Project management does not exist in a vacuum. We have embraced the various new methods of communication to encourage better collaboration and team-work. It is now practically inconceivable for a project not to be using email, tele-conferences, even video-conferencing to maintain contact with the participants.

But are we embracing the new technologies available now? Are we making best use of the tools we now have? With project teams becoming even more spread out over the globe, are we making best use of our new communication methods?

This series will look at the various new social media tools available to us, and how we can start to use them in our projects. Some of you will already be using some of these tools. I’d love to hear your stories about how they have worked for you – many of the uses are only now developing, so I’d love to hear your best practices!

So far in the series, we’ve looked at blogs and Twitter, two social media tools you can use for project management. Today, I am going to introduce to a relative newcomer to the social media world, one which I think is going to become much, much bigger over the next year.

The tool I am looking at today is FriendFeed. Now, the FriendFeed site says it “enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.” That doesn’t sound terribly useful for project management.

However, the important thing to see is that FriendFeed mainly uses something called RSS to gather information. An RSS ‘feed’ is a common way of sharing information – many blogs have them, including this one! But they aren’t limited to blogs – most sites that are regularly updated use them as a way of letting people know when new information is available. (The web has lots of information about RSS. For now, all you need to know is lots of places use it.)

Once this information has been brought in to FriendFeed, anyone can add a comment to it – enabling discussions to take place.

Because FriendFeed uses RSS, and allows you to submit your own chosen RSS feeds, we can build a powerful project management tool.

Now, this post could get very technical here. FriendFeed isn’t the easiest of sites to explain, or to describe. There are a number of places you can go to find out more (try How To Use FriendFeed on Mahalo), and they do a much better job than I can about explaining this!

What I’d like to do, though, is talk in general terms about how you can use FriendFeed in project management. The specific part of FriendFeed that we want to look at is the ability to create “rooms”. These rooms are separate little areas that you can link to different RSS feeds.

Now, when you create a room, you can add what you find useful. For example, we talked last week about Twitter. If you are using Twitter publicly, you can use a special hash tag, such as #myproject, in all of your tweets. You can then do a search for that hash tag to find just those tweets. (Here is an example search for the #superbowl tag.) On the right of the search results you will see a link to “Feed for this query”. It is this link that you need to import into your new FriendFeed room. (Right click the link, and then choose “Copy link location”. This will put that link into your clipboard.)

If you have a blog that you set up for your project, chances are that will have an RSS feed too. You can import that into your FriendFeed room as well.

Now, I imagine some of you are wondering why we would want to do this. Well, now we have added these RSS feeds, every time there is a new post with our hash tag, and every time we update the blog, this will feed through to our new room. And, importantly, this means all of the social media tools we are using to help us in project management are now feeding into one place. Even better, everyone in your project team can join your room, and hold discussions there.

This one room now collects all of the information we are producing and the conversations the team is having. And even better, this information is now fully searchable, right from the FriendFeed room. Once you click into the room, the search box at the top of the page will search only within the room. I am sure you can see the value in being able to search all of your information quickly and easily!

I think this is going to be a fantastic tool for helping collaboration of geographically scattered teams. I’ve barely touched on the functionality of FriendFeed, such as the ability to start a conversation about any posted item, or the ability to ‘Like’ an item to push it to people subscribed to you.

FriendFeed is a huge topic, and one which I can’t cover all of here – not least because I am still finding new ways to use it! I’d really encourage you to get over there and create an account, and to start playing around with it. I’m already on FriendFeed, and you can subscribe to me there, just like you can follow me on Twitter. In addition, I have created a Project Management Guide FriendFeed Room which you are all more than welcome to join. Currently, it has the feeds of a number of PM blogs I read, and a feed of certain Twitter updates – I’ll do a quick post on those tomorrow, if I haven’t exhausted you all!

FriendFeed is really new, and looks like being a really powerful collaboration tool. I can’t stress enough how important I think it is for you to get involved now, to start to get used to it. I’ll see you there!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

In our projects, we seek to provide benefit to our business, by delivering a product at the required quality, on time, and on budget. Now, when economic times are tight, and budgets are being squeezed, we need to start looking how we can deliver on another, bigger project: keeping our business in business.

It is too easy for a project manager to only look at their project, and only think about how to deliver that. In normal times, this is probably what a business wants, but now we need to raise our sights a little.

Be sensitive to what is going on in the business more generally:

• If they are looking to save money, proactively look at which parts of your project could be cut. It is better to achieve most of the benefit at a lower cost, rather than risk delivering no benefit, because the company has run out of money. Effective planning should mean you already have an idea of what the impact would be, in terms of time, features, and budget.
• Don’t be afraid to speak up. If you see inefficiencies in your business that could be solved quickly with a new project, with the application of a bit of project management, speak up about it.
• Make sure your projects stay focused on their customers, the stakeholders. Encourage your business to stay focused on their customers too.
• Encourage frequent and vigorous examination of all projects to check they are still relevant in changing circumstances – there’s no point delivering your project perfectly if the end product no longer helps the business!
• Most importantly, deliver. Now more than ever, we have to make sure we only promise what is possible, but challenging, and that we then go on to deliver it.

