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Weblogs Will Have A Greater Role In Project Management

Publishing a project weblog. A couple of years ago I predicted that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I'm even more bullish on the concept today. [Jon's Radio] [Michael Fioritto: KM]

I strongly support Jon Udell's prediction of project based web log's. After using the tools for a few years now I'm finding weblogs have significantly reduce my data acquisition time, organization of technical materials, and simplified content management.

This form of centralized project communications would work well for the process described in "Web teams as a component of tactical and strategic methods" -- each of the "Nine Pillars" would represent a category inside the project weblog. As notes and lessons learned are published, they would be tagged according to the functional area that particular item belonged.

In "It is time to bring blogging home in the business world", I provide some tips for making weblogs work in this capacity; including providing the right tools, categorizing discussion by functional units (in this case one weblog per project, and an aggregated feed for a program), encourage participation, and a few other ways to make weblogs useful for internal discussions.

Open information exchange keeps all group members on the same page, if it is properly used. A keep to improving adoption is how easy the information is to collect and share. Weblogs make knowledge management easier, tools are already available to facilitate this.

A well functioning group has less discipline problems, is more productive, and produces better quality products. Topics to discuss on a project management weblog:

1. Open discussion on customer desired features.
2. Challenges faced in accomplishing tasks.
3. Lessons learned as progressing toward a particular objective.
4. Status reports or other historical records of progress.
5. Shared knowledge about task implementation.
6. Related reports, studies, and supporting information with references.
7. Training materials for new project members connected to discussion tool.
8. Collaboration tools such as outlines, databases, and reference cards.
9. Summaries of test results linked to complete report.
10. Technical notes about products for sales, marketing, or support.

See also: "Blogging better for internal team communications", "Relationship building examples using a web log", Weblogs and Project Management

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By Justin Hitt at July 18, 2003 3:25 AM  Subscribe in a reader