This is the fifth in a series of five posts

Let’s summarize what we’ve asked so far. In our first post, we asked, “How does your tool allow me to leverage the expertise of my entire organization?” , and noted that the first question begins to illuminate whether what is being sold is “social software” at all. Next we asked “Does your software support real project management?”, and discussed the lack of support for the project management role and practice within many online and social task management systems. We then turned to needs of the team, and asked “Do you provide what my team needs to collaborate fully on the project while minimizing the impact of project management tasks on project completion.” In that post we argued that social project management systems need all of the online collaboration tools that the web can provide, but also need the ability to structure that collaboration around project task completion and status reporting – in order to minimize work about work. In the fourth post, we asked “Does your software support what management – outside the team – needs?”, and emphasized the need for the social network of the project – management included – to be given access to the project data in real time, and to participate in the project fully.

In this post we ask a question that is related to many of the previous posts, namely “Does your software support our enterprise social strategy?”. If you haven’t yet developed an enterprise social strategy, you most likely will in the next year or two. An enterprise social strategy is a key step in ensuring that investments in are leveraged and exploited as fully as possible. Remember that (as we’ve stated before) Metcalfe’s law posits that the value of a network increases non-linearly to the increase of the nodes (think people in our case) connected to the network. This holds for a “single-purpose” network. However, for a multi-purpose network, of which a social network is an instance, the potential value of the network is also multiplied by the number of “uses” for which the network is employed. In the context of the business value of enterprise social, these “uses” equate to business processes that are integrated with the social network.

For this reason every company who makes a material investment in social software needs to be sure that those investments are compatible. So, in a fashion,  Question 5 closes the loop with Question 1. In the first post we asked if the software was capable of leveraging connections to a greater social network. This post gets to the core idea of whether the software leverages connections with the “right” enterprise social network. As of this posting, we are aware of three project management systems that integrate with larger social networking systems. Goshido and Wrike integrate with the Jive SBS system, and ProjExec integrates with IBM Connections, IBM Lotus Quickr, and IBM SmartCloud. (We will not use this post to compare and contrast those systems directly. Also, if you know of more systems that integrate with enterprise social platforms, comment below, and we’ll add them to the list.) So, if you are an IBM Social Collaboration software shop, ProjExec gives you unique opportunities to leverage your enterprise social investment, and if you’re a Jive SBS customer, Goshido and Wrike do the same for you.

Hopefully, this series has given you something to think about when conceptualizing social project management, and social software in general. We hope that it is valuable to you. As always, we’d love your comments below.

This series of articles was written by John Tripp, Social Project Management Evangelist at Trilog Group (www.triloggroup.com)

(This post is the fourth in a series of five)

In this post we discuss something that many collaborative software vendors don’t talk a lot about…how does the software support the needs of upper management and stakeholders?

Back in post one, we argued that for a social project management software product to be considered “social”, it should be integrated into the enterprise social platform, the “social fabric” of the organization. This is because so many of the operations of the project team, including issue resolution, expertise identification, status reporting, etc., are impacted by the social processes that are  possible only when integrated into the wider social network of the organization.

This post focuses on another by-product of the software being socially embedded into the organization by asking the question: “Does your software support what management – outside the team – needs?”.

The core premise of social business applications and, of course, social project management is that they leverage the social network of the organization. For this reason social business applications must consider the needs of all of the types of users for whom social ties exist. Realistically, project teams’ have three key classes of social ties – team members (of many types), project management, and stakeholders.

Unfortunately, while many web collaboration systems provide a number of the features required by a project team, few think about the greater needs of the program and portfolio management team, to say nothing of director-level or executive-level management. In some cases, this is due to the ideological stance of the vendor – those seeking to “democratize” projects, or to make teams more “egalitarian” see little value in recognizing the reality of the large, hierarchical enterprise and the requirements that these organizations place on the project manager and team. In these cases, project managers are often left with the tedious task of converting the information stored in the web project management system into reporting and other templates necessary for communication with upper management.

Just as a social project management system must provide visibility and engagement for the project team, it must provide the same ability for visibility and engagement for stakeholders. It can do this in many ways, but most importantly it should:

1. Promote engagement by allowing stakeholders to not only view, but participate in the social activity stream of the project.
2. Promote visibility by providing project and portfolio-level reporting for stakeholders – in real-time – without requiring additional project team or project management overhead to provide it.

Unless the system expects stakeholders to directly interact in the social process of the project, and unless the system provides the functionality for the stakeholders to transparently see the progress of the project, it will fall down on this point. Why should project stakeholders not be part of the same “democratization” of project information that is properly recognized as being a key requirement for social business?

