The Social PM Approach

  Agile   Communications Management   Estimating   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   ProjectsAtWork  

Product development requires a unified, collaborative team effort. A social project management framework, combined with the right social tools, helps to connect team activities to the product development process and stakeholders. The benefits include increased visibility, more accurate estimates, responsive, real-time analysis and streamlined workflows.

Today's project managers are asked to do more with less. They are encouraged to do less planning, with smaller budgets, more rapid product iterations, and deliver releases quicker. Another common difficulty is that, too often, project management activities are out of the loop from the rest of the product development process. This disconnect results in the setting of unrealistic goals, cost overruns and work estimates that do not necessarily align with organizational strategies.

To add to the complexity of product development, today’s project managers are now expected to be incorporate social technology into the process in order to increase communication and promote more collaboration between team members, business partners and customers.

By definition, social project management encompasses both the traditional approaches of project management and the more open, collaborative nature promoted by web 2.0. While the overused term "social" is as often vague and open-ended, in the context of project …

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