What about you? How are you reacting as a project manager to lean times? What opportunities do you see? What challenges do you face? Let me know!

This week on our Project Management Guide, we’re going to take a look at risks.

Every project will face risks. Risks are those things which could go wrong, or change, and adversely effect the project. The idea of handling risk in a project is not to avoid all risk. Any project will face some risk – projects are about bringing about change, and any change will bring some risk. The aim of risk management in a project is to make sure we reduce the risk to an acceptable level in a cost-effective way.

This means that we need to accept we will face risks, and to examine them with an open mind. It also means we need to track those risks, and think about how we would handle them if they occur.

The first step in managing risk is identifying them. We’ve already seen in Project Plans – The Art of Prophecy that risk analysis needs to be part of the project plan. But how do we go about it?

A system that I use is as follows:

1. Identify the risks: Preferably as part of a group, start to write down as many possible risks as you can think of. At this point, don’t try and think about how likely a particular risk is, just try and capture as many as you can. Include risks from a wide variety of areas, from technical nitty gritty details, all the way up to the environmental risks, such as natural disasters! Also include business risks, financial risks, etc.
2. Evaluate the risks: You should now have a nice list of risks. Now we need to evaluate the risks in terms of their probability and impact. Probability is the likelihood of a risk occurring – so, for example, a natural disaster is astonishingly unlikely to happen, while a computer failure is much more likely. (Knowing my luck, the Redoubt volcano in Alaska will blow just as I post this…) Impact is how much of an effect the risk would have – natural disasters next door, quite a lot. Computer failure, not so much.
3. Plan a response: You will now have a set of risks, with probabilities and impacts. You can now start to decide what to do about them. Your options are likely to include avoidance (doing things differently so the risk doesn’t occur), mitigation (take some action so the probability, impact, or both, of the risk are reduced), acceptance (just live with it) and contingency (a prepared plan of what to do if the risk occurs to deal with it quickly).

We don’t just stop there – this is just the first run through. You should record these risks in a risk log (or risk register, etc.) and make sure you monitor them throughout the project – and add new ones as necessary. We’ll look at this in more detail later.

Two tips:

• When it comes to evaluation of the risks, usually simpler is best. Grade the impact as High, Medium, or Low, and do the same for the probability. If you assign High a value of 3, Medium a value of 2, and Low a value of 1, you can simply multiply the probability and impact together to get a quick and dirty numerical grading for your risks.
• The grading of risks should have some bearing on how much you are willing to spend to deal with them. Obviously risks that have a high probability and a high impact should be looked at first!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this quick guide to getting started with risks. Do you have any tips? How do you start identifying risks? Let me know!

Project management does not exist in a vacuum. We have embraced the various new methods of communication to encourage better collaboration and team-work. It is now practically inconceivable for a project not to be using email, tele-conferences, even video-conferencing to maintain contact with the participants.

But are we embracing the new technologies available now? Are we making best use of the tools we now have? With project teams becoming even more spread out over the globe, are we making best use of our new communication methods?

This series will look at the various new social media tools available to us, and how we can start to use them in our projects. Some of you will already be using some of these tools. I’d love to hear your stories about how they have worked for you – many of the uses are only now developing, so I’d love to hear your best practices!

This week I’m going to take a look at Twitter. Twitter is a relatively new social networking and ‘micro-blogging’ service, based on the exchange of 140 character messages.

That perfectly explains what Twitter is, while also completely missing the point. Twitter is about keeping in touch with people, in a simple way. You can update people with a light touch, on a frequent basis. These are the kind of small interactions that help to build a community, or a team.

In Twitter, you choose who you want to hear from by selecting who you would like to ‘follow’. In turn, others can choose to follow you. If you want to, you can also make your account protected – this means only the people you allow to can see what you say.

Obviously this has possible applications for a project manager. Twitter enables you to keep your team members updated on a regular basis. For example, you could ‘tweet’ whenever there is an update of the blog you set up for the project. If the account you are using is protected, you can also tweet about the project status, questions you may have, and answers too.

Because Twitter isn’t one way, you can also follow your team members. This enables you to build a network within your team, with short and frequent contacts – especially useful if the team is scattered around the country or even the world.

The best way to learn about Twitter is to actually start using it. To get you started after you have created your account, you can start following a few useful project management people. Try Project Shrink, PM Tips and PM Opinions to get you started. You might also like to try following Josh Nankivel and, of course, Cornelius Fichtner, who is responsible for the great PM Prepcast.

Oh, and you can follow me too! Just click on the follow button after you have logged in.

Once you see how you can use Twitter, you’ll begin to see all sorts of ways it can be useful in your business. I’ll see you there! Next week, we’ll be looking at another social media tool, one which helps bring together all the other tools out there.

What about you? Are you already using Twitter? Who do you find most useful to follow? Or do you think it’s just a waste of time? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.