Social Project Management 2.0

Don is an entrepreneur and business leader with over 15 years experience specializing in aligning management-driven technologies and initiatives together with business and project strategies resulting in thoroughly planned and comprehensive business solutions. His expertise as a project manager, developer, tester, analyst, trainer, consultant, and business owner has spanned across diverse industries such as finance, retail, health care and information technology

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Talent Management  

When we think about social media as applied to project management, the first image that comes to mind is of utilizing Facebook or Twitter--or some online collaborative system like those sites to get project teams more engaged and to communicate traditional project communications such as status, issues and progress in real time and in a more socially engaging way. But I think this focus is too shallow; what is really going on here is that we are attempting to shift the focus from a task-, schedule- and resource assignment-driven project process to one that is driven by participatory collaboration of tasks, highly transparent communication and social engagement.

In other words, the social engagement of the project is what underlies every aspect of the project process more so than normal. One could argue (quite successfully) that all projects are a form of social engagement since they present the coming together of teams and resources to complete a project from start to finish. But in traditional project management, the planning and scheduling of tasks and resources is central--and social communication is a necessary vehicle to make that happen. Likewise, in methods like Agile/Scrum, the deliverables completed at each iteration are central and the social communication feedback loop is used to ensure that delivery.

In social project management, collaboration, …

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