Project stakeholders often complain that their project teams are a “black box”, that they cannot see into. Interestingly, many project team members often are unaware of the power that they possess to keep information hidden from stakeholders (of course, others are far too aware of that power). Because of this, the ability for stakeholders to have constant, real-time, and transparent information regarding project progress is often an unrecognized need, or an intentionally neglected need, when evaluating project management systems.

So, a social project management system engages the social ties with stakeholders in the same fashion as it engages project team members. By providing the information that each person needs, when they need it, while minimizing the work necessary to provide that information.

(This post is the third in a series of five)

In the first two posts of this series (here and here), we discussed that the first order of business when dealing with a social project management software vendor is to determine first, if they are selling social software at all, and second,  if they are selling project management software. In this post we discuss something that most vendors claim to provide – support for social enabled teamwork and collaboration.

The third question that you should ask any social project management software vendor is: “Do you provide what my team needs to collaborate fully on the project while minimizing the impact of project management tasks on project completion.” In order to deliver on this question, a project management software system must (1) help the team to connect together to collaborate, (2) allow as much project information as possible to be shared widely and openly, and (3) provide capabilities for project team members to perform their “project management” tasks easily, and preferably, transparently.

Team Transparency and Interconnectedness

Too often, projects are plagued by a lack of transparency and connectedness, both between the project team members, and between the team and the project manager. This is even more true when teams are geographically distributed. Transparency and connectedness is typically highest in teams that are collocated in the same room. This is due to the ambient awareness that emerges within a group of people who have few barriers to their ability to “catch” portions of conversations, body language, and other non-verbal communication cues. As barriers to the development of ambient awareness, via walls, miles, or organizational barriers, transparency and connectedness become more difficult to maintain. This is one place where social software has a potential transformative application.

Most software applications that claim to be “social” apps utilize the concept of an activity stream, or a “wall” that shows a continual stream of updates. This concept is, of course, most famously implemented in the Facebook wall (now News Feed), and is becoming nearly ubiquitous in the “social” software implementation. What makes this activity stream so important is that, when well used, it is nearest approximation that we have yet devised to the stream of “ambient” information available in the environment when we are near other people. In fact, there is emerging research that illustrates that people are better able to “make sense” of a number of small chunks of information than of a large, detailed document.

Further, as the nature of the information within the activity stream becomes more diverse (as when multiple apps are integrated into an enterprise social system), the activity stream becomes even more like a real project team environment, where multiple tasks and execution contexts are simultaneously occurring .

Finally, to be clear, an activity stream is NOT a discussion forum. Although it exhibits characteristics of a forum, an activity stream’s value and power come from the fact that the information in the stream can be posted by people intentionally, people unintentionally, and by the system itself. Intentional posts are the “status updates”, questions, and other pieces of information that people add to the stream. On Facebook, this might be the cute photo of your kid, or your post about the fact that you were stuck in traffic for an hour.  Unintentional posts are the “by-products” of action within a system. On Facebook, this might be a notice that you’ve “leveled-up” on Mafia Wars, or that you’re listening to Billy Joel on Spotify. In a social project management system, an unintentional post might tell the team that you’ve just finished a task, that you’ve added a document to the document library, or that you’ve just opened an issue that affects the team. Finally, system posts are those posts that humans are not directly involved with. On Facebook, it might be a “friend suggestion”. In a social project management system, it might be a notification to the team that the project has crossed an action threshold, or has missed a deadline.

In short, the integrated and diverse nature of the information on an activity stream helps increased transparency and interconnectedness on your project team.

Access to Project Information

However, far more information is generated and consumed on a project team than what is represented on the activity stream. Project schedules, documents, issues, changes, reports – the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, in most projects these documents are restricted in their distribution and are, in some cases, limited in the access that project team members have to them.

Here is one area where social project management is most closely related to Project Management 2.0. Social project management systems embrace the PM 2.0 concept of the democratization of data access, even while at the same time ensuring proper control over data modification. By this, we argue that Project Management 2.0 had it right when it argued that all of the project information should be available to and accessible by the project team, no matter where they are. However, we also hold strongly to the perspective that most projects still need to be managed, and that certain documents such as the project schedule, still need to be controlled by the project manager. The project plan (and, depending on your project other documents as well) should be always available online to the entire team, but must be able to be controlled.

So, a social project management system is differentiated from a Project Management 2.0 system in the capability to control project information granularly, while ensuring the constant and broad access to the same information.

