Collaboration Tools for Project Managers: How to Choose, Get Started and Collaborate with Technology

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Introduction

When an earlier version of this book was released under the title, Social Media for Project Managers, it focused on how mainstream social media tools could be used in the workplace to engage teams and create collaboration and participation on projects. Just a few years on, the working environment has changed significantly.

I’ve reflected that in this current book, Social Media for Project Managers has been fully revised and updated and in that process, it morphed into something quite different. While there are hundreds of little changes, new examples, and updated research, the two crucial differences are:

First, the language has changed. For example, we are no longer talking about creating our own project wikis, but rather using collaboration tools designed for the purpose of working with virtual teams that have wiki functionality inherent in the tool. Today, the discussion is about how project management has adopted social media-style technology and incorporated it into the tools used to get work done. This has happened because project management software has caught up with what teams actually need to manage in complex, virtual environments.

Another byproduct of the software now in use for adopting the functionality of social networks is that the debate has shifted from should we adopt new communication methods to how should we adopt new communication methods. Rather than a discourse on the benefits, project managers need practical guides about how to choose and use collaboration tools.

Second, project managers have changed. The role of the project manager is expanding to include managing change and getting involved earlier and earlier in the project process. With that in mind, there is a need to discuss how to select a tool and prepare the business case for introducing collaboration software. I’ve dedicated a large chunk of the book to establishing a team collaboration software strategy and providing information on how to execute that strategy through creating a robust business case and implementing your software.

The Reason for This Book

Over the last few years, a not-very-subtle change has happened in the workplace. Project managers no longer manage tasks and people; they create collaborative environments where people can do their very best work to achieve corporate goals.

It’s not management-speak. It’s the difference between task management and engaging team members. It’s the difference between command-and-control and working together as equals. It’s also not a new idea, but one made more acute by multigenerational teams.

In parallel, digital culture has exploded, fundamentally changing the operating model of many businesses and the way consumers engage with products and services. This has recently spilled over into how projects are managed, but this isn’t really a new idea either.

Fifteen years ago, Richard Murch, in his book, Project Management: Best Practices for IT Professionals, predicted that we would be using the Internet to support project communications as well as recruitment and training of project managers. He called it I-PM: Internet Project Management (Murch, 2001). Among other things, he believed that the Internet would enable project managers to automate the capture of project information and enable electronic collaboration.

Let’s just say that it’s taken project management a while to catch up, but now the change is happening and it’s happening fast. Research from MIT Sloan reports that the number one reason cited by CIOs for using social business tools like online collaboration software is for managing projects (Kiron, Palmer, Nguyen Phillips, & Berkman, 2013).

Collaboration at work, as most people would understand it, is what we do every day now. Projects are collaborative by nature, with people from various departments and companies forming a temporary organizational structure and working together to achieve a common objective.

The collaborative workplace is about more than this day-to-day kind of working together. Instead, it fosters sharing our collective knowledge, skills, and resources and integrating disparate contributions into a productive whole. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams call the potential to deliver greatness through this way of working the new promise of collaboration in their book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Tapscott & Williams, 2008). They believe, as do others, that opening up the knowledge channels and promoting cross-organizational sharing will be the way in which organizations will generate wealth in the future. Project leaders need to be at the forefront of this organizational change to support our companies with innovative projects going forward.

However, collaboration is hard. You work with teams across many locations, organizations, and cultures. You manage many projects at once and work with colleagues who have no formal background in project management or any desire to use the professional enterprise project management tools that many Baby Boomer project managers trained in.

If you want to help your teams collaborate more effectively, save yourself some time, and reduce your stress levels, then this book is for you.

It aims to demystify the use of collaboration tools for project teams. It will help you choose and deploy a software solution that is right for you, taking into account the needs of your team, your business case, and the security and management challenges that you will need to address.

If you already have collaboration tools in use, it will help you scale them up across your project management office or enterprise, and get more out of them through driving better adoption and best practices.

Considering Collaboration Tools: Project Management Software Evolved

Project software used to be the domain of the project manager. Tasks and milestones were stored and reported, but project management software provided little, if any, insight into the doing of the tasks and the decisions taken along the way. Collaboration tools make this visible to everyone by improving transparency across the whole team. You don’t have to be a software whiz to use them.

