Get Started Using Social Media on Your Projects is a practical guide to choosing and setting up a social media tool in a project environment

Communication is always a problem on large projects: making sure everyone on the outside has a similar view of what is going on and that everyone on the project team knows how their role affects the others. You already have meetings with detailed minutes, phone calls with each team member, maybe even a dedicated intranet site, wiki or collaboration tool. What could a blog offer on top of all the communication you are already doing?

Here are 4 ways that you can use a project blog.

1. A blog by your sponsor

A blog can bring your sponsor closer to the project team: on a large project it’s possible that some members don’t even know who the sponsor is. It’s good to wheel out your sponsor when they need to inject a bit of motivation during a difficult patch, but it is rarely practical to invite them to every team meeting. A quick blog post from the sponsor will help the team members feel that someone high up does care about what they are doing, but without the intrusion of an email.

A large legal firm in the Southeast USA used this technique to engage project teams. The project sponsor added content to the blog several times a day. He used the blog to ensure that the team knew that he knew about their big milestones. It also helped build excitement towards significant milestones on the plan when the team knew they would be celebrating their success with events like go-carting.

The blog enabled him to stop sending out so many emails. It gave project team members more control over when they read the information. It also provided a forum for them to comment, ask questions and give their perspectives.

2. A blog to engage people outside of the project team

Another function for a project blog is to communicate to a wider audience than just your immediate team. Allowing other people in the company to read the ‘story’ of your project via a blog can help prepare them for the changes that may come when your project delivers its objectives.

Matt Down, a project manager from London, gives the following example of using a project blog as a communication tool:

For the last six months I have been using one to provide a brief weekly update on progress for the project team and other internal stakeholders. I normally include a relevant photo showing progress or an event that has taken place. I’m using Microsoft SharePoint which is the corporate tool we have for collaboration and have found it easy to use with a little guidance from another user at the beginning but otherwise no training. Using this rather than the weekly email I previously sent has been well received as people can look as and when they need the information and look back at what was said previously without trawling through emails. My only regret is I didn’t use it earlier in the project. I will definitely be looking to use something similar again on my next project.

3. A blog to help team members collaborate

This is an old-ish example, but still an interesting one, especially if you wish you could save time when documents are doing the round for being reviewed.

In 2006 I interviewed Paul Wormelli, who was then Executive Director of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute. The Institute is an industry consortium of companies that provide IT systems and products to the US Department of Justice. He told me how they had launched an enterprise blog in January 2005 using Traction software. The objective was to share information between the different committees.

Prior to setting up the blog, the Institute used to send out copies of reports for review in Word format. One person was nominated to collate the comments. Paul explained that if the document went out for review to 25 different people they would all pick up the same errors. The blog enabled the committee reviewers to communicate in real time. One committee was able to cut the number of phone and in-person meetings it held by half.

4. A blog to help team members communicate across distances

A blog can help the team communicate asynchronously – in other words, not in real time. A project blog offers a 24/7 informal reporting mechanism. Team members can post updates and progress reports to the project blog instead of calling a meeting to summarize progress. This can be especially helpful to those team members who do not have English (or the majority team language) as their first language and who find it difficult to contribute effectively during conference calls. They may be better at expressing themselves in writing.

Kandy Crenshaw has experience of using project blogs with team members in multiple time zones. She says:

I am currently managing 4 projects and have created Microsoft SharePoint project blogs for two of them. Originally, I intended to create a blog for each project but by monitoring the site analytics reports I quickly realized that the only staff members visiting the blogs were the core team members. Our project sponsors and outside stakeholders just weren’t interested in the level of detail provided there. The blogs were not (in my case) effective for sponsor and stakeholder communications. However, they have been an invaluable tool in projects with a large team based in multiple time zones. We have even used them to facilitate decision making between meetings.

As Kandy says, a project blog can help structure and organize project work and assist decision making. The ability to share views collaboratively can also help combat the silo mentality that grows up around projects. A blog is a level playing field, owned by the project and not the IT team, and easy enough to use for everyone to feel they can get involved.

How do you use blogs on your projects?

This is an edited extract from Get Started Using Social Media on Your Projects (3^rd Edition). I have recently revised and updated the ebook. The latest edition has over 15 additional pages of good stuff including lots on privacy and security considerations of using social media on your projects.

Get your copy here.

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This is a guest post by Jon Swain, President of Ten Six Consulting.

Strong project sponsorship is critical to ensuring that your project is a success. One of the roles of a sponsor is to champion the project and the project team. This includes making sure the project gets the recognition and resources it requires. But it is not only the project sponsor who can shout about the project and spread the word about the team’s achievements.

Your project team can be ambassadors for the project and sell the story of the change you are delivering. People often worry about using the word ‘sales’ but really it’s about ensuring that the rest of the organization gets to hear about the work the team is doing and the benefits that the project is delivering.

Every project manager and team can be a sales force in disguise. You have a number of tools at your disposal to generate interest in your project. Here are five ways you can sell the story of your project.

