The Influence of Social Media on Project Management

 

Last week, Dave Garrett wrote an interesting post on social media and project management, Can Project Management Software be as Engaging as Facebook?. There were many great points brought up in the article and interview with Vantage Software's founder Alex Leblanc.

I believe there is a lot we can learn from social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. The millennial generation has been collaborating on teams since elementary school and they have spent the lion's share of their young adult lives collaborating with friends and family within social media. In my opinion, it just makes sense to leverage this knowledge into a project management solution that utilizies the familiar metaphor. What's more, it's not just the millennials that are jumping into social media with both feet. Many in my generation are turning to social media to reconnect with old friends, keep track of family or business colleagues spread around the world or follow their hobbies and other interests. Addressing the collaboration and business needs of the "Facebook Generation" with something that works and feels like Facebook just makes sense.

With that being said, in any discussion about the merits of social media within the project management context I think we need to identify and address the elephant in the room. No CEO is going to spend any money on a tool that simply incorporates a Twitter or Facebook feed into its project management solution. Business leaders don't want to fund an employee's ability to waste time talking about what they are going to eat for lunch or where they might be spending their weekend holiday. The conversations need to be about the work and projects that team members have in common, it's the Facebook metaphor that's important, not Facebook. Twitter-like but not Twitter.

Additionally, it's not the tool or the methodology or whether or not it utilizes the strengths of social media that will ultimately make a difference. It will be our approach to how we manage "process" and lead "people" that will make the difference. Without a doubt, process is important. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be writing about it. However, if we continue to rely on tired and arcane notions of command-and-control to jam tasks and assignments down the throats of our project teams, we will fail regardless of the project management tools we use.

Top-down management methods fail. They produce information we can't trust for making decisions, they create a work environment people dislike and ultimately cause projects and project teams to struggle and fail.

Steve Denning, in a recent article for Forbes wrote, "The mode of coordinating work must shift from bureaucratic control to dynamic linking." In other words, our job is to facilitate and help project teams collaborate with each other to develop and execute on solutions rather than build unwieldy project plans and make task assignments. "Communication must shift from top-down command to adult-to-adult conversation, thus avoiding the dispiriting effect of top-down commands."

When we achieve that attitude within our organizations, applying the social media metaphor to the work management process works. Until then, it will fail—much like our current approach to managing projects.