First, let me acknowledge just how much of a rank amateur move it is to show up for an hour presentation with an hour and a half full of content. That’s what you get for tooling around with a known quantity the day of the event without timing yourself. I apologize for leaving you all up short and will do my best to summarize here all that you missed. And again, thank you so much for braving the weather to get to the session this evening.
Where were we…
We’d been discussing the nature of communication and had discussed the idea that as project team members are getting younger, their habits and demands in terms of communication are forcing an increased degree of transparency into the project process, and in the promotion of the project across stakeholder groups. That’s about when I got the giant cane dragging me off stage.
Where do you go from here?
First, ask for help. We already established that project managers are constantly challenged managing broad awareness beyond the context of the project. And rightly so; when you’re focused on delivering results, it can be difficult to see beyond your on boarders. And yet, it’s important to do so all the same. So help yourself: get a communications advisor.
What is a communications advisor? They’re outside eyes. They’re your canary in the coal mine. They’re your consigliere. Come up with a better metaphor? Use it here. For large projects, it might make sense to have this person as a team member on your project. But in my experience, it was always helpful to keep the outside perspective of advisor and triage specialist. You might think, from the example I discussed in our session this evening, that it might be smarter to have someone on your team. Remember, the failure of tonight’s project example had much more to do with complete opacity, and no communications advisory capacity leading up to failure. There was only so much triage that could be done.
Second, define boundaries. Enable your project teams to be opaque with their work where appropriate, but make sure you have clearly defined what “appropriate” means for your project. There are some projects around which strict secrecy must be maintained. But if not, if you have the ability and the authority to promote the work of your project, ensure you have clearly defined what is absolutely inappropriate, and give the work that everything else is fair discussion.
Third, get out of the way. Insofar as monitoring your team members, you’ll have to be the judge of the right level of control to engage. But as a rule of thumb, the higher the degree of communication between project team members, and across teams, the higher degree of cognitive processing of project problems you will see. This means: more solutions.
Survey Your People
Too often, project managers are the last people to know about the latest technology, the most innovative tools available for team communication. Engage your best resource and ask your team members what they are using — what they would like to use — to manage communication on the team. Ask them if they’re blogging, and if they are, do they blog about work. Begin to follow their work, their blogs, their twitter feeds. See how they are using technology to engage in dynamic online relationships with others, and ask them if they think there might be a way to better engage team interaction on your own projects.
Embrace and Extend
The beauty of modern web tools lies in your ability to create mash-ups. Indeed, the mash-up is a cornerstone of the web 2.0 universe. The single best thing you can do for yourself is become well-versed in RSS or “Really Simple Syndication”. RSS is the technology that allows you to serve project data across new services, connect and aggregate project feeds, and pivot around your data in wonderful new ways. Once you have your hands dirty in RSS, discovering the utility in tools that are enabled by it is a breeze.
There is Always a Simpler Set Of Tools
Bottom Line: the tool your company uses is probably not the best tool for the job. There are a number of reasons this might be true, the biggest one being that the users in your group — your project people — were not the people who made the buying decision around your enterprise tool. So before you dive in, make sure there isn’t something simpler to enable communication and collaboration at a level appropriate for your project.
Tools and Examples
Take a look at Channel9 from the Microsoft Developer Network for a great example of internal promotion of project efforts. It’s easy: pick up a camera and start asking questions of those around you. For Microsoft, it started as a place to chat with project managers, technical leaders, and developers in the community without the interruption of marketing and PR folks. Now it’s practically a movement.
We talked about Twitter in the session, which is great for the public discourse and I encourage you to sign up and start searching for project management folks — there are a ton of them out there. Visit http://search.twitter.com.
But even better, visit Co-Op to see how one developer has taken the theme of Twitter and turned it into a real group tool with legs.
37signals.com has long been the panacea of simplicity. They took the tools we hold dear and stripped them down to the bare minimum. No sacred cows. Nothing glitz. No Flash (or flash). Just fast workgrouping, project management, and CRM for small and large teams alike.
We could go on and on here. But for those in attendance in the session, I’m interested in what you were able to take away. What are you going to do differently as a result of thinking about project communication more critically? How are you going to enable your teams tomorrow differently than you did today? Comment here, or message me on Twitter!
Again, thank you for the opportunity to participate in the meeting. I look forward to running into you all in real time soon!
Update: Howard Teibel Interview
I mentioned in the session that I’d included selected comments from change specialist Howard Teibel. Here is the Skype interview for your reference. There are some interesting comments and illustrations from Howard’s experience, should you be interested in delving further!