1. Perfect your elevator pitch

You have probably heard about having an elevator pitch – a short statement that sums up the project that you can use if you are ever in an elevator with the CEO and are asked what you are working on

Everyone on the project team should know the elevator pitch. Don’t drill it into them (there is no benefit gained by having them repeat a stock phrase verbatim). However, they should all be clear about the project’s benefits and goals. In other words, if asked, every member of the project team should be able to articulate what they are working on, why it is important and how it contributes to the company’s overall objectives.

2. Tap into social media channels

Social media, like wikis and blogs, can be useful tools used within the organization. They are a different type of communication channel to monthly status reports and they can reach a different audience. They also offer a higher level of interactivity than ‘standard’ communication channels meaning that you have the opportunity to respond to comments made by the people you are trying to reach.

You can also use social media channels like Facebook pages and Twitter to reach the public outside your organization. They may also be a key stakeholder group and if you are working on a public sector project or an initiative that is very much in the public eye, then this could be a good way to sell the story of your project to a wider audience.

3. Use your allies

The sponsor is not the only person who can generate interest in the project. Tap into his or her network and try to find other key people in the company who can sell the benefits of the project on your behalf. Ask them to mention the project to their colleagues. Find other people to co-opt onto your stealth sales force and share the key messages with them too.

4. Ask questions

You are selling interest in your project, and one of the best ways to find out what people think of it is to ask questions. When you meet colleagues at internal networking events or at meetings, ask them how your project is going to help them. Hopefully they will know, but if they don’t, this is another opportunity to spread the word about what you are achieving.

Questions are also a low cost way to gather insights into the problems colleagues are facing. You can learn a lot from listening, and good sales is as much about listening as it is about offering information.

5. Create internal PR

This is perhaps the most traditional way of talking about your project. Use all the internal channels that are available to you. You probably have a staff magazine – could you ask the editor to include updates about your project? Check out the corporate intranet. If the PMO or the department who will benefit most from the project has an intranet page, could you post regular news about the project there? Most company intranets will have a section for internal news and announcements, so even if there is no central PMO page for project updates you could write a regular news piece for the intranet.

Think about ways you can generate interest in your project before it is finished: the story of the project probably includes some interim milestones. If you have a project celebration, take photos. Use them to sell the benefits of the change you are delivering. Print them on mugs or mouse mats, along with a short statement explaining the goals of the project, or achievements to date.

There are plenty of creative ways for the project team to become ambassadors for your project. Work with them to help them become a sales force in disguise, championing your project and its benefits whenever they can. What other ways have you found to spread the word about your project?

Jon Swain is President of Virginia Beach-based firm Ten Six Consulting. Ten Six specialises in enterprise project management tool deployment.

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I was in Las Vegas earlier this year for the Pink Elephant ITSM conference. I took some time out of the conference to meet Dave Gordon, The Practicing IT Project Manager. We discussed IT project management, the challenges for project managers working on Software as a Service projects and the cartoon laws of physics.

This video was filmed on location at The Beat Cafe on Fremont Street, Las Vegas, a very nice coffee shop and the only place I visited where food and drink didn’t come in bucket-sized portions.

Transcript:

Dave Gordon: It’s not that I’m practicing to become perfect. I’ve accepted the fact that perfection is overrated. But as someone who is doing actual IT projects and making a living doing it, I’ve been doing that for over 25 years. I like to identify myself as a practitioner. I’m not a theoretician. I’m not some guy writing textbooks. I’m a guy who basically is out there trying to figure out how to get stuff done. And because I come from a technology background, I’ve seen many waves of technology. I wrote my first program in 1973 on Fortran on a model 29 card punch.

So to me, I’ve had the chance to watch a lot of waves of technology come through. But the one thing that has remained constant in all of that is there’s always a difference between what we think we’re going to do and what we end up doing. Because along the way, we discover an awful lot about what the real problem is. I don’t think there’s a way around that. I think we have to accept that. And I think that’s one of the reasons why the Agile approaches are becoming so popular because they do acknowledge that you can’t plan it a lot and then do it. You can certainly do that in civil engineering because if you’re building a bridge from here to there, here isn’t moving and neither is there. So you’ve got a lot more ability to control the subject matter, the content and the scope.

When you’re talking about building a software system to accomplish some business need that may or may not closely defined that may have a lot of constraints that are external to the organization for compliance or any number of other things. And when you’re talking about technology that seem to refresh every few years that becomes a lot more difficult. So the timescales are necessarily compressed. Things are continuously changing, the parties and interests change so it’s a very different model and I think that that’s really what sets IT project management apart from other forms of project management.

Tell me about the book you are working on…

Dave Gordon: It’s about implementing Software as a Service. Essentially from the point of view of the customer who is trying to replace whatever their legacy system might be with Software as a Service as opposed to a premise-hosted software package and other things that goes along with it.

The basic idea behind the book is that the reality is of the SaaS implementation is it’s less about information technology and far more about re-engineering business processes, really looking at how you represent data in a complex system.

Many years ago, a group of undergraduates with far too much time on their hands created something called the Cartoon Laws of Physics. If you browse the internet, you can find the Cartoon Laws of Physics and one of them is about cats. Cats assume the shape of their containers. I mean if you chop them up into little pieces, they assume the shape of the container whatever it is, a violin case, a jar, whatever and you take them out of the container and they retain that shape. The same thing is true of data. Data also assumes the shape of its container. Whenever you store records in a particular system whatever that system is, you’re basically forcing it to fit in the descriptions that were created for that software application that data model as it were.

