. Please tell me what you think about the role of email in the day-to-day life of business users. Do you think email should be merely replaced by the new tools? Is there an opportunity to leverage email and integrate it with the Enterprise 2.0 applications?
, Wrike. I tried to briefly explain my view on what the new trend in project management is about. My opinion may seem controversial to some of you, but I think it’s only natural. Project Management 2.0 is an emerging trend, and it constantly evolves. As always, I’d like to say that I do appreciate you and your participation in the ongoing Project Management 2.0 discussion. Your comments are welcome.
that I attended in October, I met many project management practitioners. Some of them asked me about my views on Project Management 2.0. One of the questions was “How is Project Management 2.0 different from what many organizations have today?” I decided to summarize my answers and came up with a short list of key factors that distinguish Project Management 2.0 from traditional project management. They are: Environment. Manuel Castells, the author of "The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (v. 1-3)" and a visiting professor in 15 universities around the world, states that we are currently experiencing an IT revolution, just like our predecessors lived through an agricultural revolution and an industrial revolution. According to Castells, there is a shift from industrialism (mass production) to informationalism (flexible production), and this new type of economy is empowered by the development of technologies— first of all, the Internet. As the world shifts from an industrial economy to an information economy and big part of the workforce becomes information workers, the importance of innovation, creativity and productivity rises. In traditional project management, people are often managed like any other resource, just like bricks and machines. In the present economy, people cannot be managed the same way, as it will simply be counterproductive. In Project Management 2.0, people are encouraged to participate in project planning, to introduce their ideas on project development and to give their feedback on other team members’ jobs. Environment as the main differentiator drives the other distinctions listed below: Collaboration and collective intelligence. In an information economy, only organizations that are flexible enough, so that people and capacity can be rearranged and recombined quickly without major structural change, will be able to thrive. Quick access to information and rapid data-sharing become critically important in this environment, as they help companies minimize expenses, innovate, make better decisions and make them faster. Project Management 2.0 emphasizes the importance of leveraging the collective intelligence of the whole team, no matter where the team members are located, at the same office or on different continents. At the same time, Project Management 2.0 stimulates collaboration and catalyzes the change in processes. Here I’d like to paraphrase Andrew MacAfee’s quote about Enterprise 2.0 and apply it to the new trend in project management: Project Management 2.0 technologies are “trying hard not to impose on users any preconceived notions about how work should proceed or how output should be categorized or structured. Instead, they’re building tools that let these aspects of knowledge work emerge.” Emergent structures, one of the basic principles of Project Management 2.0, empowers people on the team level to easily share information and make changes to their part of the project plan. This way, bottom-up field knowledge makes its way into a project schedule, and the schedule becomes more realistic. Comparing this approach with the one represented by most current project management platforms, wiki inventor Ward Cunningham highlights an important shortcoming of the traditional way. He says: “For questions like ‘What’s going on in the project?’ we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what’s not important about what’s going on in the project. What’s important about the project is the stuff you don’t anticipate.” The Project Management 2.0 focus on collective intelligence stipulates the next differentiator. Shift in the project manager’s role. Traditionally, the project management role is focused a lot on tight control of the budget and schedule. This part of the project management job becomes more subtle in a talent economy. Organizational agility requires a more flexible approach to budgeting and deadlines. At the same time, the importance of leveraging the human talent becomes more prominent. Therefore, other parts of a project manager’s job, such as leadership skills, become more important. It's no longer enough for project managers to possess good people skills and to be fluent in project management best practices, tools and methodologies. To succeed today, project managers need enhanced leadership skills. They need to be flexible and focused on business value, writes Forrester Analyst Mary Gerush in “Define, Hire and Develop Your Next Generation Project Managers.” Productivity. Web 2.0 tools allow an unprecedented productivity increase when it comes to information-sharing and communications. There are many examples spanning from the consumer arena to the enterprise space, from Wikipedia and Facebook to GE’s corporate collaboration system. Project Management 2.0 focuses on taking advantage of this productivity to achieve better results in shorter periods of time. Have I enumerated all the distinguishing traits of Project Management 2.0? What’s your take on the main differentiators of Project Management 2.0? