Some projects are done entirely in-house. The business has all the tools and people it needs to get the final result that they want. Often, though, a project will need to bring in outside help – such as buying in equipment.

I’ve worked on some projects which have had major procurements as part of them. I don’t want to talk about the process of that procurement – that’s what procurement departments are for! But I do want to talk about how to handle your supplier once you have decided who it is.

With your internal project team, it is quite likely you won’t have line management responsibility for them. This is what makes your people skills so important in project management – you need to inspire and encourage without having the usual tools a manager does to back it up.

However, with an external supplier, you quite often have a lot of power over them. After all, the whole reason they are there (as far as they are concerned) is to get their invoice paid. If you control the money, you can control them.

But I really wouldn’t recommend this adversarial kind of mindset. Making it all about Us and Them isn’t going to help the project at all. That’s not to say there isn’t a time for that mindset – but that time is in the procurement process, when you are making sure you get the best value for money you can.

When I am bringing a supplier into the project, I really want to make them feel a part of the team. Firstly because they really are part of the team – they are supplying something you need to make the project successful, just like every other team member.

But more cynically, it’s also much easier to get the supplier to go the extra mile if they feel included in the team, if they have some emotional investment in making the project a success, if it is about more than just the money. I’ve had suppliers really push hard to solve problems for me – in one case even getting into trouble with his boss to manage it!

Finally, it just makes for a better working environment. Being inclusive makes the project more fun for everyone to work on, and a happy project team is often the successful project team.

What about you? How do you handle your suppliers? What tips and techniques have you used to get them to go the extra mile? Let me know!

We all know that the purpose of a project is to deliver some sort of benefit to the business. For many projects, the real benefit is that the end result is being sold. But what about projects that are purely internal? What about projects that are trying to change the business?

I’ve run across a few of these in my time. One thing they all seem to have in common is that they are driven from the top – they are designed to deliver a benefit to the senior management. That’s not surprising – senior management are the only ones who can commit to spending money on them!

But that also causes problems for a project manager. When the project is being put together, it’s always a good idea to make sure that there are also benefits to the people who are going to be affected by the changes. Without their support, the project is very unlikely to be successful.

Let’s look at an example. Quite a while ago, I was working at a fairly large and bureaucratic public body. Their whole reason for existing was to pay for and support projects to support and grow the local economy – business support, infrastructure building, that sort of thing.

Naturally, this meant they needed a lot of information. This information was going to be particularly useful to the senior management who had to report upwards to government. But getting this information could be difficult. So naturally, a knowledge management solution was proposed.

Now, this solution was going to use simple techniques – tagging of all documents with keywords, imposing a defined directory structure, and so on. For the senior management, the promised benefits were great: they would be able to drill down into any area, and all the information would naturally flow into a dashboard view.

But the benefits for the other users were minimal, at best. They already had developed their own directory structures. They knew where all the information was. The problem senior management had simply wasn’t a problem for them.

But senior management’s solution, well, that became a huge problem for the staff! Suddenly they had to start adding keywords before they could save their files, they had to try and fit their documents into a structure they couldn’t control, and so on. There was now a new barrier to them doing their work, without any benefit to them!

When the poor soul put in charge of this project ran the concept past me, I was sceptical. It seemed fairly clear the project was going to be horrendously unpopular, and difficult to get finished due to the resistance it would encounter. But my colleague didn’t want to say anything to senior management – he believed that the staff could be made to use the system through coercion, rather than choice.

Maybe he’s right – but you’re not going to get the real benefits out of a system people don’t want to use. Keywords would be selected poorly, missing out a number of useful ones. The directory structure would get filled with files in the wrong places. The expected benefits wouldn’t be delivered.

Not surprisingly, the project hit difficulties almost as soon as it was started, with resistance from all sides, and pressure from above to get it implemented quickly. It dragged on for far too long, before finally it was scaled back, and the business actually talked to staff about what they wanted to get out of the system.

Always remember that to implement an internal change project, you need to make sure you deliver benefit to everyone affected, if possible. If it isn’t possible, minimise the pain as much as it can be, and realise it is going to cause you problems and delay.

What do you think? What barriers do you run across when implementing change? How do you get the buy-in of the various groups? Let me know!

1. The Social Media Project Manager – Blogs
2. The Social Media Project Manager – Twitter
3. The Social Media Project Manager – FriendFeed
4. The Social Media Project Manager – More Twittering
5. The Social Media Project Manager – Social networking
6. The Social Media Project Manager – An Example
7. The Social Media Project Manager – Wikis
8. The Social Media Project Manager – Blogging Community
9. Edit: I have also put together a slideshow for this series, The Social Media Project Manager – The Movie! Hope you like it!

Over the past few weeks, I have been highlighting some of the tools that can loosely be described as social media. The tools can be of use to a project manager in a variety of ways. Some of them can be directly used to help manage your projects, some of them to help you learn and develop, and some of them can be used for both.

As the series has gone on, my use of some of these technologies has also increased, as I have started to find them more and more useful. Of particular note to me are Twitter and FriendFeed, both of which I have found exceptionally useful. These two tools have helped me become more involved in the online project management community, both by seeing what others are doing, and by trying to contribute!

My resolutions moving forward are to continue to play a part in the project management community, most especially through Twitter and the Project Management Guide FriendFeed Room. I will also continue to search for new ways and new tools of social media to use in project management.

What about you? Which of the tools have you found most useful, or most interesting? What are you going to do to use social media in project management? Or are you going to steer well clear? Let me know your views!