So one of the challenges you have whenever you move from some legacy system to a new system is you’ve got to basically reformat that data so that it means something meaningful to the new system. So part of the challenge is going through your data assumptions, your data models and determining what’s actually meaningful in all of that stuff, figuring out how to bring it across to the new system and not do any damage to the meaning of it. And I think that’s one of the key challenges.

Another key challenge is figuring out how you’re going to support your users when in fact there is no in-house technical knowledge so that’s another piece of it. Testing is another piece of it. Security models are another piece of it.

One of the challenge that most organizations have nowadays is they’ve invested a lot of money and some sort of identity management and provision and deep provisioning systems. So how do you integrate an application that’s hosted at some third party data center by some vendor with your security model? So it’s a number of challenges and I thought it would be time for a book like this to pull all those things together.

What are the challenges for project managers on SaaS projects?

Dave Gordon: One of the challenges you have is a very different group of stakeholders. Quite frankly if everything is in-house, it’s a lot easier to identify your stakeholders because you can really very efficiently and effectively say: ‘Okay, who are we talking to now?’

But as soon as you start hosting something outside, you got to integrate that system with all the other systems that the legacy system touches today. In my case, I go around implementing a human capital management and payroll system and they typically have anywhere from 20 to 70 integrations with other systems. Third party vendors, you know people who report taxes withheld on payroll, things of that nature. So add in all of the other internal systems from your accounting system to the aforementioned security management systems, you very quickly end up with a lot of integration work. So it becomes difficult to understand and manage all of those stakeholders because everyone of those sources or sinks of data has some sort of an established set of protocols and some of them you may be doing for the first time and some of them, you may be redoing after having done it 10 years ago and everyone associated within that. So sometimes, it’s about rediscovering the way and you don’t always necessary want to pave over the cow pats. A lot of challenges for that kind of work simply because there are more parties of interest.

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According to Chrismon Nofsinger, there are 4 steps on the journey to being a great leader, but most people only get halfway.

“Leadership is about facilitating the output of others and giving them recognition,” he writes in his new book, The Shift from One to Many: A Practical Guide to Leadership. This is a great way to define leadership, and this short book explains how you can be better at it.

It’s not about you

Leadership, whether you are leading a project, a sports team or a group of volunteers, is not about you. That’s where the title of this book comes from: it’s the journey of giving up the need for it to all be about you and starting to think about your impact on others and what you can do for them.

Nofsinger’s 4 step journey encompasses:

Me: “People with a Me focus are concerned with knowing exactly what is expected of them,” writes Nofsinger. It is characterised by using the word “I” a lot, and not using other people’s names. People who are at this leadership stage have ownership of tasks and often perform very well, but because they concentrate on their own contribution they struggle to listen and don’t take other people’s views into account. I expect you know some project team members, or even some project managers, who operate like this.

Us: This stage is where leaders use the language of “we” and it is all about teams. I think that many project managers display this type of leadership, and if they don’t, they should strive for it. It’s demonstrated by collaboration, recognition for the work of others and through beginning to delegate appropriately.

Letting Go: The shift to full-time coach. You look for the strengths and weaknesses in each of the team members. You are objective, and allocate work based on skill and ability. I think this is where effective programme managers should be. You have to trust others to do their jobs, as programme managers can’t be involved in the detail of every project. The role is about overall direction, setting the vision and enabling others. You are not part of the team any more.

Transferring: this type of leadership is where you risk sharing your secrets. You can be a project, programme or portfolio manager and fall into this category. It is about being that guru in the office and sharing your wisdom with others, but in a way that doesn’t feel patronising or that you are dishing out unwanted advice. Nofsinger believes that to operate at this level you need to spend 50% of your time developing others.

Nofsinger says that only exceptional leaders make it to Transferring, which is where you spend most, if not all, of your time, facilitating the output of others. Less than 5% get to Letting Go, so if you are on your way to setting expectations and holding people accountable to them, delegating and forgetting about your need for personal recognition, then you are doing well.

A quick read and a simple idea

The Shift From One to Many is a straightforward idea, and it doesn’t take many pages to explain it in depth. The book is also straightforward, with examples that are easy to understand and instantly relevant. It avoids superfluous language and management speak, in favour of clarity of concept. At fewer than 60 pages of content, it’s a perfect commuter book, especially as you could read it on the way to work and then put some of the principles into action immediately when you arrive.

Project leadership was a hot topic last year and it looks like it will continue to be on the radar for project managers this year as well. People who are already leading projects know that this stuff is hard, which is why it’s of interest to the project management community. Anything that can make our lives easier has to be good, and Nofsinger’s ‘one to many’ is a simple model.

He writes:

“The leadership journey is hard. It’s hard not to want personal recognition for your work. It’s hard to have people reject you when you move beyond daily ordinary tasks. And it’s hard to give away your best ideas in order to facilitate the output of others. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.”

Where are you on your leadership journey?

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