Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 12

	This Month's Issue:
	Consolidation is Key

Project Management 2.0:
Collaborative Communications

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improvement over typical meeting notes. IM conversations and VoIP calls can be recorded and stored, with very little expenditure of resources, for use later to review decision factors or confirm action items.

IM introduced not just a simpler, faster email substitute, but the ability to communicate presence. You now have a good guess about who is available before trying to contact them. Even more useful may be Twitter. In addition to presence, Twitter and other status indicators identify not just who is on line, but how receptive each person is to interruption, and even what each person is working on. Personal feelings can be communicated and tracked too.

Collaborative Workspaces, such as Groove or open source cores based on Javaspace, provide both a central recording repository for these methods of communication as well as a mechanism for project organization. Each member connects to the common workspace via a queue of communication that synchronizes their time-space to the “experience” of the group as they move off and on network. People are kept current and everyone present has the same view of the project, its outputs, and documents. Utilities running in the collaborative workspace can provide a common personal platform for the project and a common dashboard of project progress. Additionally, many vendors of collaboration tools supply project templates designed for a collaborative work space. The various project views, resource needs, team makeup, and status, etc. are all mapped in the workspace and collaboratively updated. Collaborative workspaces enhance democratic teamwork, rather than relying only on the project manager to keep the tracking up to date.

People as knowledge networks

Social networks: Self-organizing structures, they include private corporate deployments of technology found in MySpace, Facebook, and similar network products. These, essentially, invert the Groove collaborative space. Instead of all communicating to the common center, all communicate to their social network, and record on a private-but-shared portal. Social network pages act like a combination of shared blog and collaborative repository. They usually do not support collaborative document editing, but can provide a cork-board place for everyone to keep up to date on information and post their findings. These pages can be closed, viewable and usable only by the group, and thereby become a collaborative scratchpad, or they can be open and allow the “pool of talent” to self subscribe to a project. And they can market the project to others, either inside the corporation or outside, depending on security settings. Their value in the communications network is to

Like an eBay buyer, you can see the bidders that struggle to deliver, or those whose scores indicate a propensity to be late and over budget. We can all see the value of this, but actually establishing such supply chain networks will be a trans-organizational challenge - Perhaps another task for the TMF Supply Chain group.

supplement and perhaps replace direct communications that strictly follow the hierarchy of command. We have just begun to scratch the surface of usefulness for social network pages and the social networks behind them.

Reputation Networks: One recent enhancement to social network pages is “Reputation Networks.” This technology builds on the “recommendations” feature of Linked-In and the seller-buyer evaluations of eBay. Reputation Networks include a mash-up of recommendations, performance, assessment of the breadth and depth of your network, and wraps it all up in voting technology. It can capture:

How well you have performed historically
Who you are connected to, and what they think of you
Ratings that are continuously calculated and always up-to-date

It is easy to see how these can enhance productivity by sharing clearly how other team members and members of the organization view their fellows. It helps identify who your real experts and star performers are. When the networks are allowed to extend beyond corporate intranets, management can also evaluate the industry reputation of their star performers. Of course, it becomes easier to see where the problem performers are, too….

We can also use these tools to automatically and continuously score vendors. Reputation networks could be created to enable teams and management to participate. This will give a chance for all the customers to score a supplier in public, where all can see. This seems to work quite well for eBay users. Executives must, however, be able to set the conditions required to ensure that vested interests cannot trump institutional interests. For these reputation networks to work, everyone must tell everyone (internal and competition) who does well and who does poorly.

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