Project Management 2.0 is Nominated for the IT Blog Awards 2009
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Andrew Filev
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Project Management
5 min read
Why Project Management 2.0 Is a Different Ball Game
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.
Project Management
5 min read
Project Management Software, Mind Mapping, Weak Ties and the Human Brain
I have already mentioned that many-to-many structures employed in project management 2.0 software offer a better way to organize your projects. Here is an interesting angle on the same topic. Have you ever thought about how our mind organizes ideas? We do not organize all the information we know in one strict hierarchical tree, life is too diverse for that. Associations radiating out (or in) from many different connection points help our brain to navigate through a vast information pool and quickly make decisions. Many connections in many different directions connect items together. We could say that the structure in our mind is a network of connections or a many-to many structure. Many-to-Many Mind Map This phenomenon of mind functionality inspired a psychologist, Tony Buzan, to invent the Mind Mapping process. In his popular title called "The Mind Map Book," Buzan calls this phenomenon “Radiant Thinking.” “Most people are trained to think in a linear way, thinking of one thing, then the next thing, and then the next, in a series of singular associations in one direction,” notes Buzan in one of his interviews. “The way our minds really work is in multiple thoughts and multiple directions at the same time. The way the brain fundamentally thinks is radiant, meaning that it thinks primarily from image centers and then radiates out.” Buzan used this capability of the human mind to introduce a technique of arranging words, ideas, tasks, or other items connected to a central key word or idea. Presenting these connections in a radial, non-linear graphical manner, the method encourages a brainstorming approach to any given organizational task, eliminating the hurdle of initially establishing an appropriate or relevant conceptual framework to work within. Once you augment a radiant Mind Map structure with associations between different nodes, it becomes a many-to-many structure that resembles the way your brain works. You can build a structure that perfectly reflects the way you think. If you use adequate project management software to record this structure, you can then apply it to manage your business and personal activities. Project management 2.0 brings collective intelligence into this, so your team can share this structure and work on it together. You can share your tasks with people from another department, or from French or Japanese office of your company or with your clients. The best part is that you can combine your structure with other person's structure without breaking the connections that are important for you. Associative connections between different people’s hierarchies now play the role of "weak ties", linking people from different departments, offices and even companies. Weak Ties Leverage Weak ties are recognized by sociologists as the best bridges between people to spread new ideas and innovation. Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist and the author of the one of the most influential sociology papers, “The Strength of the Weak Ties”, states that “weak ties bridge social distance.” He also notes that “weak ties provide people with access to information and resources beyond those available in their own social circle”. Granovetter’ ideas are summarized by Harvard Business School associate professor Andrew McAffee, who points out that weak ties help solve problems, gather information, and import unfamiliar ideas. They help get work done quicker and better. This is what makes these ties so powerful. When speaking about weak ties, Andrew McAffee says, "My former HBS colleague Morton Hansen, for example, found that weak ties helped product development groups accomplish projects faster. Hansen, Marie Louise Mors and Bjorn Lovas further showed that weak ties helped by reducing information search costs." So a structure that has a lot of weak ties turns out to be more beneficial for a project. To find out the principal advantages of this structure it will be useful to compare it with one-to-one and one-to-many structures. The limitations of one-to-one (linear) and one-to-many (strict hierarchical) approaches can easily be extended into the project management space. Traditional project management software like Microsoft Project enforces a strict hierarchy that requires a manager to select only one way to organize information. In this case project managers have to sacrifice all weak ties and even some of the strong ties in favor of one hierarchy. This makes plans harder to navigate when your perspective of the project differs from the selected hierarchy. Let's take a look at a typical example. An engineering manager builds a product development plan around a structure that he considers as best one to organize information. Then a marketing managers needs to augment this plan with marketing activities. If the tools that these managers use support only a one-to-many hierarchy, there is a great chance that the managers will end up with two separate plans, so all of the connections between these related projects will stay in the managers' heads. Some of them will be forgotten, and others will have to be managed manually. We don't even need to walk to the marketing department to understand the importance of weak connections. There are different roles in the engineering team. The importance of particular associations between tasks differs from one role to another. The "one-association-fits-all" approach makes plans hardly usable by some of the team members. This burden can easily be avoided with the right tools. The Power of Collective Brain Project management 2.0 software supports many-to-many structures, connecting different team members’ views on the project. It gives a bigger and more comprehensive project scope. It enables project managers to view one project from different angles and helps them find better solutions, which would not otherwise come to the manager’s mind. As more people can get different views on the project and can build more associations, their collaboration becomes more affective. The project team works like a huge collective brain. Many-to-many structures allow all of the team members to contribute to the plan productively. This enables collective intelligence and leads to collaborative planning. In turn, collaborative planning makes organizations more agile, productive and transparent. Your comments on the post are welcome, as always.
