The buzz about traditional project management software being inefficient is pretty loud nowadays. The basic problems associated with this software are:
- E-mail communications bypass the project management software, making plans outdated and information siloed in individual mailboxes.
- Lack of collaboration puts the enormous burden of routine operations on project managers.
- There are many single-view documents, instead of one multi-view plan covering different roles, levels and projects.
Agile project management processes, accompanied with collaborative project management software, promise to improve this situation. These fast-spreading tools and practices are changing the traditional project management discipline and are often called Project Management 2.0.
Can these tools influence a process and accelerate change? What are the main advantages of the new-generation tools over the old ones? Why are more and more companies adopting these tools? What are the results of this adoption? To answer all these questions, we’ll need to examine Project Management 2.0 tools and find out what they have to offer.
Project Management 2.0 is powered by the same source as Enterprise 2.0 – freeform collaboration. The power of many, also known as collective intelligence, helps to build, maintain and evolve an up-to-date picture of operations. Flexible Project Management 2.0 tools merge this picture from various pieces, giving a perfect example of what enterprise social software researchers call “emergent structures.” Let’s take a more practical look at this process.
Communications integrated into project management
There are more than 60 billion e-mails sent each day. Many of those e-mails contain tasks, status updates, change requests and task discussions, so it’s hard to overestimate the knowledge buried in e-mail mailboxes every day. This knowledge often bypasses project management tools like Microsoft Project, making plans in static files outdated and thus useless. Somebody has to connect the dots in order to see where a project stands. Today, project managers take a hit and assemble e-mail pieces into a project picture on a daily basis. This explains why even the simplest tool that is integrated with e-mail and is capable of tapping into that knowledge becomes more powerful than traditional project management tools focused on individuals and complex schedules. With a good project management 2.0 tool, plans emerge from separated e-mails in the course of continuous interactions of people. In this case, applications demonstrate the phenomena of emergent structures in action.
Merging of separated to-do lists and project plans into one master plan
Project management 2.0 tools employing the principle of emergent structures enable organizations to successfully combine top-down guidance with bottom-up collaboration. Team members organize their daily tasks in to-do lists, which the tool merges into a bigger picture that is aligned to an organized by project managers. Project plans become part of a bigger picture that is aligned by upper management. This structure reflects the bottom-up field knowledge brought in by the people on the team level. At the same time, this structure is easy to coordinate and adjust from the top, as it is totally transparent to managers. The flexibility and openness of Project Management 2.0 applications allow organizations to harmoniously combine field knowledge coming from the bottom up with leadership and guidance coming from the top down.
Multiple views of the projects
Besides giving an up-to-date picture of internal operations, the new-generation technologies enable managers and other members of the project team to view projects differently. People can pick any reasonable sub-set of tasks, create a view with these tasks and share the view with someone who needs it. It means that more people can collaborate and contribute to the project work productively.
Each of these views can be changed by team members as the organization and its environment changes. The whole structure evolves with time. Managers, who have access to more views and to bigger views, can avoid scheduling conflicts, set priorities and align multiple projects. Flexible, many-to-many structures that allow creating, sharing and easy merging of views are an important part of Project Management 2.0 approach. This approach enables collective intelligence and leads to collaborative planning. In turn, collaborative planning makes organizations more agile, productive and transparent.
Automation of routine operations
Yet another advantage of the new software is that it eliminates a great amount of routine work that distracts project managers from important things like leading and motivating their teams. There is less need to manually copy information from e-mails, pull information from employees, update plans for somebody else, notify people about updates and remind people about deadlines. The real-time visibility increases velocity in decision- making, helping organizations move faster and respond to changes quickly.
Summary
All the above listed Project Management 2.0 benefits become a catalyst to important innovations. Software will not do the whole job alone, but it empowers people and multiplies their efforts. Project Management 2.0 democratizes project management, bringing it outside of enterprise project management offices to other departments, as well as to small and medium businesses. It makes companies more agile, projects more controllable and people more productive. More projects will be completed successfully for everyone’s benefit.
(Guest post by Andrew Filev, Founder & CEO of Wrike, a Project Management 2.0 startup. Andrew is a frequent speaker and recognized expert in project management disciplines)
Am not sure if I agree with your contention that data gets irretrevably buried in email (or at least to the extent of being very time consuming to corelate)
microsoft project has a good integration with outlook clients and can push tasks and completion status around with good efficiency
I agree with the overall idea though. It should be definitely more effecient to see free form collaboration between the various stake holders and project teams. Usage of tools like forums, wikis alongside pure project tracking tools should improve success rates of projects even better.
To summarize what I feel we miss today is one central place that stores the plan along with status along with project execution srtifacts along with discussions that support execution rather than a tool that merely democratizes task breakdown and tracking
Thank you for the great comment. I fully support your point on the central place and on the fact that project management tools should focus on execution.
Though, I’m not sure about your confidence in Microsoft Project, so I couldn’t stop myself from commenting back. The file based version of MS Project has no support of email or collaboration. The server version it doesn’t create or update tasks based on email conversations, so it does nothing to prevent burying of data in email.
Every tool has its own means. MS Project is a great tool for PMOs, but it is not good for the rest of us. Here’s the litmus test: ask a marketing manager in your company, if/when he or she used MS Project the last time and when he or she used email the last time. This simple test is unanimously supported by the vast difference in adoption of MS Outlook and MS Project through “the rest of us”.
Project Management 2.0 relies heavily on the power of many. Miss one member of 10 people team, who don’t want to open or learn a complex traditional project management tool, and the tool won’t keep your team on the same page. Miss three and you miss the crucial information out of process. So the tools have to be simple and ubiquitous. In the 2.0 context, it’s better to have stripped down wiki used by the whole team, than have a complex scheduling software used by one person.
Cheers,
Andrew
If you’d like a tool for managing your time and projects, you can use this application inspired by David Allen’s GTD:
http://www.Gtdagenda.com
You can use it to manage and prioritize your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
A mobile version and iCal are available too.
I haven’t tried this one, but most of the tools that have “GTD” in their name lack collaboration, so they are not the best supporters to Project Management 2.0.
Thay’re better than paper and pen for managing personal ToDo, but they do not leverage collective intellegence. Collective intelligence is the power that stands behind “2.0″.
I have been working in a virtual office since I started having children (6 years now). Skype has been an excellent tool for me to communicate with my coworkers. I have worked with quite a few people that I have never met but just spoken to with Skype. I find I can be much more efficient and there is no travel time. The flexible working hours are fantastic…especially with children.