Closer Sponsor Relationships Through Web 2.0 Tech...

Situation: You Need To Jazz Up Your PM Communications in an Effective Way...

Email status reports put people to sleep.   Status meetings are exercises in robotic interaction.  Through blogging, I'm able to throw my thoughts down in clean, (hopefully) tight snippets, where I try to offer only useful information without a lot of fluff.  Today, more people are doing that within the enterprise.  A blogging tool is good for data entry and RSS feeds are an efficient way to deliver the info.

Mark Perry, Senior VP at BOT international (and very active participant on gantthead) passed along the note below yesterday.  The technologies he talks about are incredibly easy to use if you can get past the fancy, sometimes confusing, names.  BOT International is doing what we all should be, trying out new technologies in approriate ways and seeing what works.

As you read Mark's message below, I would focus on three things:

1.  Most of these tools/features/things are simple and free. (consider how low the "cost of trying" is)
- A podcast can be as simple as recording a quick snippet on your PC and emailing it around. (and be an interesting way to provide updates)
- Even free blogging tools all come with RSS feeds. (that sponsors or stakeholders can easily subscribe to)

2.  Some technologies streamline the communications process. (consider what "the advantage" is)
- An RSS feed is just a way to automate the delivery of materials you are already producing.

3.  Just the newness of some technologies makes people pay more attention. (don't discount the "bling factor")
- These things can make you look good and cause people to pay more attention to your message.


"Great job with your Project Management 2.0 blog..! I and many of my colleagues at BOT subscribe and enjoy reading your PM 2.0 blog. And, I wanted to pass on to you one of the things that we are doing with our PMO best practice offering called Processes On Demand that has been very, very positively commented upon by our customers. As IE 7.0 and Outlook 2007 offers really easy to understand and use features for RSS feeds, we have XML enabled all of our PMO dashboards within Processes On Demand. This means that whenever the PMO Manager updates the PMO dashboard, executives immediately see the dashboard update right from their choice of Outlook RSS folders or IE 7 RSS Feeds or both. And, we have also podcast enabled Processes On Demand so that the PMO manager can release periodic podcast updates, usually weekly or monthly, for the executive team of the company that the PMO serves. This is, not surprisingly, a big hit as few PMO managers can get 30 minutes of time with the entire executive team of the company due to normal calendar scheduling difficulties and time constraints, yet virtually all of the executives are willing and indeed enjoy listening to such internal communications via their iPODs while traveling to and from work or simply at their convenience from their PCs at home. Hence, RSS and podcasts, 2.0 ideas that any PMO can take advantage of. And, of course, you don’t need our product, Processes On Demand to do this. But I believe, at present, we are early to the PM 2.0 scene. "