Are Project Managers Reluctant to Collaborate?

Jason Westland is the Founder & CEO of ProjectManager.com, a project management software company based in Auckland, New Zealand and with U.S. office in Austin, Texas.

  Communications Management   Teams  

Collaboration is a buzzword that has multiple meanings depending on who you ask. For some, collaboration is a people-focused strategy to improve outcomes like innovation. For others, collaboration is about shared document creation. For others, it’s about integrating social chat tools.

However you define it, it’s pretty well established that improved collaboration means improved project outcomes. So how are project managers collaborating to improve project outcomes? In a recent study, we polled the ProjectManager.com LinkedIn Group of over 330,000 PMs and asked them how they use collaboration features in their PM software.

Their answers surprised us. Our study found that only 27% of PMs used collaboration features in their project management software, and only 13% used their software program’s mobile app. Given the preponderance of collaboration features in most PM software applications—such as task-level chats, social interfaces, document sharing, etc.—these numbers are shockingly low.

Now, of course this doesn’t mean project managers don’t collaborate in other ways outside of their PM tools, but it raises interesting questions about the lack of adoption of PM collaboration tools and whether that says something broader about the nature of the profession or the role in terms of a desire or ability to collaborate.

Why &…

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