on the emerging trends in the development of business software, SaaS and collaboration. This “humble blogger,” as he calls himself, moderated the Project Management 2.0 panel at the Office 2.0 Conference this year. Now Zoli is working on a new blog – CloudAve.com. This blog is a joint effort of Zoli and Ben Kepes, the founding editor of Diversity. Ben is an expert in SaaS, social media and user-centric design. Both Zoli and Ben are evangelists for cloud computing, hence the focus of the blog. I was invited to contribute my ideas to this remarkable resource. The result is my article, “Project Management 2.0: Catalyzing Changes in Project Management.” I encourage you to post your thoughts here and at CloudAve.com. I’ll be glad to continue the discussion.
As a Project leader you are dumped in an organization you have never seen before. You get people assigned you don’t know. The organization prescribes methods and tools you don’t like. And of course, there are a gazillion of unwritten rules. Welcome to your project life. You run on partial Information, partial Influence and partial capability. But how do you actually run a project under these circumstances? Answer: Project Leadership. The elements of (my version of) Project Leadership are: Goals and Means on individual, project and organizational level Alignment of goals and means on all levels by communication Goals A project has a goal, an objective. This is part of the larger context of the goals of the organization. Individuals have goals, ambitions, interests. If peoples goals are met, they work happy; if not, they don’t. Job for the Project leader is to align the goals on all levels. Keep on tweaking and adjusting. Make sure everyone understands. Make sure they are all in balance. Means Means are the strategies to reach the goal. This is the set of rituals, artifacts and values shared among the group, the organization and individual. The culture. The culture can be used to create a strong group; it can be in conflict with the dominant structure. Job for the Project leader is to align the means on all levels for maximal effectiveness. Balancing deviance with compliance. Making sure there are rules of engagement the entire team uses. Communication You think that if you are dropped into foreign territory like this, you would get a lot of equipment. Sorry. You get your Swiss Army knife: communication. But in the end, that was all MacGyver needed. About the Author Bas de Baar discusses Project Management in a global, mobile, virtual and multi-cultural world through his popular blog and video podcast “The Project Shrink”. With over a decade spent in the trenches as Software Project Manager within the publishing, financial and public sector, running multi-national teams, he has a lot to talk about. Bas holds a masters degree in Business Informatics and lives with his wife in The Netherlands. He is author of the book “Surprise! Now You’re a Software Project Manager” and is a member of PMI’s New Media Council.
,” was then republished in a larger Cutter Consortium report, titled “Next Practices in Modern Project Management: Supporting Communication, Collaboration and Collective Intelligence.” Now I'm working on a series of smaller articles for Cutter E-mail Advisor. These are aimed to help readers explore the emerging project management 2.0 tend in detail and from different angles. What questions do you think I should cover first? Feel free to comment on this post. I'll appreciate your opinion and advice.