However, project management itself hasn’t fundamentally changed. Project managers have always been primarily focused on creating participation in projects. Knowing how to engage people has always been part of that—if somewhat overlooked in the literature and standards until recently. Collaboration technologies are another way to do that.

I first got interested in this as a topic when I started working in healthcare. The speed of advancements in healthcare technology is incredible and the pace of change in the healthcare arena made me realize how slow the pace of change is in project management. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see the shift in working practices so acutely, although I expect many businesses are slower to adopt new methods.

Collaboration tools are a new method that may not feel comfortable or appropriate right now. But other people, our project stakeholders and team members, are using them, and that makes it a good idea to find out what they are all about. After all, even if you feel they are a waste of time, you won’t personally reverse the technology trend just by ignoring it. As with all project management tools and methods, you have to know the rules before you can start ignoring them.

How the Book is Organized

This book has three parts. In the first part, we look at the context for collaboration, how technology can support collaborative working, and how it fits into the project management life cycle.

The second part covers how you can make technology for collaboration work in practice through defining your strategy and engaging the team in the change. It also covers practical suggestions for security and managing the culture shock of shifting to new ways of working.

Part 3 discusses the bigger picture of collaboration technology and social media at work. We cover personal credibility and safety online as well as job hunting and online professional development. The final chapter offers a nonexhaustive view of what the future of collaboration and technology might have to offer project leaders by considering current trends.

One of the issues in writing about technology is that it moves on quickly. It is quite probable that some of the software and tools described here have been overtaken by newer, better tools by the time you read this. In fact, some of the companies may no longer exist: The web is a rapidly changing environment. No matter. Use the product names as placeholders: They are signposts pointing toward a concept, and it is the concept that is important, not the corporate embodiment of it. Change and innovation in the social media and collaboration space are good things. Change normally means that tools are improving, becoming more robust and useful.

Whatever technology product you use to drive collaboration, the examples of how other companies are doing it will still be of use to you. Throughout the book, you will find examples of companies and individuals using social media tools to improve their project practices. Where I haven’t included a reference for the source of an anecdote, it has come from a personal interview specifically for this book.

Is This Book for You?

This book is aimed at project, program, and portfolio managers, whether you work for a large or small company or in the public or private sector. If you are interested in finding out more about how you can use technology like wikis, instant messaging, and collaboration tools on your projects, then this book is for you. It will also be of use if your company has already chosen a suite of enterprise tools, as it will give you the skills and vocabulary you need to be able to tap into that effectively.

In this book, you’ll discover the reasons why project leaders should get on board with online collaboration and technology for virtual working. It also offers practical guidance on the use of such tools for working effectively with others on projects.

I look forward to joining you on your tour through the tools of online work and hope that you take away the knowledge you need to transform your organization, one project at a time.

PART 1

The Context for Collaboration

Part 1 looks at the sea change in working practices. It examines the ways in which the project management landscape has evolved to operate online and provides a contextual background for how collaboration tools can be used for getting work done.

It includes the following chapters:

Chapter 1: Why We Are Leaving Behind Old Working Practices

Chapter 2: Online Collaboration: The New Normal

Chapter 3: Collaboration Tools 101

Chapter 4: Communication and the Project Management Life Cycle

Chapter 5: Team Management and the Project Management Life Cycle

CHAPTER 1

Why We Are Leaving Behind Old Working Practices

When Social Media for Project Managers was first published in 2010, the idea of using online tools and web technology for enhancing productivity on project teams was relatively new. Today, it feels as if everyone’s doing it.

Much more of our working and personal lives is run online and, for the youngest generations in the workforce, it’s the only working practice they have ever known. Part of the shift away from the old options for collaboration has to do with the fact that there are fewer people around who want to work that way anymore. Why use a conference bridge when a group Skype call gives you more data about your recipients and allows for chat and document sharing with the group while you’re speaking?

The old ways of working aren’t even that old. You don’t have to be nearing retirement to remember fax machines and internal forums. Everyone has a story about a command and control style manager and we can all have a laugh at how dated that approach to management seems today.

