Donna Fitzgerald

I guess it’s time to turn myself in. Despite the existence of this column and the existence of my personal blog I’ve never been truly sold on the idea Blogs. In my mind Blogs are single author commentaries on a subject of the author’s choice and it seems to me I already do that for a living (here’s a link if you want to see my research).

I’ve always been more interested in a dialogue, which is something the old fashioned list servers provided very well. On a list server I could post a question or an observation, and somebody would actually talk back to me with a well considered response. For an ENTP, Libra Sun Sign, Expressive, dialogue is where it’s at. Extroverts don’t even know what we really think until we hear ourselves say it and Expressives always need the constant feedback that someone is buying the vision they’re selling. And Libras? Well according to the books we’re all about relationships. We need to know there’s another person involved or doing anything just isn’t worth our time and effort.

So needless to say blogs didn’t really fit into my world view until I started reading what my peers at Gartner were writing and I began to get very excited. Gartner research is the poster child for a networked culture and as such, research is spread out all over the world with most of us working in offices in our homes. What that means that we don’t have an opportunity to chat in hallways or in the lunch room the folks do who all work in the same office. And it’s as a replacement to the office banter where I’m beginning to find blogs fascinating.

Even though there is a very small section of Gartner research that is currently blogging, I can now go “virtually” meet my peers and what a pleasure. I laughed so hard I was close to an asthma attack when I read Whit Andrews entry on “how I put the Mo’ in Moron” and I make it a habit of randomly picking a blog to check out everytime I go to the Gartner blog page. I also do a little more than just read the blog. Many of my peers post links to their personal blogs and I go and check this out as well. For example Whit likes music and while we aren’t even on the same planet when it comes to musical tastes, he has some cool widgets on his blog that I might track down and add to mine.

Now back to the real topic at hand. How does all this relate to PPM? Blogs build better relationships between geographically remote team members. If you don’t want to go as far as giving people personal blogs at the company then simply give everyone a space to post a link to their personal blog. I’m not implying that this will solve all your problems with running a virtual or geographically disbursed project or program team BUT if it makes it even one tiny bit easier for a team member to pick up the phone and call another team member to ask a question or share a finding, then it’s more than paid for itself.

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Category: PMO Program Management Technology     Tags: Geographcially disbursed teams, Technology

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