Fear No Project Blog – Focusing on the Management Side of Projects

Dr. Karen McGraw, founder and CEO of Cognitive Technologies, recently published a very thoughtful article for project managers in PM World called, “The Social Project Team: Using Social Collaboration & Networking to Enhance Project Success”. In the article, she addressed:

• Facilitating informal learning through collaboration and social networking. Did you know that 75 percent of corporate learning and training is informal?
• Making everyone on the team a thought leader by taking advantage of simple, open, and honest collaborative conversations.
• Improving information access with tools that support of group working environment such as Microsoft SharePoint.

The social networking tickler in her article got me to thinking about how social media services can help build a sense of community and the willingness to collaborate that includes and extends beyond a single project. The operative word here is community. A community is more than a group of people that jointly inhabit a locale or serve a project.

Communities share experiences, know other community members, and work cooperatively to achieve objectives. To stretch a metaphor, just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to execute a project and business successfully. Judicious use of social networking can further the goal of building a project community.

Why Facebook
Actually, I am not recommending Facebook, per se.  It is just one of many social networking sites. However, Facebook is the most popular with over 300M users and many people are already familiar with the setup, on-line applications, and site etiquette.

The characteristics of Facebook that deserve consideration in building a project community include the requirement to limit updates to 420 characters—this is not the place for long, time-consuming diatribes. It is easy to share links, photos, screen shots and movies. Moreover, Facebook’s connectivity supports mobile phones, laptops, and desk computers.

Your project can be a group on Facebook. A group is by-invitation-only. Therefore, you can limit access to those stakeholders that need and want to share updates and information. Your group may include people outside your direct purview such as users, consultants, suppliers, and other departments within the organization. All members of a group have the ability to contribute content to the Group’s wall.

Facebook’s visual organization has lots of white space, color cues, and pictures that support rapid scanning of who, what, and why. Group members can quickly check project updates, event information, questions, and comments.

Potential Benefits of a Social Media Project Group

• Share information outside the established organization hierarchy
• Give employees a chance to have input on something they might otherwise not have. For example, “Does anyone have an idea for a facility to celebrate the delivery of Phase I?”
• Provide an opportunity to get to know project members as people—here is a chance to share accomplishments or interests not directly related to project tasks. For example:

XYZ Corporation CEO was nominated for a Crunchie

Karen’s book made Amazon’s top 25 books on project management

Son Johnny’s varsity soccer team won the state title

Need help with school science project on hydroponics

• Take advantage of the informal style to share bits of information that may not make it into formal project or organization communiqués.
• Improve morale and positively influence retention through the sense of community that results from sharing on a social media site.

Getting Started
Before rushing to implement social media in support of your organizational projects, first take a deep breath and focus a couple of guidelines suggested by William Azaroff in a classic blog article “Key Success Factors for Social Media”:

• Identify your goals and critical success metrics. What are you really trying to achieve? Can you measure it? How when you know you have succeeded?
• Create a set of community guidelines. This includes the “do’s and don’ts for participating. Here are a few of mine:

Never, ever, post anything on a social media site that you would not say directly to anyone who might read it or be willing to be questioned about on 60 Minutes.

Do not use a social media site as a replacement for formal project or organization communication.

Be careful about sharing any information that might be proprietary to the organization. Even though the Group has limited access, accidents happen.

Do separate fact from opinion.

Always follow basic rules of civility.

• Appoint a moderator and ensure you have good moderation capabilities.  Don’t just set it up and “leave it.” Moderators encourage communication among members, post interesting discussion questions, present a problem that needs to be solved quickly, and help keep the postings calm (no virtual “yelling,” please).

I know that some organizations discourage, limit or even completely ban visiting social media sites during official work hours—abuse can happen. However, I think there is a place for social networking to help create group cohesiveness and a sense community. As Bob Larrivee notes in his LinkedIn blog, “effective use of collaboration [and social media] tools requires a cultural mindset and managerial support that fosters one to be open and share information and knowledge.”  This means that as organizations we must first take the time to understand what project collaboration and community mean to us in terms of how our projects and organizations plan to use it.

Please share your thoughts and experience in using social networks on your projects via comments.