I’ve been writing recently on my thoughts about what project managers need to do now to grasp the opportunity (yes, opportunity) that the current economic climate gives them, and move from being a good project manager to being a great one.

And I really do think this climate is an opportunity for project managers, one we should grab hold of. For one thing, we get to shine by delivering for our businesses. For another, governments around the world have been announcing huge stimulus packages that will involve many new projects that need managing.

Something else, though, has got me thinking about this being an opportunity. And that is a book, Outliers: The Story of Success.

This is by Malcolm Gladwell, he of Tipping Point (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference) and Blink (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking) fame.

Outliers is a fascinating book. Malcolm Gladwell looks at successful people, and how they got there, in an interesting way. Some of the conclusions are perhaps what we have suspected, but he has done the legwork to find the data that backs it up. I really do recommend you take a look at it.

Now, some of you may have seen some of the buzz around the book, most of which focused on the assertion that someone successful needs to have practiced something for about 10,000 hours before they get really good at it.

Yes, 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours of work and practice. 10,000 hours, day after day, month after month, year after year, of sheer effort on whatever it is they are now successful in. The figures seem to hold for everything from music, to law, to ice hockey. People start to get good, really good, when they have spent 10,000 hours doing what they do.

Now, this isn’t really that surprising an answer. It may be a little disappointing, but it’s not surprising. It’s disappointing because all of us secretly would like to think that the people who are successful are somehow gifted – that their success has literally been given to them. But it turns out that successful people really aren’t that different than the rest of us.

But what I think we need to pay attention to now, with the economy as it is, is the other aspect of what makes successful people successful. And that is the environment they are in.

Outliers has a compelling section where Gladwell talks about the rise of Jewish lawyers, and law firms, in New York. And the reason they rose was, at least in part, because they were lucky enough to face a harsh environment.

It was precisely the difficulties they faced getting into one of the supposedly prestigious New York law firms in the 60s and 70s that placed these lawyers into a position where they could take advantage of the changing legal scene in the 80s and beyond.

Reading this book made me think about what we really mean by an opportunity. Often, opportunities come to us disguised as a challenge, a problem, maybe even a disaster. I’ve been writing elsewhere about the pros and cons of being a contractor, precisely because for some, the disaster of losing their job may really be an opportunity for more success.

It is all about being in the right place, at the right time. And, crucially, about grasping the opportunity, recognising it for what it is.

Right now, right here, I believe that project managers, good and great project managers, have the opportunity to make the best of this economic challenge. To make the best of it, to be successful not despite it, but because of it.

But then, I’m a born optimist.

What do you think? Am I just fooling myself? Let me know!

A quick update today, looking at an example of a business using Twitter and FriendFeed in the same way I suggested in earlier posts. The company in question is Humana.

Chris Hall has a blog post up, Meeting of the Minds, where he talks about how this came about. He was in a meeting, essentially a project kick-off meeting, about the social media strategy for Humana, when someone suggested that they record the event on Twitter – in the public domain.

You already know I think this is a good idea. The meeting agreed to use a hashtag (#hcoc) to make the tweets easier to find, and an interesting thing is that co-workers not in the meeting were able to follow along, and even suggest ideas. This kind of wide-ranging collaboration is a great benefit of this openness.

In addition, Chris created a FriendFeed room to enable everyone to find the information easily – providing a more stable and helpful resource.

I really encourage you all to go along to the blog post Meeting of the Minds and read more about it.

Do you know of any other examples of organisations using social media in an innovative way? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

In the past posts on this guide to project management in a social media world, we’ve looked at blogs, Twitter (twice!) and FriendFeed as ways of helping us manage our projects. Today I want to look at something which we wouldn’t apply directly to our projects, but which we can use to be better project managers: Social Networking.

Social networking is about joining a group of people you have something in common with, and building a community with them. The most famous social networking sites are probably MySpace and Facebook. The “something in common” those sites promote is, of course, friendship. You are encouraged to join so you can be part of an online community with your existing friends, and so find new ones.

But that isn’t the be all and end all of “something in common”. As project managers, we have, not surprisingly, project management in common. And as readers of Project Management Guide, I’m going to go ahead and assume you also want to continue to improve as a project manager! So where can we go to be part of this project management community? I want to talk about two places.