Throughout this series, we’ve been looking at ways you can turn the tools of social media into tools of project management. But there is a much simpler way that social media can help us as project managers. Already there are project managers out there who are sharing their expertise through blogging, and that means there are many places we can go to develop ourselves as project managers.

Today, I would like to share with you some of the best project management blogs and resources that are out there. Now, this list isn’t designed to be comprehensive, but it will point you at some of the places I go.

First up, we have PM Hut. This site is a large collection of categorized project management articles, gathered from all over the web. There are many different project managers appearing here as authors, and a wide range of different views from them.

Next, we have PM Student. This site is primarily the work of Josh Nankivel, who you may recall I recommend you follow way back when we covered Twitter. As well as Josh, there are a few guest authors, and a lively group of commenters to keep you entertained!

Project Shrink is a blog by Bas de Baar, a software project manager. the blog has the tagline “Projects Are About Humans. We Help You Deal With That.” The site has a variety of posts that can help you be a more flexible and people-focused project manager. Take a look!

PM Tips is a collaborative blog that covers not only project management, but also “collaboration, knowledge management and all other work 2.0 concepts present in today’s web 2.0 world”! It offers practical tips and advice to help you be a better project manager.

Finally, do take a look at Pawel Brodinski on Software Project Management. This blog is more personal than the others I have mentioned here, and covers a lot of ground.

There are many more high quality blogs out there as well – I haven’t mentioned Jurgen Appelo’s Noop, Elizabeth Harrin’s PM4Girls, or John Reiling’s PM Crunch, all of which deserve a look.

Don’t forget, however, that if you join the Project Management Guide FriendFeed room the feeds from these blogs, and more, are pulled together into one handy place. Join in, and get commenting!

As I say, these are just a few of the blogs I go to. What blogs do you recommend? Which ones have you found to be most useful? And why? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

As project managers, we’ve all had times when our attention is being pulled from many different directions at once. As well as our day to day tasks, sometimes problems pop up that mean we need to firefight, stakeholders can demand new reports, and team members can seek new direction. All of this can happen despite our best efforts to keep the project on an even keel.

Now, the ability to jump from task to task like this and still be effective is important for a project manager, but I don’t want to talk about that today. No, today I want to talk about the benefit of behaving in the opposite manner, about the benefits of focus.

All of us have had times where we have had to jump from task to task. And I imagine a lot of us have been left feeling that at least some of those tasks were short-changed by us – the pressure we put ourselves under to swap to the next job meant we didn’t spend enough time on the task in hand.

We all know that we should recognise the difference between things that are urgent, and things that are important. But while we all know it, I’m sure many of us still fall into the trap of chasing the urgent, without looking at how important it is.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to resist the demands to switch from task to task. By focusing on one task, you gain the ability to really get to grips with it. You will be able to look deeper into the cause of any problems, and come up with more considered solutions.

So, let’s put these two ideas together: deciding on what is urgent and what is important; and the benefits of focus. So how do we merge them?

Well, when you have a lot of issues clamouring for your attention, take the time to focus on one task first – the task of deciding which of those issues are important, and which are urgent.

Once you’ve done that, you are in a better position to focus on those issues that are important and urgent. Those that are important but not urgent can wait until these are done. Those which are not important, but urgent, can be delegated or renegotiated. Those which are neither important or urgent, well, they can just wait!

One of the ways to think about this is to remember that your time is precious. You are being paid (hopefully well…) to use your time for the benefit of the project. So take just a little of that time to make sure the rest of it is spent in the most effective manner, in the best way to benefit the project.

Of course, this is easy in theory, not so easy in practice. How do you deal with these sort of whirlwind days? Do you end up running around firefighting, or do you manage to find the time to focus on what is important? 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!

Wikis are websites that allow the people who access it to contribute to it, or to change and update the information that is already there. The most famous example of a wiki has to be, of course, Wikipedia, which has harnessed the efforts of individuals around the world to build a resource with a remarkable breadth, though with sometimes variable quality!

But can a similar system be of use to us as project managers? We’ve already looked at the benefits of FriendFeed, most notably that as all the ‘conversational’ information is being captured, it generates a searchable resource of this information. However, sometimes we need to make things more formal.

While we can use blogs to share formal documents, they are primarily a one to many communication tool, in that the person writing the posts has the most control over putting information out. In other words, while a blog is useful for gathering comments on the information, it is not good at allowing collaboration in the creation of it.

When all of your team are close by, this may not be a problem – you can walk over and talk to them! Unfortunately, this is increasingly often not the case, and this is where a wiki can come into its own.

By putting up a wiki page, you enable the people viewing it to add information, to modify what is there, and to improve the usefulness of it. This means you can gather the knowledge and expertise from all of your team members, who can contribute to the generation of this resource.

This is useful when you are looking not only at the documentation around running the project, such as risk logs, but also when you are looking to create the documentation about the product – in other words, the documentation about using the product, which should be part of the output of the project.

A wiki isn’t the perfect answer, of course. While, hopefully, the documentation produced on the wiki will be good, it still needs to go through a quality process before release, and this may uncover problems. And, of course, actually getting your team to contribute needs discipline on both your and their parts. There may be a temptation to set up a wiki and leave it alone, assuming that the documentation will magically now get written. This works about as well as you would expect.

But while a wiki brings some challenges, the benefits of using one can be great. Having the accumulated knowledge and expertise of the project team around this project put down in an organised manner is incredibly valuable. And if it is done throughout the life of the project, it is likely to be much more successful than when tacked on the end.

Have you used a wiki in project management? Was it useful? Or did it just mean another thing that had to be monitored? What do you think? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

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.

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.