Social Media for Project Managers
Society in general has embraced social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and e-Harmony just to name a few. Often these social media gateways are the primary means of communication by their user to their specific audiences (friends, co-workers, potential loooooooooovvvvveeeee connections, etc.). But those of us monkeys in the middle working program/project management issues have yet to accept these social media tools in the workplace to make our professions more affective.
In her book “Social Media for Project Management,” Elizabeth Harrin does a great job describing what social media is and how it can play a role in program/project management. She highlights several different types of social media tools that project management teams can use and how to sell their use to management. Ms. Harrin highlights that ultimately it is the project manager who has to think out of the box and decide to use social media tools. A fact she mentioned that stuck with me is that social media is not just another communications channel, it is collaboration tool. It may be just a nuance but she presents an interesting angle to at look social media use in project management.
Overall a really good book introducing social media use for project management. For those of us involved in project management, the book may spur some thoughts on how to use some of these tools in our work teams. In fact, after reading this book my team decided to experiment with Twitter to try and better collaborate.
References
Social Media for Project Managers (2010). Harrin, Elizabeth. Newton Square, PA: Project Management Institute, 153 Pages.
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Hi Ski,
Good to see that you and your team are utilising social media for project management, and in particular Twitter. Are you using Twitter with ‘protected Tweets’ to help with security of your messages, or are you using it ‘open’?
The Association for Project Management (APM) recently ran an article in the Project magazine (Feb 2011) on a range of social media tools in project managment.
Regards,
Ed
Ed,
We have locked Twitter down! Only the small team can access. We have a small team that is local but, we all work in different locations. For coordinating locations, pick-ups, locations of documents… it seems to be working pretty well. Most of us use Black Berries. We have set it up so when one of us tweets, it pops in as a text. We all get so many emails a day that when we are out in about, we may not answer immediately. However, when a message arrives as a text, it gets answered.
I liked the review, very objective. I’m very interested in how you got on with Twitter and in particular, how you dealt with confidentiality concerns. Twitter is a public network and with most of the companies that we deal with, sharing any company information is prohibited.
Thanks,
Paul
Paul,
Good points and my team did discuss those exact issues when we started using Twitter. During our normal work day, we are all mobile and at different locations. For now, we use Twitter to give status as to where our location is. In that way, it may save one of us a trip later. Also, we’ve used it for things like “can someone email me the XXX document.” So far in these type of situations using Twitter to coordinate is working fine. Because of the reasons you had stated, not sure how much more we can benefit but, we’ll see.
I’m glad you liked the book – thank you for taking the time to review it. How did you get on with Twitter for your team? I’d be interested to hear some more!
I will say that when the Twitter idea was suggested, it was received moderately at best. We have been using it for a couple of weeks and the small team I work with is slowly accepting it. Real test of acceptance will come in a couple of months. We’ll either keep on using it or… it will just die away.
Your book is among the first to suggest and analyze social media for project management purposes. It would be interesting to revisit this topic in a year and ask the questions:
-Have you used social media in your workplace?
-If so, has it taken hold?
-Either way…any lessons learned?
Ski, these are the sorts of questions I asked in the Social Media in a Project Environment survey last year and this year. The results are just in for 2011 so it will be very interesting to see the trend, if there is one. I’ll be reporting the results on my blog soon. In the meantime, you can get last year’s results here (scroll down to the 2010 survey results).