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Enterprise 2.0 technologies make companies stronger. This is what we read in almost every analytical blog and in many business publications. More and more companies are announcing the introduction of Enterprise 2.0 technologies to their business. One of the recent examples is IBM’s Lotus Connections. It’s an enterprise-wide IT controlled social networking package, which was presented earlier this year. The company representatives called it one of the features designed to take advantage of "real-time presence and communications capabilities." Well, even technological giants are opening up to Enterprise 2.0, having realized that it will drive corporate innovation and facilitate communication from the boardroom to employees and back. Previously closed corporations turn open with the help of new-generation software. But what are the advantages of being open? To answer this question it would be useful to examine the key differences of open and closed organizations.Let me explain what I mean by "open" and "closed" first. I should note that I will depart from the traditional economical definitions. Closed Enterprise Closed organizations usually are hierarchical, strongly regulated and not sensitive to their environment. Hierarchy as an organizational system is often criticized due to its multi-level structure; I mentioned this in one of my previous posts. It can be hard to implement innovation in a hierarchical organization, as its structure is not flexible. Innovations require people and groups to communicate and work together in new ways. Hierarchical organizations are limited in communications and knowledge-sharing between different departments. It can be hard to get necessary information due to the superfluous bureaucracy. Let’s take a situation when an employee desperately needs an answer to some question. He is ready to search, but it seems almost impossible for him to find anything in an enterprise’s closed email environments and file systems where so much knowledge resides. The most experienced workers in organizations of the closed type are often burdened with providing the same information over and over again, year after year. Very often they have to go through complex and time-consuming processes to get information collected in series of files, which can be used by newcomers later. A lot of data is just not being collected, which means the precious knowledge is getting lost. Poor information-sharing can prevent enterprises from successfully implementing innovative processes, rapidly developing and immediately responding to market changes. However, it would be hard to find completely closed organizations nowadays. Apparently, they won’t be able to survive in the ever-changing business environment. It’s much easier, however, to find companies closed in some aspects. A good example here might be market leaders that believe that they are using the most effective technology and producing the products well demanded by the major customers. These companies are confident in their leading positions, and it results in the narrowing of their strategic vision. They don't have to struggle in strong competition; that’s why they stop listening to their consumers. Such organizations are closed for the knowledge coming from outside of the company, and they might miss development ideas produced by consumers. These enterprises support only one-way communication. This one-way communication goes from a company to its customers. This type of communication can result in the slowdown of their evolutionary processes. Here’s an example: Microsoft Internet Explorer has been a market leader for a long time in the browser market. Microsoft had a great market share and almost no competition. At the same time, users were struggling to get tabbed browsing for years, but Microsoft ignored their requests. It switched to one-way communication. Then Firefox entered the market, taking users from Internet Explorer. This fact made Microsoft finally wake up and listen to customers. However, it was too late, and now there’s real competition between two. Another example is searching within e-mail. Outlook users were crying for years asking Microsoft to implement indexing and fast searching in e-mail. Their cry was heard, but not by Microsoft. New search initiatives came from Google (including Gmail and Google Desktop Search) and Apple. Only after that did Microsoft start to pay attention. So big companies become closed in some aspects and turn to one-way communication, when they are pretty happy with their market share and current market position. They can be either too lazy to change anything or afraid of changes. Enterprise 2.0 means Open Enterprise Today top management of many companies realizes that it can be much more profitable for an enterprise to be open. An open organization can be defined as an organization open to anyone who agrees to abide by its purpose and principles, with complete transparency and clearly defined decision making structures, ownership patterns, and exchange mechanisms. Open companies are more flexible and mobile due to their internal organization. Enterprises of this type are democratized and have better communications within a company. Wikis, blogs, social networks and other "weapons of mass collaboration," as Don Trapscott calls them in his Wikinomics, change collaboration patterns in organizations. Now every employee is welcome to participate in an enterprise activity and influence the corporate policy and development of the whole company. This change can be started by the top management, when CEOs in search of the right direction