Looking at Daniel’s pictures I was struck by how many things had changed.  Going to Japan just seemed like a big deal to me in 2006.  Today it’s just one more long airplane flight.  In 2006 I knew lots of people who had been to Japan but seeing their pictures would have been a process of going to their house, waiting for them to find them and then flipping through the hard copies.  Today tweetdeck offers me a personal slideshow, delivered to my family room 24 hours a day, and Daniel isn’t even back from Japan yet. As far as its come, technology isn’t completely ubiquitous yet.  We loaded Skype to Daniel’s computer the day before he left only to find out that there isn’t any Wi-Fi available in his dorm room.  Our assumption that it would be there is almost laughable but it reflects how we all see the world today.

So what does all this have to do with PPM?  Two things; the first is our potential project staff really is global and we need to begin understanding how to work effectively with a geographically dispersed team (especially those of us in the United States).  If this sounds like old news, I’m not sure it is.  We all went international years ago but I think we did it with our eyes closed.  We just treated everyone the same and tried to adjust for time differences )or at least that’s how I handled it).   Now I think we owe our team members a little more personal touch (which means a little more travel on somebody’s part no matter how grueling).  The second point is back to my refrain that PMs are luddities.  We need to not just embrace communication and social networking technology.  We need to lead because we’re the ones on the front line.

I know we’re all busy, but our professional lives are not completely defined and bounded by the PMBOK.  To be perceived as leaders in our organizations we should be looking for areas where we can establish leadership naturally and I think collaborative technologies and the fine art of managing in a global world is a golden opportunity that is being handed to us on a platter.

Thoughts?  Opposing opinions?

All of you out there who manage projects and programs for a living are welcome to have a good laugh at my expense.  I do know better.  I know that Murphy is always lurking in the shadows and he’ll launch a sneak attack whenever you least expect it.  I know that things always take longer and involve more work than I’d hoped.  Not only do I know this but I’m famous for reminding all of you that risk management is EVERYTHING.  The problem is it’s just too easy to take your eye off the small things ….

So now with the help of my fantastic in-house IT department (otherwise known as my husband) we’ll get it fixed.  I will also commit to getting better about backups and upgrades.  The big lesson out of this is that Murphy gets his foot in the door when you’re running to hard to make sure you’ve done everything you need to do. 

So to every frazzled PMO director, stressed program manager, exhausted project manager, and numb portfolio manager my advice of the day is to slow down.  You’ll get where you’re going faster.

So here we have a completely free service (Twitter) that is rapidly becoming the backbone of applications and workstreams.  I hate to say it but I’m thinking that at some time in the future we’re going to have a situation where the firms funding Twitter will want some financial renumeration for their investment and then we’ll all find out about TANSTAAFL really means.

From the reports I’ve gotten from the folks about Twitter usage at our other Summits it sounds like using Twitter helped great a dynamically connected environment during the conference.  Obviously I’m not sure how it will work and we’ve got fall-backs in place (raising of hands will still work for dynamic polling and microphones will still be available for questions) but the more of you who come twitter enabled the more we can see if it helps.

Now, for all of you Luddites out there, yes it’s really safe to set up an account.  Yes you really can use it only when YOU want and for your purposes, and yes your reputation will still be intact if you don’t update it every day.  For those of you who want a test account to follow where you wont’ have to endure too many tweets about cups of coffee consumed and the weather I’ll offer up my own which is Nimblepm.

I’m so excited that I’ve planned both mediums into my panel discussion. So given all my prior entries commenting that PMs are probably the most Luddite group on the planet the question is does anyone out there have twitter set up on their phone and would you actually use our interactive polling during the conference? I hope so BUT as a project manager by training I have a contingency plan in place – paper, pencils and microphones will be in place for questions and we can still use a good old fashioned show of hands for polling.

For those of you how are interested and haven’t signed up yet here’s the link

Later in the week I was talking to a completely different group of people about how best to communicate with stakeholders and when I shared that my communication method of choice was email I was told with equal “politeness” that I was clearly failing to move with the times and that I would know that twitter was the right medium if I wasn’t suffering from “generational impairment”. Ouch…that one hurt.

So here is my esprit d′escalier: We need to understand that our stakeholders and our peers have a variety of preferred means of communications. If we want to build the widest possible network then we need to be conversant in all of our options and to understand when it makes sense to use multiple methods to disseminate the same message.

So while MY preferred method of communication is still email; I also have this blog and I intend to keep exploring ways to communicate whether it’s twittering (nimblepm) at our fall PPM conference or interacting with our growing Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit group at linkedin.

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.

Whether or not this is the right technology, I have to say I found the fact that I could send a project team member an atta boy or atta girl and then actually make sure that I took the time to take them out for coffee, rather appealing.  In my experience the personal attention of a busy program manager can mean more to a team member than the more common $25 gift certificate.

Of course forgetting who you owe a coffee or a beer to might only be a problem for those of us who are right brained but since that was how I found the link in the first place it just seemed rather serendipitous.

A year ago April at Spring symposium I gave a presentation on using Enterprise 2.0 on projects with essentially the same message I’d had at the DC conference 10 years before.  There’s a point in time when late adoption is not only silly it’s counterproductive. This was driven home to me even more forcibly when I read a column in the New York Times about the fact that the government has now decided that wikis and blogs and facebook accounts are something important as a way to reach their constituency.  

What I’d like to do here is start a discussion as to why we aren’t doing more.  I understand the “it’s not my job perspective” but I also know that as a group of people we can move mountains when we have.  So what is it about this topic that is falling on deaf ears?  Or maybe I should rephrase that — the topic of collaboration and the role that collaborative can play in a collaborative process just isn’t striking our folks with any degree of resonance.  Some of it is survival I’m sure.  After all I’m not going to refuse to do a program just because the Powers That Be won’t give me access to a collaborative tool.  On the other hand I’m certainly going to use the one that the company has installed (if it exists).  And this is where I see the issue.  Many PMs work in companies that have tools in place today that can do a lot more than they’re using them for and yet I haven’t found anyone who is pushing the envelope

This shouldn’t read like a rant.  I’m very sensitive to the challenges PMs actually face in their day to day lives on the job BUT I’m increasingly focused on the fact that we’re not taking charge of our own environments and that our choice to ignore enterprise 2.0 capabilities on our programs is a leading example

If anyone is reading this I hope we can get some discussion going.  I think this issue is the tip of a much larger iceberg that has to do with leadership and our own self image as PMs.