Project Management
5 min read
Andatech’s Tips: How to Develop a Habit of Logging and Updating Tasks on Time
If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly!If you have just started using Wrike, at first some employees may forget to log and update their tasks in the system. Don’t worry, Andatech’s best practices will help you deal with this problem quickly! Andatech is one of our customers, and it wholesales a vast variety of innovative electronic products for home in Australia. There are several teams within the company that are working on completely different projects, and the same employees take part in several projects at once. Prior to Wrike, the general manager spent several hours every week on collecting updates across different projects and putting them together into a general overview. Now, every team member keeps their tasks up-to-date in the system, so it’s a matter of a click or two to see how things are going. This approach is beneficial for both managers and the team, as everyone is on the same page and is moving faster. We've asked Andatech's team to share how they managed to make logging tasks into Wrike a habit so quickly! Leverage e-mail integration Andatech managers wanted an easy way to track all work that has been done, especially by remote team members. So the first thing Andatech did was to create a simple rule: Any task that takes more than half an hour should be logged into Wrike. Making this happen was easy. A lot of the team’s communication takes place via e-mail, so logging new tasks from e-mails into Wrike is literally a matter of a click, thanks to Wrike’s Gmail gadget. “Most project management tools are hard to adopt right away because people think that it’s actually more work for them. But with Wrike, the biggest thing for our staff was understanding that it’s not just a separate platform. It naturally supplements other habitual tools, such as e-mail, easily converting e-mails into tasks,” says Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech. If your team is used to communicating issues via e-mail, make sure everyone on your team knows the fastest way for them to turn e-mails into Wrike tasks. This means the add-ins for Outlook and Apple Mail users, the gadget for Gmail users and simply forwarding an e-mail to [email protected] for anyone else. Update tasks in Wrike after everyday standup meetings When tasks are logged into the system, at first people may still forget to update them. So Andatech managers decided to update tasks right after the everyday standup meetings. They created a folder called “Morning standup,” where the project manager puts tasks that need to be done today and prioritizes them after each meeting. After the meeting, team members also check that all updates they have reported during the meeting have been logged into the system. If they have previously forgotten to log something, it's high time to put it into Wrike, making sure the project picture is complete. This approach makes it easier to collaborate with remote team members, as the manager can quickly show them today’s agenda and the team’s priorities. The manager also sees the overall team’s progress in one place and can quickly measure the progress for any given period with the help of Wrike’s advanced filters. Suggest that employees create personal folders for the most important tasks Quick access to all current tasks is vital to set the priorities correctly and get things done in time. That's why every Andatech employee has a special widget on the Wrike dashboard with all tasks assigned to them (by default, you only have tasks assigned to you for this week). The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. If you want to create such a widget for yourself, all you need to do is go to “My folders,” click on the Descendants button, filter tasks assigned to you and click on the “Create a widget” button. This is a good exercise for all team members! :) The widget automatically shows the up-to-date list of tasks with every login. Sometimes there are too many tasks assigned to one person, so it's hard to quickly grasp the ones to focus on. Andatech's employees have come up with a solution! Some of them created the personal “Most important” folder (not shared with anyone else) and put the most important tasks from different projects there. This is easy to do, thanks to the ability to put one task in several folders in Wrike. Within personal folders, people can drag tasks up and down the list to prioritize, and then complete items on the priority list from top to bottom. Following these three easy principles, Andatech’s team adopted Wrike quickly and smoothly! In turn, Wrike helped them greatly with tracking work progress, prioritizing things and figuring out what needs to be done and when. Learn more about how the Andatech's team successfully uses Wrike for their workflow in our podcast with Sunil Joseph. What are your team’s best practices in making task-tracking a habit? Do you have any particular rules in using Wrike and tracking the progress? With Wrike, it gets easier to share and collaborate on any kind of data. We’re sure that the relevant people will see what needs to be seen, and things will get done in time.” — Sunil Joseph, the head of digital strategy at Andatech.