for innovation decide to initiate the creation of social networking systems for collaboration with customers. It can also be started at other levels, for instance, when individuals start using planning or project management software and then involve others into the on-line collaboration process. Mike Sigal, CEO of Guidewire Group, a research firm focused on emerging technologies, said in one of his interviews that more and more companies are getting “ready to enter in a dialog with their market, as opposed to having a one-way conversation.” With the help of Enterprise 2.0 tools, organizations become open in every way: open to customers, open to new markets, open to new technologies and techniques, open to learning. Perhaps one of the most prominent examples here is Procter & Gamble fundamentally changing of its company culture. P&G turned its Research & Develop (R&D) group to Connect & Develop (C&D) after the company went into a crisis. P&G CEO A. G. Lafley decided to broaden the horizon by looking at external sources for innovation. P&G's new strategy, called Connect and Develop, uses technology and networks to seek out new ideas for future products. The corporation discovered that important innovation was increasingly being developed at small and midsize companies. Even individuals were eager to license and sell their intellectual property. University and government labs had become more interested in forming industry partnerships, and they were hungry for ways to monetize their research. The Internet had opened up access to talent markets throughout the world. That’s why P&G decided to experiment with the new concept of open innovation building and exploiting innovation networks of all kinds. So today, more than 35% of P&G’s new products contain elements originally developed outside of the company. Approximately 45% of all initiatives within the product development portfolio possess key elements discovered externally. Procter & Gamble R&D productivity has increased by almost 60%. Introduction of Enterprise 2.0 technologies allowed to double the success rate of innovations and to diminish the costs of innovations. Investments in R&D relative to sales have been reduced from 4.8 % in 2000 to 3.4 % today. Some other examples: companies like Microsoft, IBM, Google, Sun Microsystems and SAP write corporate blogs on a regular basis. The number of non-technology firms that have their own corporate blogs is rapidly growing too. For example, the vice chairman of General Motors, Bob Lutz, maintains one of the most widely read corporate blogs on the Web. Openness of an enterprise means open communications among employees, partners, customers and shareholders. An open organization is a transparent organization. Enterprise 2.0 software enables customers to closely follow the product development process and to make valuable contributions. That is why one of the global financial services firms, Morgan Stanley, announced its wish to bring the company up to speed with Enterprise 2.0. The announcement was made at the Office 2.0 conference, which took place this September. Adam Carson of Morgan Stanley said that the corporation has 70 to 80 social networking projects underway, many involving creating online communities with clients and wikis. This can be a good example of how vendors and customer relations turn into “peer production” (a term coined by Yochai Benkler), that is when customers and service providers collaborate effectively achieving better results. Open organizations empowered by Enterprise 2.0 technologies unleash the power of collective intelligence. They involve partners and customers in their collaboration process. Collaboration within such organizations is much more efficient and makes the whole organization stronger in the market. So organizations, that are closed even in just a few aspects will most probably yield to a more flexible and innovative company. Enterprise 2.0 culture empowers organizations and makes them more competitive. This is proved by hundreds of companies that adopted the new technologies at the early stage. In the course of time, the number of closed enterprises will gradually decrease, influenced by the new technologies and business collaboration patterns. So if you want to be more competitive, you should think of bringing Enterprise 2.0 tools to your business and empowering your enterprise with the vigor of collective intelligence.
. He has a lot to share on how open innovation helps his company be the global leader in scientific and healthcare equipment. Instead of limiting your innovation process to just a few dedicated professionals in-house, you can engage talents from outside the department, outside your organization, even outside your industry and your country. The open innovation model is one of the areas where collective intelligence is leveraged in the most prominent way. In our presentation, Damon and I will observe how open innovation can make your organization more competitive. More revolutionary ideas, increased cost efficiency, new paths to market - these are just a few of the advantages you can gain. In addition to Thermo Fisher's experience, we’ll highlight case studies from different industries, including software, FMCG and others. Whether you're only considering adopting the open innovation model, or you already have your own success story to share – you're more than welcome to join us at the Santa Clara Convention Center! If you plan to attend, drop me a note, and I'll provide you with a promo code for a discount on the conference pass or a free expo pass. If you are a Wrike customer, I also have a limited number of session passes that I could distribute.
