Info Feed Weblog
Using Weblogs to Manage Information Technology Projects
Jonathan Peterson shares some good thoughts on how to use weblogs to manage IT projects. Although you should really read the article, here is a lengthy quote to set the stage:
Now lets look at a blogged IT organization:Each developer and/or development team would keep a project blog with RSS.
- The PM would subscribe to all those blogs and would publish a roll-up blog with links to details of various issues.
- The program manager would subscribe to the RSS feeds for every project or team that impacts his project portfolio and would publish his own blog.
- The Powerpoint deck would now have live links to blog entries at the program office level.
Now when the CIO asks the "why" questions in the program review, the program manager can click back through a set of links to find the series of problems/questions/resolution for the problem in real time. What's more as a smart CIO, I wouldn't bother having my program office create my program review Powerpoint deck, I'd have them continually monitoring projects, and I would subscribe to THEIR RSS feeds. I'd similarly have my customers subscribe to the RSS feeds of the IT projects they are interested in.
Sure this adds time to daily effort, but saves time on an inquiry, but it also creates both corporate and project memories allowing those "Why did we decide to do this this way?" questions to be easily answered by a Google search across some project blogs.
Heck I'd even be tempted to turn my bug tracking system into a blog with trackback. All activity on a problem is attached as developers work things out.
That's how it should work in general. But there are some issues where I would not use weblogs for. I could probably come up with more should I be thinking more about this, but the following are the three most obvious ones:
- Bug and feature tracking: Specific workflow management software, e.g. Starteam which we used at dooyoo, does a far better and more efficient job than weblogs. A bug or feature changes owners several times across its lifecycle, oftentimes several times per day. And that's best done by assignment and those issues are addressed in the above-mentioned software very well. However, each of the bugs / features in the system should publish its own RSS channel, so customers could subscribe to those.
- Board Reports: It's nice to keep people updated with weblogs across the project cycle all the time, but senior management or the supervisory report will not and should not be forced to digest all the information. I think the "roll-up blog" for the whole project is a good idea and some of the executives might even read some of the content. But a board meeting is a very expensive thing, so it should be optimized for efficiency. It's well worth the project manager's effort to produce a PowerPoint presentation or whatever other means of presentation and handout material to specifically address the issues the board needs, both to lead through the discussion as well as to have short info ready for the expected questions. Depending on the size of the organization, this issue not only extends to board meetings, but also meetings further down the chain.
- Project Planning: MS Project or Excel do a job that you can't substitute with weblogs.
Only goes to say that it's important to understand the limitations of the format as well. It's one more tool to be used complementary with others and substituting only a few. Weblogs in project management can mainly be a communications tool in the organization, both horizontally (to peers, colleagues, or even clients) and vertically (up and down the chain of command). Specifically, for communication inside the development and project teams, for daily updates by each developper in his own words, for communication of project management issues, for communication of project updates to internal clients -- weblogs are just made for that.