Project Management 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 facilitates creative methods of communication. The concept of pushing information instead of pulling in Enterprise 2.0 is unique. On the other hand, communicating effectively with stakeholders and project personnel is key factor for successful project management. Exchanging project messages or updates in a timely fashion is critical. Therefore, communication channels are established early in projects and maintained thought the project course. From there, the concept of Project Management 2.0 emerged.

In a previous post, I cited a definition of Project Management 2.0 as “the natural evolution of project management practices brought by Web 2.0 technologies”. This post will investigate how Web 2.0 tool can be used to in project management.

Requirement Elicitation:

Understanding the exact requirements of the project is a key factor for any project success. Existing requirements elicitation techniques include:
Stakeholders’ interviews
• Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)
• Document archaeology
• Brainstorming
• Business use case workshops
Some of the issue related to these techniques are the limited time for senior management to be involved in long interviews and workshop. Another issue is the nature of the requirement itself. Several projects failed because stakeholders were unable to exactly determine their exact objectives.

Web 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs and mash ups facilitate a way for stakeholders and other project parties to collaborate to build those requirements and communicate them effectively. The development of the requirement with in a Web 2.0 environment triggers other hidden requirements, which are difficult to depict in other techniques. The use of Web 2.0 might not replace the previously listed methods, but it certainly assists and improves them.

Configuration Management:
Configuration Management is essential to keep track of project assets, making sure that the project team is using the latest updated versions of the project documents such as Quality plan, Work Packages, and even the project plan. Web 2.0 such as wikis can support the work of the configuration librarian, who is responsible of configuration management, and enable him to communicate with correspondent personnel in case a change occurred. For example, if a new version of the project plan was released tools like twitter would be very practical to inform the project team of this change. As professor Michael Rosemann suggested in his paper about the use of twitter to track business processes, twitter can be used to track project assets as well.

Issues Management
As previously mentioned that Web 2.0 tools such as twitter could be used to track assets, it also can be used to raise a project issue and communicate with the correspondent personnel is a timely fashion. Moreover, a search tool can be used to look up for issues from prior projects and quickly learn from the learned lessons.

Despite that the fact that Web 2.0 tool are very practicable and applicable for project management, the current version of these tools might not empower the project as perceived. Some of the problems with the existing tools are privacy, security and formalization. However, a new set of customized web application can be developed to compensate these areas.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_2.0
http://www.wrike.com/projectmanagement/07/03/2009/What-Is-the-Best-Way-to-Enterprise-2-0-Implementation
http://www.prince2.com/

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