With over a third of projects being agile and more work being done by virtual teams, we aimed to look at how project managers can successfully combine the two. Having combined our expertise in managing distributed teams, we came up with a few practical, battlefield-tested tips in the area of communication practices, Web 2.0 tools and beyond, which can help bridge the gap for agile teams working across geographic boundaries. In the first part of the session, Cornelius started with a case study of his own team, spread across 6 countries on 3 continents, and shared which tools and practices help them the most to collaborate efficiently. For instance, according to the experience of Cornelius' team, the best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. There's no doubt that virtual teams have some very strong benefits, but there are certain serious bottlenecks, too, like the risk of miscommunication, limited visibility, etc. In my part of the session, I highlighted 5 pain-relievers that help me overcome the most common challenges in managing my team. Some additional tips came up during the Q&A. For example, when your team members speak different languages, don't let accents influence your perception of a professional. This is especially critical in the initial conversations, when team members don’t know each other yet and haven't yet built social and professional trust. Make sure that you give your team members "trust credit" in this initial phase, and always remember that behind that email ID is a real person, who likely works as hard as you do and is as professional as you are. It’s also crucial to remember and respect the cultural differences, and while keeping this in mind, work toward building a shared culture. Last but not least, as with everything else, it’s hard to create an ideal collaboration pattern right from the start. However, if you keep your eyes and mind open, constantly communicate and gather feedback from your team members, you can continuously iterate and improve. Eventually, you'll find your secret sauce for efficient remote teamwork. I believe that one of the main prerequisites for the success of a distributed team is to make sure that everyone is on the same page – not only in terms of the assigned tasks, but also the general vision, applied processes, cultural awareness, information sharing and trust. It’ll be extremely helpful for team members to know not just what to do, but why and what lies ahead. This will help a lot in asynchronous communications, when you’re not immediately available to answer all of their questions and course correct. You have to think and communicate proactively in distributed teams, making sure you’re your team shares the same mission and vision, and understands the goals. So meetings in virtual teams are very important. Not only are they important, they are different, and in the final part of our session Elizabeth named some important techniques for making virtual meetings productive. I’ve posted our joint slide deck on Slideshare, so that you can adapt some of these practical takeaways to your team: Agile Collaboration in a Virtual World: Harnessing Social Media, Web 2.0 and Beyond View more presentations from Wrike com To learn more details about our session and other ones, too, you can also check out recent tweets with the hash tag #pminac. Here are a couple of them: @pm4girls: "Don't just give them tasks, give them reasons to help them understand vision and goals" @wrike talking about empowering teams at #pminac @LewisCindy: From @wrike don't let accents influence emotional feelings about the person. Nice reminder #pminac By the way, Wrike has just opened an interesting survey about remote work and the way workers see its benefits and challenges. I would really appreciate if you could spend a few minutes to have your say in this survey. As soon as we get enough responses, I’ll analyze the results and share them with you.
" series with it. The second reason is that this book is a perfect way to start your Enterprise 2.0 journey, as it explains the transformation of the business environment by Web 2.0 technologies in very plain terms. The main goal of “Wikinomics” is to draw your attention to the processes that take place and trends that emerge in the present economy. Web 2.0 is how companies innovate, build relationships, market and compete. More and more businesses are harnessing the power of collective intelligence with the help of “weapons of mass collaboration,” such as blogs, wikis, tags, social networks, etc. This helps them to get closer to their customers, drive performance, implement service improvements, create new products and more. The objective of the authors is also to prove that this new way of doing business actually has many more benefits than risks. By providing readers with numerous examples, the authors, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, roll out facts that should not be missed by a company that wants to thrive in the new environment, called “Wikinomics”: • Being open and transparent for your customers and partners pays off, as it brings trust to a new higher level. • Peering with your customers boosts production of new and improved products and services. • Sharing some basic intellectual property helps companies bring products to market more quickly. • Acting globally is essential because global alliances, human capital marketplaces, and peer production communities will provide access to new markets, ideas and technologies. Tapscott’s call to companies is to adapt, and quickly – the changes are here to stay and will continue to unfold as time progresses. The book also describes a series of business ideas or approaches that are at the root of rapid, collective change. My favorites are: • Peer production, driven by “Peer Pioneers," the people who brought us open source software and Wikipedia while demonstrating that thousands of dispersed volunteers can create fast, fluid and innovative projects that outperform those of the