Project Management 2.0

 clipped from www.projectmanagerplanet.com

Project Management 2.0
September 21, 2007
By Chris Lynch

Project management is rapidly evolving, and at the heart of the emerging model is collaboration, according to Chris Lynch of eProject.

Project management is undergoing a changing of the guards -– the broader idea of "managing work" is replacing many existing notions of project management.

Across businesses small and large, a vast portion of everyday work fits under the umbrella of a project even though it may not be organized according to the rules of traditional PM. No longer are "projects" firmly in the domain of Project Management Professionals (PMP) who view PM as a way to control and manage a project using task lists and Gantt charts. Whereas once PMPs had the responsibility to facilitate and organize work across an organization, this now falls to most people within a company across a number of different and distinct lines of business.

At the heart of the new project management (let's call it PM 2.0) is collaboration, and people now are defining a project as any work undertaken to achieve a business objective. When we start to think of projects as based on collaboration -– instead of on control -– a new approach to managing projects emerges.

The need for shared insight and the ability to look across the board and see things holistically is at the forefront of PM 2.0. With insight and collaboration driving a project, people and businesses are accomplishing much more than when they relied on silos of information that were built around control and an adherence to traditional PM rules that fit work around a PM system, rather than the PM system fitting around the work.

This shift in project management is similar to the change that took place in word processing. Whereas once you would hand a document or notes to someone for them to type up, we now have a variety of word processing tools that empower the people within an organization to take that responsibility themselves.

However, this transition to PM 2.0 has not been seamless –- organizations have been giving business people PM responsibilities without realizing they don't speak the language of the old PM.

Today, businesses need to look to leaders within their organization who can drive toward a common business objective and are willing to collaborate to get there. Since teams are spread over so many different boundaries (geographic, organizational, objectives, etc.), collaboration becomes the key component to PM 2.0.

Multiple Components of Collaboration

One of main problems with the historical approach to project management is that relegating PM responsibilities to a specific person -– someone who often is separate from the mundane aspects of a given project -– simply is too costly. To control expenses, organizations end up infusing the PMP DNA into people with less-technical roles.

For example, when non-technical people cobble together a Gantt, it falls out of use when the project begins because they don't know how to effectively maintain it. The main idea behind a Gantt chart was to create a visualization tool to communicate work schedules, not a means to run schedules. However, the original intent and end goal of the Gantt remains -– to drive to success -– so now various components of collaboration must become the tools of PM 2.0.

What does this mean for businesses? Take the example of a marketing project -– most people initially would think of implementing a solution like Microsoft Project to track and organize the "who, whats and whens" of all that needs to get done, if only because the name of the software would seem to fit the bill.

However, more often than not the head of the marketing team isn't going to have the technical background of a traditional PMP and won't be able to utilize a large portion of the software's technical tools. Instead, viewing their project simply as work that is based on communication and shared insight, the team will turn to tools such as email, spreadsheets and to-do lists in order to facilitate communication across the marketing group with the common aim of reaching an objective.

 clipped from www.projectmanagerplanet.com

Project management is rapidly evolving, and at the heart of the emerging model is collaboration, according to Chris Lynch of eProject.

This isn't to say that there is no more need for PMPs -– technical projects that require more technical management are plenty. However, the fact remains that most projects in the workplace today are run by business people who have never heard of Critical Path analysis.

To aid in this move to managing projects, businesses can and should look to people who have a keen sense of the fundamentals of collaboration, insight and accountability, as these are the common business drivers that ultimately can make a project successful.

With this change in project management comes a change in tools -– PM 2.0 tools have to facilitate communication and business insight at their core. Where does a project stand, are tasks moving along as they should and being successfully completed? Is a project at risk? Currently, the No. 1 project management tool is spreadsheets, but decentralized tools like this and email aren't efficient and lack shared insight. Nevertheless, people continue to rely on personal productivity tools to manage projects because they don't recognize what they're doing as project management and they don't know that a whole new set of tools caters to managing projects.

With business people essentially acting as project managers, tools need to be flexible or run the risk of appealing to the small percentage of the workforce that is trained as PMPs. Instead of adhering to traditional rules and guidelines out of a sense of history or simply because that's how things have been done, new solutions need to work they way the business runs -– they can't be so rigid that they only follow one discrete methodology. The old approach to project management isn't wrong or obsolete, there's now just an additional need for lighter PM 2.0 tools that enable shared insight.

As increasing numbers of business people find themselves managing part or all of a project, companies will be able to work smarter and gain valuable insight into all realms of their business. This change isn't limited to a certain type of business -- everything from startups to large enterprises are seeing their employees become work managers who focus on collaboration and communication, and who are starting to tap PM 2.0 in order to achieve business objectives.

Chris Lynch is vice president of engineering for eProject, a provider of online project management software and services.

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