How to... execute effective projects[From CXO Magazine, Aug. 2006] Forum One’s Dave Witzel explains how collaboration technologies are enabling his company to better manage its projects.
I know this is true for us at Forum One, with our 25-person firm specializing in online collaboration services and products. Successful project delivery – coordinating complex teams, managing difficult processes, innovating and learning from our innovation, communicating with staff, partners and clients and doing it consistently has become one of the biggest challenges in our knowledge-driven economy. Increasingly, firms are responding by adopting various online collaboration tools and approaches and project members are increasingly experienced and comfortable with them. Three categories of tool have become particularly important for managing Forum One’s distributed company and multiple project teams. First, we depend on instant messaging or IM. It provides a very efficient form of communications that meshes nicely with phone and e-mail. More importantly, it creates ‘presence’. I don’t care where my team members are as long as I can see them on my IM list. Second, we rely on project workspaces. Workspaces become an ‘always available from anywhere’ virtual representation of the project, capturing project materials (including documents, graphics and e-mail); maintaining task list and schedules; and defining the project team. Specialized workspaces can provide detailed workflow management, time tracking, financial controls and project reporting as well. We use our own product, ProjectSpaces (www.ProjectSpaces.com) to coordinate the hundreds of projects we run every year. Not only does it help us keep all team members on the same page by making sure all critical materials are always available to them, but since we usually share our workspace with our client, it helps make the project process more transparent and intelligible – thus improving communications. Materials stored in the workspace become a critical part of our institutional knowledge – we know what we did, when and for whom because it was captured and organized during the project process. Third, is a broad category of knowledge sharing and coordination tools that we are exploring and adopting. Here are a few examples:
I’ll confess that although we are a web-savvy firm, we’ve been working for 10 years to encourage adoption and use of various tools and still sometimes struggle. Our rule-of-thumb is that the problem is 30 percent tools and 70 percent people. Thus, it is important to think about how your people will adopt new tools. We try to structure workflow to reinforce the tools and put in place incentives to encourage adoption. There is definitely a learning curve with these new work habits so patience and nagging are both called for. Increasingly, we are seeing the tools change the very structure of our projects teams. We often share our tools with partners from outside the firm. We are able to better manage ad hoc teams ‘on the fly’, which may involve people and organizations we haven’t yet met. For example, with ProjectSpaces we can easily create a ‘community of interest’ and let people nominate themselves to participate. We also manage very large, very virtual groups like the 10,000-member International AIDS Economics Network (http://www.IAEN.org). Our experience has confirmed that investing in the tools and encouraging adoption is worth it.
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Your staff are scattered across the country or around the world. Schedules are tough because of time zones, childcare and flexible work schedules. You worry about losing critical staff. Your deadline is short and firm and your deliverable complex. You are working with contractors, consultants and vendors in addition to your client. The client is demanding, wants to know what is going on and wants to be involved. What’s more, this isn’t just about one project – you have to manage dozens and your company hundreds.
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