For the past few days I have had a myopic obsession with the word “community”. So, of course, I began to wonder what happens when you combine the concepts of Project Management with the concept of Community. The first thing that pops into mind is the community of people that are project management practitioners. A worthwhile area of investigation, but I want to look at something a little different…
What happens when we think of “the project” (any project) as a social object? By social object, I mean, something around which conversation naturally emerges. If the nature of a project was so compelling that people chose to talk about it out if interest, as opposed to out of requirement, it could really change the complexion of project effectiveness.
I am not talking about getting rid of PM tools, I am just saying that if people were passionate about a project, there would be less need to beat them about the neck and shoulders to meet deadlines. The point here is not that Social Media, as discussed in earlier posts, directly drives efficiencies, but that is can create a community of project stakeholders that are passionate about the successful completion of a project.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Community, PMandSM, project management, social media |
Inside Conversation 
In IT projects, a lot of the PM’s job is issue tracking and change request tracking.
Yet, it’s strange that the tools used to do this tend to output reports to the PM, rather than engage the stakeholders and resources directly.
These tools tend to have an implicit sonar logic (ping the people!), rather than being the starting point for conversations.
A PM I know recently complained that they were paid far too much to spend their time chasing people up. Surely, they’re paid to link problems with solutions, and when the problems are people’s needs and the solutions are people’s skills, then aren’t PMs just conversation starters?