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Will Blog for Project Management

OK, so maybe I’m late to this particular party, but I just recently ran across this 2005 posting from Tim Duckett: 10 Ways to Use Blogs for Managing Projects. (It’s a short read. Go ahead; I’ll wait.)

The 10 ways:

1. Communicating with project stakeholders
2. Replacing paper
3. Building issue logs
4. Capturing information snippets
5. Publicizing project progress
6. Reducing email overload
7. Capturing requirements
8. Circulating screenshots
9. Keeping team members up to date
10. Providing an automatic audit trail

I wonder: How many of these reasons would resonate with large organizations? How do you sell the idea to management?

What I think is the key thought is actually contained in the opening sentence, quoted above. Focus on desired outcomes (or, keep your eye on the trophy); namely, improved information flow, easily accessible shared knowledge, and up-to-the-minute updates. By clearly articulating what you want to accomplish, it becomes less about the tools and more about the goal: improved efficiency in execution.

One Hundred This and That

Jerry Madden, Associate Director of the Flight Projects Directorate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, collected a list of principles known as “100 Rules for NASA Project Managers”. Certainly a great “handbook”, and pretty much timeless as well. After his retirement in 1995, he followed it up with “100 Lessons Learned for Project Managers”. (Strangely enough, there are actually 128.)

But what I’d really like to see is his list of “unwritten” rules, one of which is, “Show up early for all meetings; they may be serving doughnuts.”

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How do you go about initiating change in your organization? Not so easy, is it? A ChangeThis article by David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz, “The Neuroscience of Leadership”, suggests that the physical operation of the brain itself may have a lot to do with it.

To me, the challenge of change in any organization (particularly for broad, organization-wide changes) is to encourage it in such a way that acceptance becomes rapidly widespread. Otherwise it becomes bogged down, sidetracked, or otherwise ineffectual. Once that happens, the next attempt at change becomes even harder to initiate.

David and Jeffrey suggest the best way may not necessarily be to tell people what’s best for them, but to present ideas in such a way as to allow each person to experience their own insights into how best to behave. Then, when leaders remind others about their useful insights, a positive feedback is formed, and the new behavior becomes more entrenched.

Steps to building acceptance can be summed thus:

1. Focus employees’ attention on their own insights, by facilitating discussions and activities that involve being entrepreneurial
2. Regularly provide “gentle reminders” so the entrepreneurial maps become the dominant pathways (in the brain) along which information, ideas, and energy flow
3. Catch the team when they get sidetracked and gently bring them back

I have no problem with the steps outlined above, but translating that into the real world is not so cut-and-dried. Suppose you have an organizational change you want to introduce (internal blogging, for instance). How do you go about getting the organization to envision it? Where do you begin?

More to come on this in the future…

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Pip Coburn, in his Manifesto, “Non Geeks are Not Morons” (free download here), makes a case for those of us who are technology-challenged to some degree.

Too often, technology-makers are motivated by Field of Dreams theology (“If they build it, they will come”), and Pip argues that the real motivation for people to adopt new technology has more to do with pain rather than gain. Rightly pointing out that most people’s reaction to change is more emotional than rational, he says technology adoption is actually more a function of two factors: crisis, and total perceived pain of adoption. Because both terms are defined emotionally, they vary from person to person.

How many times have you ever seen commercials for high-tech products, and thought to yourself, “so what?” The VCR is a good example. When the pain of missing a good show overcomes the pain of learning how to use one, then and only then will you be motivated to buy it. “Just because it’s there” isn’t good enough anymore (was it ever good enough?), and sadly many still don’t get it.

A sane voice in the wilderness, or totally wrong? You decide.

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Happy Fourth, everyone! Please have a safe and happy day today!

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

.edsel failure.
Originally uploaded by tEdGuY49.

From today’s Business Week Online is a story that resonates with a previous entry concerning the deliberate making of mistakes.

“How Failure Breeds Success” talks about how true innovation is dependent upon those willing to take big risks – and make big mistakes. The story and accompanying slide show identify a veritable Who’s Who of very public “Uh-Oh’s” that will likely bring a rueful smile and a sad shake of the head. Everyone makes mistakes; even those big, smart corporations who should have known better. It’s just that some mistakes are rather more public than others (can you say, “New Coke?”).

One company, Gore-Tex, identifies a formula that most of us, including yours truly, will have trouble shifting toward – yet shift we must. When it comes to taking risks, most people set out to prove their expectations are correct. But what’s needed is to try to prove themselves wrong. Why? Because an early focus on flaws leads to lessons learned early, an eventual key to success.

But the point is that true innovation requires us to be willing to make mistakes, and that’s something business is going to have to really come to grips with. So I wonder: after spending so much time with efforts to “get it right”, have we become afraid to stick our necks out?

I predict: resistance.

Granted, that’s something of a no-brainer. After all, since when have most people truly embraced change? The normal state of affairs is that people hate change!

No matter the merit, getting most companies to actually innovate can be quite a challenge. Sure, most of them talk a good game, but meanwhile, down in the trenches, workers tremble at the thought of suggesting a new idea that doesn’t work out. Thus innovation becomes stifled at the grass roots level.

But luckily, resistance to change is, well, futile. Changing markets, changing demographics, changing political landscapes – these and many other factors all contribute to the need for more rapid innovation. To survive, businesses must come to grips with the reality of taking risks and making mistakes. It’s do or die time, folks!

I also predict: you WILL be assimilated.

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