Financial crisis is all over the news today. Some analysts are trying to predict the future of the national and global economy. Others are offering tips on how to survive in the situation of economic turmoil. Yet almost all the analysts agree that it is no time to panic; rather, you should rethink your strategies. The question arises: what strategies can help your business survive the economic downturn? Some experts, including Bill Gates, answer: "Innovation." Innovation means finding new ways to do business in this harsh situation and learning to think differently. It is said that innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity and not a threat. Today, indeed, is the time to seek new opportunities, leveraging the full potential of your enterprise. One of the ways to do it is to improve the efficiency of your operations through innovations in project management. As I briefly noted in one of my previous posts, the ability of Project Management 2.0 software to leverage field knowledge coming from the bottom up not only improves productivity, but also helps companies to innovate. Project Management 2.0 characteristics pushing innovation First of all, Project Management 2.0 tools allow you to weigh the collective intelligence of employees and at the same time keep tight control of all of your internal operations. In a sluggish economy, managers have no room for error. So a close insight into your business will help you to focus your resources and direct them correctly. With project management 2.0 tools, you have insight into every action of every team member, and you get immediate updates about the changes in the project plans. Thus employing the collaborative planning model introduced by the new technology, you will be able to build the strategy, taking the valuable bottom-up field knowledge into account. You also get an opportunity to use this knowledge to back up your decisions, so that you make fewer mistakes in resource allocation. Second, the new-generation technologies help you to make your plans easily adaptable. Today, there's no time to waste on gathering information from e-mails and meeting outlines, incorporating the updates into project plans and reporting the changes. When the economy is unstable, information quickly becomes outdated. So by the time you finish merging the latest updates into your plan, it can become obsolete already, and your work will be useless. But what is even worse, your company might miss an important opportunity. When all the routine work is performed by the software, managers have more time to evaluate the situation and to make the right decisions. Making the right decision in time is what your company's prosperity depends on. Third, Project Management 2.0 tools, which are usually delivered on a SaaS model, can help you cut your upfront and overall expenses. When the present economy makes businesses more conscious about their expenses, the new-generation technologies do look attractive. Project Management 2.0 solutions are usually lighter and cheaper (up to 70% cheaper in some cases) than traditional enterprise project management suites. The new tools can also make you more flexible for the frequent adjustments in the IT budgets. The SaaS model allows you to pay as you go, so you disburse only a small amount of money upfront. If you are not satisfied with the service you get from one provider, you can easily switch to another provider, as no big investments were made in advance. In fact, the interest in SaaS offerings is already growing, according to Jeff Kaplan, managing director of the reputable consulting company ThinkStrategies. Companies see an opportunity to reduce IT investments and direct their cash flow to other important things. These are three basic ways that your business can benefit from the new-generation applications. As a conclusion, I should note that the Project Management 2.0 solutions alone certainly will not be the main remedy for your business in the current situation of an economic downturn. But the innovation in processes that these solutions accelerate probably will be. You can increase well-being of your company through optimizing expenditures, realizing the most advantageous resource allocation and making smart decisions in time. The adoption of Project Management 2.0 tools may be a first step in this journey. Another success strategy in the present market situation is paying attention to your customers and improving customer service. So next time I plan to speculate more on how Project Management 2.0 technologies can help businesses to listen to their clients and get to know their customer communities better. An economic downturn not only breaks fortunes, but also creates fortunes. Meanwhile, if you could share with readers your strategy for this economic situation, we could turn this into a very helpful discussion.
I’d like to give you my take on what Project Management 2.0 IS NOT.I see the three main things here. Project Management 2.0 IS NOT: Chaos Lightweight Project Management 2.0 tools and practices bring project management into a new context. However, unleashing freeform collaboration with the help of the new technologies does not mean the loss of control. Quite the opposite is true. When people start collaborating in a freeform manner with the help of emergent structures, they create a more rational and practical way of working on a project. Now it’s the project manager’s role to lead his people and coordinate their jobs. Every team needs a leader who will motivate it and show the right way for a project to be developed, as well as make sure the project is completed on time and on budget. Replacement The emergence of Project Management 2.0 does not imply that traditional project management methodologies will be gone forever. In today’s world, we come across a wide variety of projects, from creating a web site for a small business with 3 employees to the construction of a new power station. It is obvious that these projects cannot and should not be managed in the same way. Traditional project management methods help in many cases, but they clearly do not work for all projects. Project Management 2.0 extends project management, but it by no means eliminates the proven methods. Panacea Each project involves the three basic elements: people, processes and tools. These three should always be in balance. This balance was the topic of my post “Can Adoption of Project Management 2.0 tools Guarantee Success of Your Projects?” A project will be a success when you choose the right people for the job, equip them with the right tools and make sure the processes support the team’s productivity. If the triangle is misbalanced, the project may be prone to failure. The weakness of one of these three elements will have an impact on the whole project. It is also true for project management software. Project Management 2.0 tools alone can hardly do the whole job, but they can empower people, and they can catalyze the changes in processes. Another thing that Project Management 2.0 is not is that it’s not an instant change. It is true that small and medium organizations are taking the lead in adopting Project Management 2.0, as they are definitely more flexible than large, hierarchical organizations. But again I agree with Craig Brown that “most (large) enterprises are aware of the changes in project management and are accommodating them to some degree” and that “many leading organizations have fully exploited the benefits from them.” There are plenty of real life examples. I see them every day on my job with our customers, and I talk about them every day with fellow entrepreneurs and employees in leading innovative companies. You can just log on to Twitter and see what real project managers and business owners are saying about project blogs, wikis, and tools like Wrike, Basecamp, Central Desktop, Zoho, etc. Do you have an example to share? Please do it in the comments.
