The Social Network Wish List

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Talent Management  

Other than the enhanced ability to waste a great deal of time, I haven’t seen the social network used for much on projects so far. However, after wasting a great deal of time, I can come up with a good list of requirements for a social network designed for project work that would help a project team do their work more efficiently--and perhaps even have fun while doing it. I would work on this platform, but unfortunately, there are so many videos of kittens to watch, I’ll never get around to it. If someone does build a network using these ideas, though, at least send me a thank you message!

The biggest benefit of a social network is communication. Of course, project managers are no strangers to the art of communication; it is our bread and butter, just as it is the core of a social network engine. It might seem that with email, instant messaging, conference calls, video conferencing and even virtual reality, there’s no need to have one more way of communicating with our project teams. What the social networks understand though is that if they can get you to communicate via their platform, then they will also pull you into other things on their platform. You don’t have to hit “ALT-TAB” to a different window or log into something else to look at the videos of kittens; you can do it inside the same window you use to send messages to people…

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