Project Management Task Execution

Finally, a social project management system isn’t very useful without assisting in the maintenance and completion of project tasks. A social project management system differentiates itself from a social task management system in that the tasks represented in a social project management system are tied back to the real project plan that is the heart of the project (the differences between these systems will be expanded upon in a later post). Rather than a simple to do list, in a social project management system the project tasks assigned to each team member in the project plan are surfaced to each team member. More importantly, when a project team member updates their task list, by marking a task partially complete, or fully complete, or by adding a comment to the task, or attaching a document to the task, this information is reflected in the system wherever it is relevant. Task status updates appear on the wall, the Gantt chart is automatically updated, project and portfolio reports reflect the change, and other people assigned to the task can see the document and comments.

In short, a social project management system should strive to minimize the “work about work”, and let reporting and (appropriate) communication be a by-product of action. Gone should be the days when a project manager chases down the team for task status updates. A team member should never have to wonder if a team member finished a blocking task. This information, and much more, should be represented in the system with as few manual steps as possible.

In summary, a social project management system should (1) help a team to be integrated and connected by simulating as closely as possible the interactions that are only really possible when collocated, should (2) democratize the data of a project, without eliminating necessary controls, and should (3) streamline and eliminate as much “work about work” as possible.

Stay tuned for question #4. Please comment below.

(This post is the second in a series of five)

In the first post in this series, we argued that in order for a project management software provider to claim that it is providing “social” project management, it first must show that its product, in fact, a social business application. In this post, we will argue that the second thing that a project management software provider must illustrate is whether their product is, in fact, a project management software application.

Project management software is everywhere, and it seems like every day a new project management product appears. Lately, this trend has become evident with social project management software as well. As these products (with very different capabilities) multiply, it is important to understand the key capabilities of social project management software, so as to cut through the noise.

In order to cut right to the chase, the second question that you should ask your social project management software vendor is: “Do you support what my project managers need?” or, in other words, “Does your software support real project management?” There is a very tangible difference between collaboration systems that allow simple task list management, and a project management system that allows for hierarchical project work breakdown structures that include thousands of tasks, with constraints, split task assignments, critical path and over-allocation analysis, and financial planning and tracking. True enough, many very small teams do not require all of these features, but a project management system must have the capability to support all of these things.

In addition to the ability to track large numbers of tasks with very detailed information, a project management system must support the discipline of project control management. Rather than a free-for-all, in which anyone on the project can add and change the commitments of the project team, a project manager must have the ability to track tasks, control the addition of new tasks, track the reasons why those tasks were added (or changed), and provide the ability to report against baselines. Therefore, a project management system must provide true issue management, change management, and traceability of all tasks to associated changes and issues. In short, the project manager is still central to the management of the project, and her project management system must allow her to enforce the discipline of the project.

NOTE: This argument may seem to fly in the face of the “democratization” argument and the “self-managed” team wave, but it does not. While we completely agree about the democratization of project management DATA (which will be addressed in our next post), we couldn’t disagree more with the notion that any but the smallest teams, working on limited scope projects, can truly “self-manage”. Realistically, even these teams are being managed – it is simply the customer that is performing the “project management” for them.

Finally, a social project management system should augment the features described above by integrating them into the social fabric of the organization. Issues should be “crowdsourceable”, conversations from the activity stream should be able to be tracked as issues, estimates of change impacts should be able to be voted on by the team, people and tasks on the project plan should be able to be tagged in posts, and so on and so on.

We are unaware of any product that has, at the time of this post, truly leveraged the social paradigm in a fully integrated way as described in the previous paragraph. But a social project management system should at least have the capability to track all of the items discussed, and a vendor should have the vision to deliver to the promise described above.

To be clear…your social project management system must be able to support…drum roll please…project management. Team collaboration + task management is not enough.

In summary, we believe that the first two questions you should ask your social project management software vendors establish the bona fides of the product – is it a social business application, and is it a project management application…if one of those two is missing, the rest of the questions might not matter. Stay tuned, and comment below.

(This post is the first in a series of five.)

Social Project Management is increasingly being recognized as a dominant future trend in the evolution of Project Management, and “social project management” software vendors are multiplying rapidly. But are they all selling Social Project Management? There is already a distinction emerging between “Social Project Management” and “Social Task Management”, but even these categories, along with many vendors’ pitches, are doing little but muddying the waters. We think that there are five questions that you should ask any social project management vendor to identify what their offering really is.

First and foremost, ask your vendors “How does your tool allow me to leverage the expertise of my entire organization?” As we’ve noted here, here, and here, social project management isn’t really about collaboration per se (although that is a key part of it). Collaboration tools have been available for decades. Slapping the label “Social” on a product, or adding an activity stream to a product doesn’t make it a “social” business application at all.

