Social Media: A Key to Project Success?

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

  Communications Management   Strategy  

These days, it seems that if you don’t have a social media presence, you are a throwback to the Stone Age. So where does that put project management? Should part of your project communication plan include social media? If so, how can it be used? How can social media add to project success? What are the risks? With these questions in mind, let’s explore the impact of integrating social media into projects.

Social media is primarily a communications tool. It allows people to stay in touch, share information and collaborate without respect to their physical location. Therefore, the more decentralized a project team and/or stakeholders, the more social media might play a successful role in keeping communications flowing.

There are a number of popular social media mediums that can work well within the project management space. For example, Facebook can be used to post project status updates so they are available to approved stakeholders and project team members on demand. Twitter can be used to send out short blasts to groups of people. Instant messaging and text messaging can be used to allow team members to stay in touch and to have short conversations. Collaboration tools like GoToMeeting, Lync, BeamYourScreen, Elluminate and more can be used to interactively share documents, create content and even do video conferencing.

On a recent project, I found …

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