There is a lot of buzz about the potential productivity gains of social software. Luiz Benitez tweeted a link to an article on The Province, which described a variety of situations where social software like IBM Connections was leading to perceived productivity gains.

The examples cited in the article noted the increate in productivity that occurs when people are linked together in collaborative communities. But is this really what is new about social software? Online, collaborative communities have been around for a long time.

However, those communities were usually closed, meaning that you had to be a recognized “member” of the community to get a login credential, and these collaborative communities generally failed. Why? We propose that some component of that failure has to do with the centralized control indicative of most enterprise implementations.  Interestingly, this central control paradigm is hinted at in the article referenced above:

Dr. Anne Bourhis “cautioned that social networking isn’t a cure-all. She said businesses need to plan in advance how the tools will be used before they implement a new network, since there are a multitude of tools that serve very different purposes.

“You can’t use it because it’s in fashion,” she said. “You really have to understand what the need is. If it doesn’t meet the need of employees, they won’t use it.”

While we agree with the second paragraph without reservation, the first paragraph is indicative of a non-social, centralized planning approach. What businesses really need to do is to understand how to provide general purpose platforms (like an IBM Connections), along with tailored, initial business contexts through which to introduce the platform. If those tailored entry points are well thought out, the network of users will identify the next wave of uses of the platform, without any input from IT or management.

What is impossible,  once an open, social system is introduced within a business context, is for a centralized planner to predict and manage where the social network will take the software. Business can plan how to introduce the platform, but cannot plan how the tools will be used. If they do so, and restrict the ways the tools “should” be used, the value of the emergent online network will be impaired.

If businesses create an open, social network, where everyone in the organization has access, and where access restrictions are kept to a minimum, the kinds of linkages that are described in the article can take place naturally. This is what is really different about social networking, in comparison to other online collaboration spaces. Rather than “pre-identifying” communities, in social networking contexts, communities emerge in practice, based upon the needs and desires of the users, not a central plan.

Communications planning on projects takes up a major part of the PMBOK. Because traditional project management is based upon a philosophy of control, project managers are advised to develop and maintain a detailed project communications plan, with important formal communications defined and agreed to by project stakeholders.

Having been involved in scores of projects as a project manager, we have prepared literally thousands of informal and formal communications for stakeholders. However, how many times when we were writing those communications did we think that the stakeholders really valued that information, and that they would really take (have) the time to understand the communications. Rather, we knew that when something was really important (an exception), we would have to call it out with a special communication, that probably was not defined on the project communications plan.

The theory driving the establishment of formal communications planning is network complexity. Who has not seen the image of what happens to communication paths when people are added to projects? Everyone has seen it, but I’ll still link to an image here:

The concept of communications path complexity (peer-to-peer communication)

Basically, as Fred Brooks pointed out in The Mythical Man Month, adding people to a project creates more theoretical communications paths, and therefore more potential communications complexity. Because teams are large and, because the communications challenges within distributed and cross-cultural teams are real, communications control led to the partitioning of communications, with the project manager or several project managers becoming communications hubs, responsible for the filtering and distribution of information in order to limit the complexity of communications across the team, and to attempt to reduce information overload see this article.

However, with the emergence of social project management, and the application of the activity streams paradigm, a new possibility for the management of communications emerges. With the project activity stream, or “project wall”, comes the concept that the project itself is a “member of the project”, with whom other project members can communicate, and who can communicate with other project members. This leads to a new paradigm of project communications, shown in this diagram:

Communication Paths in Social Project Management (peer-to-project)

Rather than viewing the project as a set of communications paths between individuals (“peer-to-peer” communications), social project management creates the concept of communicating between individuals and the project (we call this “peer-to-project” communication). While project team members will, of course, communicate one on one as necessary, applying the “Facebook” or “Tweet” paradigm to a project, creates a steady stream of information to the project, and from the project to the individuals.

In the diagram above note two specific things. First, ties to projects can be any strength. If a person is dedicated to one project, their ties to that project will be strong. If a person is assigned to multiple projects, their ties may be stronger to some and weaker to others.  (An executive’s ties to projects will generally be weaker than the average project member on any project.)

Rather than having to maintain one communications path with every member of a project team, each member only has to maintain one communications path with each project, and then specific communications paths as necessary. However, if the peer-to-peer communications paths happen outside the project, the rest of the project team is unaware of the communications. Whereas in a collocated team environment, much of this informal human-to-human interaction is processed by individuals as part of the environment, in distributed teams this communication must be made visible through the collaboration system. As much as possible, social project management encourages the use of the system for peer-to-peer AND peer-to-project communications, creating the maximum ambient awareness for the team.

Conceptualizing the addition of a new project member as a new set of communications paths between each member of the project, we can conceptualize the addition of a new project manager as a simply a new peer-to-project path. This new path does not change the other peer-to-project communications, it simply adds another potential source to the communications paths.

Additionally, notice from the diagram that social project management, because it is embedded into the collaboration network of the organization, enables the seamless integration of external network contacts via the social networks of project members.

In a sense, peer-to-project communication with social project management is a publish-subscribe model for project communications. While this concept is somewhat silly when describing collocated teams, it is very applicable to technology-enabled teams. This publish-subscribe + tweet paradigm, where the external social network can be seamlessly integrated into the management of exceptions makes project management social.

Obviously, we believe that the social project phenomenon is significant in its impact on project teams. Whereas Web2.0 enabled the easy establishment of online collaboration spaces,