Firstly, there is LinkedIn. This site was set up specifically to be about professional networking – about connecting with the people you already do business with. In this respect, it is doing really well – it has over 35 million members! And because it is pulling in all sorts of business people, there is a natural desire to build smaller communities within it.

On LinkedIn, these are called “Groups”. A simple search on LinkedIn for project management groups yields hundreds of results – some of these groups are generalist, some are very focused on a specific industry. You’re bound to find one you’re interested in!

Secondly, there are more focused business networking sites. In particular, there is the Professional Project Managers Networking Group (PPMNG). This is a fast growing new site, and is already attracting some interesting people and fascinating content. It has a busy discussion forum, and all in all will help you connect with project managers everywhere.

I’ve put some blog posts over there about Life as a Contractor, and I hope you enjoy them too!

Social networking can provide you with a new community of fellow project managers you can learn from, have discussions with, and find support from. It really is a great way of making sure you continue to grow and develop as a project manager. And if you’d like to connect with me, you can find me on LinkedIn and on PPMNG. See you there!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

Last week I blogged about the going getting tough for project management. In that post, I suggested that we, as project managers, needed to start doing some new things.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s a few other views out there. Pawel Brodzinski posted Why the Hell Project Management Should Be Different During Recession? where he points out that the principles of project management don’t change just because there is a recession.

The thing is, that’s not wrong. The principles of project management haven’t changed – we’re still aiming to deliver projects successfully. But thinking a recession doesn’t mean we need to change, that’s not right.

I’ve blogged in the past about how I believe project managers can do well in a recession, and I still think that. Good project managers have the chance to show how project management contributes to successful projects. And successful projects can contribute to business success.

But here’s the thing: good isn’t good enough.

With companies in financial straits, with organisations looking to cut costs, with jobs being lost, being a good project manager is now the bare minimum. If you really want to shine, you need to be better than that. You need to show how your skills benefit not only your project, but the business as a whole.

That doesn’t mean you need to short change your project. It certainly doesn’t mean you should change the principles of project management. But it does mean you need to be even more sensitive to what is going on in the company.

Example: All companies are likely to find it much harder to access credit. But they have got used to getting it easily over the past decade. Suddenly, it’s not possible to fund day to day activities from credit in the expectation of a bigger pay-off later on. Instead of being able to wait for a project to produce a product in 6 months which they can sell for $500, now they need to cut costs and gain cash flow. Instead of waiting for an executive to tell you your project is canned, build the options – maybe you can deliver 80% of the features in half the time, and start selling it for $200. Overall, the company would make less money – but it would gain cash-flow.

A good project manager would keep his project on track. A very good project manager would see that the economic situation changes the business case. A remarkable project manager does both of these, and provides options to his executive – such as delivering less, but earlier.

The aim of a successful project isn’t to deliver a product. It is to deliver a product which itself delivers a benefit to the business. For most businesses this benefit is going to boil down, in some shape or form, to money. Saving it, or making more of it.

The aim of a good project manager is to have the project deliver a product. The aim of a very good project manager is to deliver a product which delivers a benefit. The aim of the remarkable project manager to is deliver the benefit.

Sure, we need to use the same project management techniques and principles as always. But we also need to recognise that the environment all of us work in has changed. That has implications for our projects: assumptions need to be checked, business cases need to be verified, timescales need to be examined, and so forth.

But it also has implications for us, as project managers. With fewer jobs, fewer companies, fewer projects, there is increased competition for all jobs. There’s competition just to keep our jobs.

Put yourself in the shoes of a businessman. You have the choice of lots and lots of good project managers. But what you really want isn’t someone who will deliver the project. You want someone who will deliver the benefit. You want someone remarkable.

This is a time for remarkable project managers to show that project management skills enable them to be remarkable business leaders too.

Because in a recession, our new project is to deliver, at the end of this recession, a company that is stronger, better, and fitter. A company that is ready to expand into the growing economy. A company that has survived, and is now ready to prosper. A company that is remarkable.

What type of project manager do you want to be? Good, or remarkable?

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was bringing a certain stream of messages from Twitter into the Project Management Guide FriendFeed Room. This is just a short post to let you know about those messages, and also gives me a chance to talk a bit more about Twitter.

