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Blogs aren’t just for marketing - there are many areas of the business
where they can help improve information flow, reduce clutter and avoid
the dreaded “but I didn’t know about that” situation. Here’s ten ways
that we’ve used blogs for managing projects - both internally and with
our clients.
Communicating with project stakeholders
Keeping your stakeholders up-to-date with the progress of the project is
vital - but if they’re busy people with other things to worry about,
how do you keep them informed between major milestone reports with
bombarding them with email?
One way is to post regular intra-milestone updates to a blog. It can
be updated weekly, daily or even hourly without drowning your
stakeholders with emails - and if they use RSS webfeeds to keep updated, they only need to scan the webfeed summaries to know if it’s something they’ll need to respond to.
Replacing paper
Anyone who’s used a methodology like PRINCE or the PMBOK
will have wondered if they were designed by people with shares in paper
mills. A well-documented project will fill entire shelves with dead
trees over the course of it’s lifecycle. But with the right
categories and a customised template or two, much of the paper can be
replaced by web pages built of blog entries. They’re accessible to all
who need them, there’s no problem of version control and search
functions come built in.
Building issue logs
Anyone involved in a project should be able to raise an issue - whether
it’s a question, request for change or an off-specification. And every
issue should be captured in the project issue log. But unless you’ve
got an automated system, that usually means an email to the project
manager, with all the attendant problems.
By providing an open blog into which anyone can post, project issues can
be raised immediately and be visible to all straightaway. By using
the search functions, you can check if someone has raised the issue
beforehand. Then the comment functions can be used to capture the
discussions, actions and conclusions relating to each issue - and
provide an automatic audit trail.
Capturing information snippets
There’s usually a huge amount of miscellaneous snippets of information
generated in the course of a project - from shared passwords to useful URLs
to code snippets. The more organised members of the team will have
their own personal filing systems to capture the snippets that they
create - but how about capturing these for the benefit of all in the
team?
By posting the information onto a blog, it can be easily captured,
categorised, searched and retrieved - and built into a knowledge base
for subsequent projects.
Publicising the project progress
If your project is going well, then why not shout about it? By posting
news, updates and status reports to a blog that can be seen
organisation-wide, you can keep everyone informed as the project
progresses. This can be very useful if you’re managing something with a
big end-user impact - and it’s a great reason for driving the use of
webfeeds in the organisation.
Reducing email overload
Email is both a blessing and a curse - great for quick communication
with colleagues or clients, but sometimes it’s just too easy to bash off
an email copied to all and sundry. Rather than sending emails with
huge cc lists, why not post these kind of messages to a blog instead?
Not only is there a single, searchable and archived copy of the message
as a result, but you can use webfeeds to quickly scan new postings and
decide if they’re worth reading further or acting on in a fraction of
the time that it takes to deal with a new email.
Capturing requirements
How often do the most important end-user requirements come to light
after the requirements capture workshops have taken place? An open
blog can be used to capture new requirements - and discussions about
existing ones - before, during and after the main workshop period.
Together with good use of categories and archives, blog entries can be a
good way of documenting the system requirements as well - online,
searchable and archived.
Circulating screenshots
Got screenshots or pack shots of new products to distribute? Rather
than annoy your remote workers - or bury the image files away in shared
directories - why not post them as blog entries? Many blog engines
have built-in image manipulation tools that can create thumbnails and
galleries on-the-fly. If a picture says a thousand words, why type?
Keeping team members up-to-date
It’s becoming increasingly common for teams to be spread across
organisations or even timezones? How can you keep members up-to-date
with what others are doing without contributing to email overload?
Create a private team blog and encourage your team members to post their
status updates (or even project gossip) and you’re created a shared,
searchable repository of news about how the project is running.
Combine this with webfeeds and you’ve got a powerful way of avoiding the
cluttered inboxes and keeping people up-to-date with progress as it
happens.
Provide an automatic audit trail
Hopefully your project will run to time and budget - but what happens if
there are problems along the way? That’s when an audit trail can
become vital - particularly if you end up in an inquest scenario. One
advantage of blogs is that they’re public - and another that they’re
automatically timed and dated. It’s very easy for pro
And best of all…
These benefits - and more - can be had quickly and cheaply. Some of
the best blogging software is open-source and free-as-in-beer, and it
can be set up in minutes. If you’ve not got the capability of hosting
a blog in-house, there are several cheap and secure hosted services
that can be set up even quicker - meaning that the benefits of using
blogs for project management can be enjoyed not just in your
organisation, but with clients, supplier and partners alike.
Posted by Tim at January 3, 2005 05:20 PM | TrackBack | Category => Blogs
We run a marketing & technology consulting business that helps smaller companies in the UK.
A lot of our work is now centring on using social software technology to
reduce information problems in business. So this blog is designed to
share our knowledge and first hand experience.
If you are interested in developing an enterprise social software
strategy and setting up an easy-to-maintain weblog for your business,
Infosential is the company who can help.
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