Social business applications, and social project management specifically, need to be integrated into the enterprise social network of the organization. Project Management 2.0 vendors complained  that most project tools were only for the project manager. But vendors such as AtTask and Vantage simply widen the scope to include the defined (and LICENSED) project team members. This is why these and other project team-centric applications are not enterprise class solutions.

For a project management tool to be a social project management tool, it must allow the team to identify the expertise of the organization intentionally, and unintentionally. By this, we mean that the tool must be able to poll the organization for the expertise that the team understands that it needs, and the tool must help the team solve problems for which it doesn’t know what expertise is needed to solve it.

To do this, a social project management tool needs information that has been stored about the experiences and expertise of everyone in the organization. This is not possible in a point solution, but is definitely possible when the application is integrated into the social enterprise application (e.g. IBM Connections, Jive SBS). This is an example of how social business applications both leverage and multiply the value of a social platform investment.

Additionally, a social project management tool needs to enable the team to ask for help – even when the project team isn’t sure who to ask. As such, a social application must be able to crowdsource problems to the entire organization. Again, this is possible only when the tool is integrated into, and accessible by, the entire organization’s social structure.

Therefore, integration into an enterprise-wide social platform is necessary, but not sufficient, for any application to be called a social business application. In the next four posts, we will discuss the key features that a project management system requires in order to be called a “social” project management system.

Much has been written about crowdsourcing, the practice of outsourcing tasks to a network of people. Specifically, crowdsourcing is valuable when a problem exists for which the person with the problem may not have the time, knowledge or expertise needed to solve the problem. In the book Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams describe the story of GoldCorp, a struggling Canadian Gold Mining company. In 1999, GoldCorp was a $100 million dollar company, unable to tap into its own reserves. By 2002, GoldCorp was a $9 billion dollar company due to its successful crowdsourcing efforts.

The GoldCorp story is just one example of the power and wisdom of crowds. When we think of crowds, we think about a mass of people, almost all of whom we don’t know, gathered together for a purpose. Although the crowd might share a goal, there is little sense as to the experience of the people in the crowd, the knowledge that they have in their heads, or the manner in which one could identify that information.

In fact, as a company increases in size, the more “crowd-like” it becomes. Because of this, the concept of inside the firewall social business applications has flourished in the past few years. Vendors such as Jive, Microsoft and IBM have become leaders in the enterprise social space. Their tools provide the ability to socially collaborate with anyone in the organization. However, these tools out of the box provide little more than the ability to “assemble” the crowd. Without a dedicated effort to ensure that employees fully complete their profile information, the ability to identify experts is not realized. Without real business processes embedded into the platform, the ability to socially collaborate for business purposes is reduced.

This is where social business applications, such as Social CRM and Social Project Management come into the picture. “Social” application vendors are everywhere these days, and more seem to start popping up every week.  However, without access to the full social network of the organization, these tools are merely team collaboration sites with social tools. What makes an application an enterpise social application is the ability to socially interact with the enterprise – internal, as well as external partners. In short, social business applications require the ability to “crowdsource” to the enterprise social network. Because of this, social business application vendors need to intentionally partner with enterprise social platform vendors to integrate their business process support within the social fabric of the enterprise.

Let’s take Social Project Management for example. Project management is exactly the kind of process that gains value from being made social. This is because of the kind of work that it is. As noted above, the value of crowdsourcing comes from its ability to find new knowledge to solve problems. While operational tasks may deliver value to an organization, projects deliver value specifically because they are creating something new. Because of the “newness” of projects, the need to identify expert knowledge is far more important in these contexts than in others.

For example, Trilog Group has tight integration of its ProjExec social project management platform with all of IBM’s collaboration solutions – IBM Lotus Quickr, IBM Connections, and IBM SmartCloud for Social Business. Because of this integration, when the project team has an issue, it can be easily “outsourced” to the enterprise crowd. Without this kind of integration, the project team must rely on its personal connections to identify help. Alternatively, the project team could search the enterprise social network to find an expert, but only if the expert has included the same search terms into his profile. Instead, by actually performing “crowdsourcing” to the enterprise, the team can access the full expertise of the organization.

Previous Post: Why Peer-to-Project Communication beats out Peer-to-Peer

So, social platform vendors help to assemble the crowd. The crowd can expose their expertise. But the real value of an enterprise social platform comes from the power of social tools like crowdsourcing being applied to real business processes, such as project management. Social interaction helps to solve hard problems, not easy ones. Businesses should first focus on creating a “social space” for their teams to find each other and collaborate. Then, businesses should work to socialize their hard problems – to the entire organization.

Social business applications’ real promise will come when the organization culture reinforces that we are all “the team”, and when the organization provides the tools to actually make that the case.

Enterprise Social + Social Business Applications like ProjExec together will help deliver that goal.

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