in January, 2008. The trend evolved, as does my thinking, so it’s about time to elaborate on that old definition and give you my take on what Project Management 2.0 is and what it is not. What it IS about Democratization The project management discipline as it’s traditionally known “emerged in the 20th century, specifically around the Second World War, through the mega projects that were required. This period can be looked as a catalyst in the evolution of project management with the need to organize vast quantities of resources and personnel to achieve critical objectives in specific timeframes.” Traditional project management built many successful tools and processes that helped to increase the chances of success in those projects. Now, the projects around us are quite diverse, and today a few of us are managing mega projects. For starters, SMBs employ over half of all private-sector employees in the United States. These companies run numerous projects that don’t span hundreds of people. So at least 50% of the U.S. working population today is involved in smaller projects. If we take a look at large organizations, many employees there aren’t running mega-projects, either. The project management space is changing and the change is not only about the size of the projects. Traditional project management developed in an industrial economy. Today, many of us are working in a creative economy and creative projects are different. New types of projects emerge and successfully develop without traditional methodologies, PMBOK and PPM software. New companies use lightweight processes based on common sense, as well as easy-to-use management and collaboration tools to support those processes. It’s simply amazing what a huge difference these lightweight processes make to the world. Was Google, which started as a student project, following a heavy project management process when they built their disruptive technology? Certainly, not. Nevertheless, they have about 20,000 employees, keep innovating and still aren’t keen on heavy project management processes that simply would not have worked for them. Of course, you may say: “NASA is building billion dollar space missions differently.” Well, I think you would still agree that what works for NASA’s space-ship project won’t necessarily work for a marketing department in your company and vice versa. Just ask your co-workers who run marketing projects. It’s about time to move project management out of the industrial economy, and to bring it into a much larger context and democratize it, if you will. Now, if heavy processes and expensive tools aren’t working in many environments, is there something that can increase productivity and the chances of success? Shift toward collaboration and business agility One of the sources to find an answer to this question is Gary Hamel’s article Management 2.0. Gary Hamel, is a professor at London Business School and the No. 1 most influential business thinker in the world, according to the Wall Street Journal. His pioneering concepts, such as “core competence”, have changed the management in companies like General Electric, Time Warner, Nokia, Nestle, Shell, Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, 3M, IBM and Microsoft. Here’s what he has to say about traditional management practices: “In the years to come, progressive companies will use the Web to overcome the shortcomings of their antiquated, bureaucracy-based management models – flaws that today severely inhibit the capacity of these organizations to adapt, innovate and inspire.” Project Management 2.0 is brought by the development of the Web, and it offers a major shift of focus from control to collaboration. Collective intelligence is one of the core principles behind the whole idea of the new project management trend. Project Management 2.0 tools and practices help people to share project information and contribute to the project plan easily. They help gather valuable bottom-up knowledge from emails, disconnected files and spreadsheets into one place. Anyone on the team, and what’s more important, the project manager has the up-to-date information at hand. When it’s clear for a manager what his every team member is busy with and what exactly is going on with every project, and when project operations become more transparent, projects become more controllable and project management more adaptable. This has a tremendous positive effect on the whole company, as it becomes more flexible and can easily acclimatize to any changes in the business environment. Here’s one of my favorite examples: In April 2006, Intrawest Placemaking, a real estate development firm that operates in North America and Europe, undertook a bold technical initiative focused on empowering individual employees. Today, Intrawest Placemaking's wiki intranet allows practically unrestricted editing for all 250 employees. This has led to a tenfold increase in use over the previous intranet, and some excellent examples of knowledge-sharing: One manager created a page with an idea that saved the company $500,000. The example only proves Craig Brown’s words about Project Management 2.0: “Over the last decade or three, many organizations have learned to trust their experts. Not all are there yet, but the trend is clear: decentralized decision making means more adaptable and viable