One of the ways Twitter users have developed to help each other is something called hash-tags. These are simply tags created by prefixing a hash (#) onto a word. The advantage of this is that it makes it much easier to search for tweets on a specific topic.

The reason for adding the hash is that it means you won’t get all tweets that happen to use that word, but only those which are talking about that topic. For example, the #superbowl tag allowed Twitter users everywhere to search for others talking about the game!

Now, these tags are also used to help create ad-hoc groups. One of these groups is Project Managers on Twitter, also known as PMOT. When members of this group send a tweet they think will be of interest to other group members, they add the tag #pmot.

Group members can find these tweets in various ways (through certain clients, through RSS feeds, through the group webpage, etc.) but the simplest way is just to use the search functionality of the Twitter web site. In the search box, just put in #pmot and click on search to see what is being said.

I hope you find this quick guide useful! Let me know if you join the PMOT group, we’d love to see you there!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

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!

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.

And maybe they’re right.

Project managers have a bad name. Let’s face it, we’ve all come across people and whole companies that think project managers just cause problems. In their eyes, we insist on the production of arcane documents, we get in their way while they are trying to just get on and do the work, and we hold far too many meetings. And don’t get them started on the metrics. Or the milestones. Or the project plans. Or the requests for progress reports.

Now, you and I know that project managers actually add value. We help to keep the project moving forward. We help to keep the team focused. We help to spot problems early, and deal with them. We help to bring it all together.

But… sometimes, those people who complain about us? Sometimes, they have a point.

When team members are complaining about project managers, one of the main reasons behind it could be our fault.

If project team members are complaining about project management getting in the way, it means they aren’t seeing value from it. And that usually means one of two things: either a methodology is being applied blindly, or the project manager isn’t explaining what the value is.

Luckily, the way to solve either of these problems is simple: take the time to talk to your team. And I mean really talk, and really listen, not hold yet more meetings. If there is someone who is complaining a lot, sit down with them, and have them explain why they aren’t happy. Sometimes, you’ll find that they hadn’t realised the benefits to the rest of the project of what you are doing – or asking them to do.

Sometimes, though, you’ll find they have a valid point. Perhaps you have been insisting on a particular piece of information being gathered, or a particular measurement being made, because it worked on the last project similar to this. But maybe it isn’t appropriate here. Don’t be afraid to learn from your team members that you are being too heavy handed in applying a particular methodology.

Remember, no methodology is ever going to be a perfect fit for your project. You need to flex it, lighten it up here and there, toughen it up in other places. You need to borrow some pieces from one system, and other pieces from another, to fit them together to make the right way for managing your project, right now.

So the next time you hear someone complaining about project management, take the time to talk, and to listen. You never know, they might be right.

What about you? Have you come across people who just didn’t get project management? How did you handle it? 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!

I’m going to start with something you should all be familiar with, but may not have used in a project context – blogs.

Now, I’m assuming if you are reading this you know what a blog is, because, well, you’re reading one. They are a great tool for getting a message out, but also, thanks to allowing comments, a great way of gathering information too.

A project blog is useful because whoever in the team you allow to post (and I would encourage you allow everyone in the team to do so) can put up some information, and ask for feedback. No matter where in the world the members of your team are, they can read the article, and post their comments.

And don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you have to put your dirty washing out for the whole world to see! A blog could be internal to an organisation, or it could even be restricted to just project team members. If your team is across multiple organisations, you could have it password protected on an external server so only those you allow can see it. (This is even possible using major blogging platforms, like Blogger and WordPress, which allow you to set your own privacy settings.)

You can also use the blog to get your message out. Project status reports, risk logs, all the documents you use to manage the project, can be updated and placed onto the blog. This ensures everyone has access to the information they need and want, when they want.

Don’t take this as a replacement of other communication methods, though – if there is vital information that team members must have and read, then use the most appropriate tool, be that email, tele-conference, or even face to face meetings. But to make your job, and the jobs of your team members, easier and better, use the blog as an additional tool, not a replacement.

You can go a lot further than just a simple blog, of course, with other collaboration technologies. But I’ll come to these in a later post.

This is just one example of how a blog can be used. What about you and your teams? How have you been using blogs? What value do you get out of them? What do you recommend as best practice? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.