Project Management 2.0 | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Project Management needs social signals

October 8, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : It’s obvious that in many cases traditional project management methods need to become more agile. That’s not without bringing new issues due to the need to keep eveyrone informed of the status of a project that is continuously being re-designed. Social media are very good at addressing the need of narating a project beyond the traditional quantitative indicators of traditional tools. But there’s still something missing in the enterprise social media offer : even if some niche players offer project socialization features, most of generalist social software vendors don’t while it would make a lot of sense next to the conversational spaces that are the heart of their product.

In more and more fields it’s becoming obvious that agile methods are becoming the most relevant to manage any project and this approach, that used to be restricted to IT projects is nom being used in more and more areas. The reason is quite easy to undersrtand : in a world where cycles are becoming shorter and shorter, plans that aims at delivering something in 2 or 4 years are not relevant. Proceeding step by step, having functional deliverables that comes progressively and continuously redesigning the project in order it meets actual current needs instead of delivering something that meets what was needed years ago but is irrelevant to the current context seems to be wiser and more efficient way of managing a project.

When, during a projet, some specific expertises and resources have to intervene on certain specific parts, it brings an added complexity. In a classical project, anyone knows what to do and when because the project follows a well defined path. In an agile project, where the roadmap and the specifications continuously evolves, resources are often lost because they don’t know how things have evolved from the original project. It’s a matter of awareness.

Is there a 2.0 way to draw an org-chart ?

February 11, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

When talking about enterprise 2.0, something we offer hear is “sounds interesting but our company is not designed to work this way”. Understand : we decide to do something and we “push” it, don’t even think of allowing a bottom-up flow to exist in this context. Of course, that causes gaps, the company isn’t able to meet clients and employee’s needs right away, many realignments being necessary while the exchanges that would makes it easier are not facilitated at all. In a colorful language, companies use the existing pipes, hoping all pieces will fit together at the end.

That’s why I suggested to think about a Service Oriented Organization, which starting point is not the top of of the pyramid but the goals the organization has to achieve. Don’t forget that the purpose of any company is not to keep people busy or give to what already exist a reason to live but to meet the market’s expectations, even if it means to change what already exist.

Now let’s play a little game.

What kind of social networks do companies need ?

February 4, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Need for synergies, for connections, to do more with less ? Whatever the official reason is (and sometimes the unofficial one), companies are now turning back to the gool old network, renamed “social network” to stick to the the current climate, to find new pools of performance.

Because companies focus on efficiency, people’s network is not a collection a business cards lying about in a drawer. More, it’s more usual to collect external’s business cards than colleagues’s. The network got “webized” and companies are wondering of to professionalize a Facebook, internalize a LinkedIn. So social networks becomes entreprise-class applications, specialists quickly took a stand, traditionnal vendors tryid to add a “network” thing here and there. The fact remains that, behind an unique word and a sotfware feature hide many realities which embody the many visions company may have of social network. To make it short the question is : what is the useful kind of networks for a bsiness. According to PWC the future is “business networks”. But what are they ?

My point here is not to discuss what a network is. I’m convinced there is no generic and ideal form of network and that we need to adapt the one that matches our needs to our purposes.

One day, every project will be agile

June 27, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

The time is not far when the question of reinventing project management will be a key issue. The purpose will be to reconsider a project as something that have to fulfill a need and not an objective by itself as it’s so often. How can we see a project is its own purpose ? When, at the end, what is delivered totally matches with what what decided at the beginning and, at the same time, people realize it doesn’t fulfill the need because the need has evolved in the meanwhile, or that the client (internal or external) agreed to something that didn’t was not really what he expected, perhaps by lack of communication or bad understanding to what could actually be done.

By being next to developers all day long, I looked at the way they were working and it seems to me these guys discovered a kind of Holy Graal called agile method.

Of course I immediately tried to find if it could be use for other kind of projects than software development.

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