organizations. At the same time the Project Management profession has evolved from a focus on WBS, network diagrams and Gantt charts into an ever-increasing awareness of the business and social contexts that projects operate in.” Balanced approach Project Management 2.0 tools and practices help you find a perfect balance between top-down and bottom-up management styles. On one hand, they democratize project management by energizing project communications and letting the project team easily make contributions to project plans and data. So the bottom-up field knowledge is brought to project planning. On the other hand, Project Management 2.0 allows project managers to get rid of unnecessary routine tasks, and obtain clear visibility into their project plans and operations. With Project Management 2.0 systems, managers have all the latest information at their finger tips and in real time. This allows them to better coordinate their projects from the top and make better decisions on how the project development should go on. This is how the flexibility and openness of Project Management 2.0 applications allow organizations to harmoniously combine the field knowledge coming from the bottom up with the leadership and guidance coming from the top down. Besides all the points enumerated above, it is true that the emergence of Project Management 2.0 is stipulated by the evolution of technology. Email, VoIP, mobile networks, smartphones, social networks, and Web 2.0 software changed the processes and culture in many organizations. They even created new types of organizations, like micromultinationals. And while it’s hard to stress enough that people come first and that balanced approach is important, it’s also shortsighted to ignore the opportunities that technologies give us. After all, I absolutely agree with John Reiling, PMP, the author of the PMcrunch blog that Web 2.0, or any other technology, “is the ability for any practitioner to focus on the true essentials of the job, rather than getting bogged down by administrative work.” It’s true that “less time spent on crafting a Gantt chart means more time spent on the true project management essentials, such as stakeholder management, communications, leadership, and the like.” Do you agree? Please let me know in the comments.
I recently wrote an article for PMHut.com. The Project Management Hut is a very useful site for project managers and those who want to know more about this sphere. Articles on topics like traditional and innovative project management methodologies, what is client resource management system, project leadership, the history of project management and much more are written and gathered from all over the world by a group of project managers, who decided to make their vast experience accessible to everyone. The PMHut authors invited me to contribute to their resource and write about a feature set for an ideal project management tool. In my article, I express my point of view on what problems project management software should help you solve and in what way. As always, your feedback on the piece is welcome in the comments to this post.
Though my view of project management is not canonical and sometimes generates hot debates around it, I do believe that PMI is doing a good job at building connections between project managers and allowing them to share their experience and skills with each other. PMI events play a significant role in moving the whole industry forward, and I’m happy to take part in one of these events this October in Orlando, Florida. If you’re still thinking about whether you should go to the Global Congress or not, here are 3 major reasons to attend it: Networking: The organizers and past attendees do a good job at promoting the Congress as a fabulous opportunity to meet 2,000+ project management professionals. Education: The event will feature more than 150 educational sessions. There are a number of great speakers lined up, and learning from them would be useful for your future career. The question of Project Management 2.0 also will be discussed at the event. I know that one of our fellow bloggers, Dave Garrett of GanttHead, who has his own blog focused on Project Management 2.0, will be presenting there. By the way, I’m working on a Project Management 2.0 guide that I’ll be giving away during the Congress, so come visit Wrike’s booth. Resources: If you are on the lookout for valuable project management resources, I believe that PMI Global Congress is just the right event for it. The exhibit hall will feature 100 companies, including Wrike. PMI Career Center promises to hold helpful discussions about project management career paths. And last, but not least, PMI Bookstore will offer great attendee-only discounts. If you have already registered for the Congress, I’ll be more than happy to meet you there and discuss innovations in project management. Drop me a note at [email protected] or connect with me on Twitter via @andrewsthoughts, and we'll set up a meeting. By the way, it’s great to see that the Project Management 2.0 topic has become the focus of hot discussions lately. I see it as a positive sign, since “the truth is born of arguments.” I’m also working on a big post about what Project Management 2.0 is and what it is not, in which I’m going to elaborate on my initial Project Management 2.0 definition.