largest and best-financed enterprises. • Ideagoras – websites or “marketplaces” where businesses can post their R&D needs to the masses and reward the problem-solvers, or offer up their unused inventions that would otherwise lie undeveloped and in secret. These emergent marketplaces for ideas, inventions, and uniquely qualified minds enables companies like P&G to tap global pools of highly skilled talent more than 10 times the size of its own workforce. • Prosumers — encouraging/supporting customers who participate in the creation and modification of the product, adding new features or offering uses that your company would have never thought of on its own. I referred to this idea in one of my previous posts “Your Customers Can Help You in Crisis,” and gave an example from my personal experience with developing our project management software, Wrike. While building Wrike, we greatly rely on our users’ requests, suggestions and ideas. It helps us make the product better. • Platforms for Participation — opening up your technology to allow others to create or even profit from its use, which may add to your bottom line and/or strengthen your brand. • Wiki Workplace, a new corporate collaborative environment that helps break information silos within an organization and connects internal teams. This idea is the closest of all to Project Management 2.0’s general concept: organizing corporate collaboration in a system that lets employees contribute and modify content in a freeform manner, so that structures (plans, schedules and other related project data) emerge over time. The book itself is a great example of collaborative production. It is an Anglo-Canadian team effort. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams were separated by the Atlantic Ocean when they wrote the book. These transatlantic roots give “Wikinomics” depth and interest, with numerous case studies from both continents. In addition, one of the chapters in the book was open for edits from its readers for quite a while. The authors work for the same consulting firm, New Paradigm, which marks the book as a client-development project, - but it is none the worse for that. Indeed, the commercial resources mean it is well-researched, well-written and edited with an eye to its sales role. The book is written in easy-to-understand language and makes a pleasant and interesting reading, as it contains dozens of real life wars stories from companies like IBM, P&G, BMW and Boeing. Of course, some of these examples and stories may not be brand new to you, if you read the blogosphere daily. However, while reading them in “Wikinomics,” you get another chance to analyze them and see whether they may be applicable to your own business. One of the best things about “Wikinomics” is the website it spawned, where a blog about collaboration and aspects of organizational change is an addendum more vibrant than the actual book. Though there are some questionable ideas in the book (for example, with all due respect, I doubt that “the participation revolution” will immediately “lift millions of people out of poverty”), “Wikinomics” is definitely worth your attention. “Wikinomics” is an important book for any company or business person trying to understand how to thrive in an age where traditional top-down, command-and-control structures are being challenged. Mass collaboration may sound like a buzz word, but as some have already found out (look for an example in the book), ignoring it could leave you burned. So to those of you who haven’t yet read the book, I strongly recommend it. Those who have read “Wikinomics,” please jump to the comments section and tell us your impressions of the book. By the way, “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” is the first book to be given away during the “Project Management 2.0 Books Giveaway”! The author of the best comment to this post will get “Wikinomics” for FREE! Update: The book went to Laura, who commented on this post on Thursday, October 22, 2009. Congratulations, Laura! Hope your innovations journey will be successful!
Today, no company can be immune to the current economic situation. So it is the time for many businesses to analyze their business model and risk profile. Economics experts join their voices stating that the best thing you can do to withstand the crisis is to improve your customer service and be attentive to customer needs. Terry Leahy, the head of TESCO, a British-based international grocery and general merchandising retail chain, noted in one of his recent interviews that staying close to customers is the key to surviving the current, difficult economic conditions. “We learned some lessons, and the message is simple – stay with your customers. Listen to your customers.” For project managers, it’s important that you treat your customers as stakeholders. John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods) and Kip Tindell (CEO of The Container Store), who drove their companies with a constant growth over good and bad times, explain their take on stakeholders in this very interesting interview. It’s a must-read for executives in the current economic conditions. Lots of companies now will have a closer look at the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 tools. Online communities, blogs and social networks are great sources of information about your customers, their opinions and their needs. Corporate blogging has become a popular trend. Books are written about it. Blogs have become effective in allowing customers to speak to each other. There are hundreds of superb examples on the Web. Take the Starbucks Gossip blog, for example. It’s a powerful communication channel for the largest coffeehouse company in the world. Each post on Starbucks Gossip gets up to 200 comments. This is an endless source of hands-on information and valuable ideas from Starbucks lovers. Blogging is just one example. It’s important to be open to your customers, so in this respect, all means of communication are