Organizational change experts stress the need to develop agile companies. Major Enterprise 2.0 theorists say that new-generation technologies can turn inflexible companies into agile and efficient organizations. They praise social software for optimizing management and overall company activity. To start with, why is the word “agility” so popular in management nowadays? Every year, new technologies, markets and competitors emerge at a rapidly ascending pace. Future threats and opportunities become harder to predict, and emerging challenges include increasingly novel elements. Today’s businesses are affected by globalization processes, and enterprises often become bigger, therefore more inflexible and bureaucratic. As organizations grow into huge corporations, it gets more difficult for them to react to constant market changes fast enough. This results in an ongoing agility gap. So an enterprise needs to be agile to be ahead of competitors; have leading market positions; exploit possibilities enter new markets; respond to new customers, partners and regulatory demands; launch new products successfully with an Agile lifecycle. I’ll explain what I mean by agility here. First, to be agile means to be able to recognize important changes in the business environment or realize the need for changes and innovations in your own business. Second, it means to make decisions rapidly to react to these changes. Third, it means to adjust your company’s goals, strategies and tactics to possible changes faster than your competitors. But prior to taking any actions in response to rapid changes one should possess information. Quick access to information and rapid information exchange are key factors that make companies agile and competitive. Enterprise 2.0 technologies, such as blogs and wikis, for example, are able to fill in the agility gap for organizations. They can provide quick access to information and improve external and internal communications. Enterprise 2.0 in external communications Enterprise 2.0 has great potential impact from an organizational and revenue prospective in the customer-facing areas. Thus, it is making companies agile in their customer relations. The new-generation technologies offer new ways of contacting and engaging new customers. These technologies provide easier communication with present and potential customers in two ways. An enterprise can get ideas for product improvement and new product launches from consumers. Customers’ ideas are likely to be much more successful than any of ideas based on in-house research. In addition, they make organizations more transparent and trustworthy to customers. They also help customer support and satisfaction. For example, many companies now have on-line support services and product discussions on their Web sites. It’s not only easier for a consumer, but also a lot faster. A user’s question can be answered in seconds, and he won’t need to dial any numbers or get annoyed holding on the line. Enterprise 2.0 in internal communications Enterprise 2.0 has even greater influence on communications inside of a company. Enterprise 2.0 tools give employees a chance to exchange information and collaborate more effectively. People enter new information that can be helpful to their colleagues. Information becomes more accessible. The most important element is that an Enterprise 2.0 application contains the latest information that Andrew McAfee says “employees think other employees should know about.” If we take a corporate blog as an example it gives people freedom of operating information. Employees can search across posts, tag articles, subscribe to blog feeds or link to articles, if they want to extend conversation, prove something, show resource of facts or just highlight information. Enterprise 2.0 technologies can be a powerful starting-lever for innovations in a company. A company, that introduces these technologies and gives its employees information exchange freedom will take leading positions and leave its competitors far behind. As an example let’s take two competing organizations Company A and Company X. Both of them are important corporations with multi-stepped hierarchical structures. Company A uses Enterprise 2.0 to improve communications among its employees. Company X is too busy to think about the implications of new technologies. Both companies hire two outstanding employees. Both of them come up with billion-dollar ideas for launching new products. Each young man’s idea is advantageous for the company and is able to move it to leading positions in the market sector. In Company X, the bright employee wants to share his idea and contribute to the company’s development. He goes to his boss, who says: “Yeah, that’s great, but it’s not what our company needs right now” because he is busy at the moment or probably is just too lazy to communicate the idea to the upper management. The excellent idea dies without even a chance to be brought to the CEO of Company X. The idea-generator in Company A wants to share his thoughts and tell the top-management of the company that there are great up-coming opportunities for the business. He publishes his idea on the corporate blog. This idea gets common attention, and it is supplemented and expanded by other team members. Company A’s top management takes it into consideration and finally brings it to life. The result is Company A is ahead of its main competitor, Company X. It launches a new product and gains more customers. Company A turned out to be more agile and open to changes. The human mind remains the center of a company’s growth and development, each company needs creative staff and innovative managers to move the business ahead. But new-generation technologies can help a great deal. Enterprise 2.0 should be properly applied in the way that allows businesses to best avail themselves of these tools. My conclusion is that Enterprise 2.0 tools are just tools after all and without the right application they will be useless. But if you know how to apply them, they will enhance your business agility and make the business easily adaptable to impending changes.
Jurgen Appelo writes an interesting blog on software engineering. He recently did a great job of analyzing and ranking blogs for development managers. The result of his efforts is the impressive list of 100 most popular blogs in this area. I think it must have been hard to search those for blogs and to evaluate each one of them. I’m glad that Project Management 2.0 blog is a part of it. I was also happy to see Bas de Baar and some other fellow bloggers in the top 100.
Here comes another question – how can we better learn from the experience we get? Eric Ries, already mentioned above, uses an efficient way to tackle problems. I am talking about root-cause analysis or “five whys.” Imagine that the problem you’ve faced has the same structure as a Russian doll. The “root cause” of it is hidden inside, and you have to remove several layers to get to it. Just as you take one doll out of another, you ask a question “Why did this happen?” five times. Each response takes you one layer deeper to the problem cause. The technique is quite easy, but when practiced regularly, it gives you a lot of great insights about what needs adjustment in your company. One of such insights is that there is always a process/human issue behind every technical one. For example, imagine that you increase the investment in advertising, but the return from it is not proportional. Why did that happen? It seems that the quality of leads dropped. Why did that happen? Because we didn’t have a quick feedback loop between the money put into advertising and the output from advertising that we get. Why didn’t we have that feedback loop? Because we didn’t know how to properly score leads. Why didn’t we properly score leads? Because no one did statistical data analysis. Why didn’t we mine the data? Because the process didn’t allocate time for someone to periodically mine the data. The next step of implementing root-cause analysis is to make a proportional investment to correct each level of the problem. It helps you to avoid both ignoring and over-reacting to a minor problem. In the case above, the decisions could be to allocate some time for data mining, to score the leads, to feed that data back to analytics, and to adjust advertising campaigns based on that. You address the problem on all levels with an incremental improvement. Every time you face a problem, you make an effort to improve the company at multiple levels with small steps. If the problem is more complex than you thought, it will keep occurring, and every time it reoccurs, you will make an incremental improvement, until it is finally solved. This way, you invest your time and money only into the part of your business that needs it the most. “Lean startups” are lean. You can see that this method combines learning and doing, continuously changing your company as you learn. This fits perfectly in the frame of continuous learning. To close, I also want to mention the importance of your own unique vision for the product. I don’t mean to suggest that the shortest way to success is to simply follow every customer’s request. Those requests will often pull the company in different directions, and you don’t want to be doing Brownian motion. This is where the art mixes with the science and produces brilliant results. What about your professional experience? How do you normally deal with failures in your business?