good -- blogs, forums, e-mail, phone, you name it. This will help you to lend an attentive ear to your customers’ voices and perceive their unmet needs. Companies that are not afraid to be open to their customers reap the rewards of customers’ trust. Yet another advantage is that they can implement ideas coming from their customers’ community to make the product or service better. The closest example to me is our project management software. We prioritize the development of Wrike’s new features, based on our users’ feedback and requests. Every voice counts, as we believe that a happy customer makes our business thrive. We can say that our customers help us improve the product, giving us tips on what direction of development to choose next. So listening to your customers is important for being able to survive in a harsh economic situation. But what’s even more important is being able to change your business based on your customer feedback and to do it quickly. Paying attention to your customers’ needs is the first step. The next one is being agile and adaptive to the changing requirements. Here’s where Project Management 2.0 practices and supporting tools can be of great help. Project Management 2.0, which is based on the vigor of collective intelligence and power of emergent structures, can help you incorporate customer feedback into your tactical plans much faster. First, a project blog, wiki or a project collaboration solution makes your project work more transparent for your clients. Having this insight into how you deliver the product or service your customers can introduce their ideas and thoughts on how it can be improved. Let’s say a customer leaves a comment on your blog or drops you an e-mail with a really brilliant idea that no one from your team had before. Still, it’s just an idea. Only you and people from you team know how to apply it to the project. This idea then can be input into your collaboration system, so that each member of your project team can develop this idea into something bigger and offer a way to incorporate this idea into your project. The project manager can then find the best way to fit the idea into the project development, so that it benefits all the stakeholders. The project then will be a result of the collective work of many minds. Emergent structures employed in the Project Management 2.0 applications will be the engine that makes this work possible. The whole process of incorporating customers’ feedback into the project development becomes much faster and easier. The company becomes truly agile and responsive. This means it will be more resistant to economic downturns. I would appreciate it if you could share your experience of fitting your clients’ feedback and requests into your project work. Have you used Web 2.0 and Project Management 2.0 tools for that? Please leave a comment below.
Surfing the Web, I come across different interpretations of the notion of Enterprise 2.0. Since the initial term of Web 2.0 refers to a perceived, not a defined, second generation of Web-based communities, there is no strict, common definition of Enterprise 2.0. So it’s not surprising that many people get confused and mix up Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. So I decided to sum up my thoughts on this topic here to make the matter clearer. I suppose that the key difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is in the side that benefits from the technology utilization. On one hand, there are applications designed for consumers and primarily used by consumers. On the other hand, these applications are sometimes used for a company’s needs. Web 2.0 technologies were designed for consumers’ everyday use. Let’s take a look at Flickr, MySpace, or thousands of other sites made for the personal use of people. These services are mostly free and are made for people to share their photos, thoughts, contacts, interests and what not. People get personal benefit from using such a community and socializing. Therefore sites like Flickr represent Web 2.0. However, these sites can sometimes be used for business purposes, if a company needs to share files on the Web, for example. This can be a great opportunity to reach its existing and potential customers, get closer to them and therefore keep them more satisfied. If this is the case, you can call it an example of Enterprise 2.0, as the company benefits from using a community site. If we talk about wikis, there are also different examples of their usage. The biggest wiki used by people all over the world is the well-known Wikipedia. Wikipedia is used by different people who need information for their studies, work or to broaden their mental outlook. This is a clear example of Web 2.0. But can we treat wikis as Enterprise 2.0? We surely can because intranet wikis like socialtext.com were designed as enterprise tools and are mostly used by enterprises. Blogs were originated for sharing personal ideas and for self-expression Livejournal.com is an excellent example of an online personal diary. However, if you use a blog as a Web-space to discuss your company's products with customers, then we have an example of Enterprise 2.0. Some bloggers use terms like Enterprise Web 2.0 and draw a distinct line between this term and Enterprise 2.0. They say that Enterprise 2.0 tools change the organizational structure and relationships inside of a company and that Enterprise Web 2.0 technologies are less powerful and are not able to bring profound shifts in organizational paradigm. I guess if there is a slight difference, then it’s too vague to actually separate these two terms. Both types of technology, that designed especially for enterprises and that brought to organizations by user communities and by employees, influence collaboration patterns within companies. This change in collaboration can affect management standards and the structure of a company. Anyway, I guess it is a good topic for discussion, so I’ll be happy to get your feedback on this post.