Gartner’s commentary on digital business concludes that this shift has come about due to what they call the Nexus of Forces (Howard et al., 2014). Four technology trends make up the Nexus. These are Social, Mobile, Cloud, and Information. Let’s dig into that jargon now:

Social

This reflects the move toward servant-leadership and collaborative, matrixed, and flat teams as a way to achieve corporate objectives. The move away from the brochure-ware, static pages of the Internet toward a more interactive and personalized feel to browsing is one of the symptoms of this trend.

Mobile

Mobile technology offers much more than just the ability to make calls and access data on the go. For project managers, who are often highly mobile workers, this takes data access to a level beyond just updating a project plan from the airport. The development of location-based data services and social tools that offer contextual information (e.g., Find my nearest…) frames the data in a way that is personally relevant and useful at that moment.

Cloud

Cloud solutions offer businesses scalable, rapid-deployment applications without high infrastructure costs. Routine backups, frequent updates, and high uptime are other advantages. The cloud works with both desktop and mobile environments, making it a highly efficient and flexible way to work. Or, as a manager of mine once said, Someone else’s computers plus tax.¹

Information

You may have heard of big data. It describes the vast amounts of data that companies collect about their customers and transactions and how this can be processed into business intelligence. Effective analysis and use of this information, whether it relates to the turnaround time for dealing with project risks or what you buy in the supermarket, becomes a way of differentiating businesses from the competition.

Gartner concludes that these four trends allow businesses to

improve how they interact with customers;

launch new products;

create points of difference from competitors;

reach new customer markets; and

improve efficiency across the operations.

However, just because the technology is there, doesn’t mean project teams have to use it, and traditional project management has been slower than other areas of business to adopt new working practices and methods.

Today, project teams are making the shift and it hasn’t been subtle. Supported by technology, change is being driven by business and social imperatives. We’re leaving behind the old ways of working for four reasons:

Project timescales drive the need for frequent collaboration.

Digital tools are better options for virtual teams.

Digital tools have been shown to help businesses get better results.

Society moves on: We don’t have stone wheels on our carts any longer and now, the trend for collaboration is to do it online.

Let’s look at those in more detail.

1. Project timescales require frequent collaboration.

Project team meetings have gone from weekly affairs to daily stand ups to twice-daily check-ins. The speed that business takes place at, and the pace of change, means that the old ways that project teams used to get together and report progress just aren’t effective any longer. Teams need faster, real-time (or near real-time) access to information and each other.

There is now an inherent understanding in many businesses that in order to meet the needs of modern project management, business practices have to change. It’s not rocket science that collaboration tools should help teams collaborate: That’s what they are supposed to do. They tend to be a cost-effective solution for many companies looking for alternatives to lead and manage project teams. The take-up in many areas is already there, recognizing this need: The major use of social tools at work, according to CIOs in a study published by Deloitte University Press, is to manage projects (Kiron et al., 2013).

2. Virtual teams need better tools.

Today’s business teams don’t work in a face-to-face environment all the time. That’s simply not a practical way to get work done when you want to access the best and most cost-effective talent from across the world. Project managers have to tap into other solutions in order to deal with virtuality. There’s more about what it means to work virtually in Chapter 2.

A 2014 survey of over 1,200 European project managers by software company Projectplace reports that 37% of respondents say that lack of communication between team members is their main collaboration challenge (Projectplace, n.d.). Nearly a third of project managers say that it’s hard to know which communication channel they should be using on a daily basis.

Virtual teams have it even harder: 22% of respondents in that study report that they can’t find the time to meet on a conference call or in-person. Inefficiencies in collaboration and project management costs teams between two and three hours a week, equating to 20 days lost per year.

Microsoft Office and email are no longer suitable for managing projects, although some would argue that they never were. Collaboration tools move project teams along the efficiency scale and deliver benefits to virtual and colocated teams. According to the Projectplace research:

82% of project managers report that better project management tools result in more time saved

80% say that tools reduce their stress levels

71% report a stronger sense of team morale

69% report better control of project costs

It’s important to balance these figures with the disruptive influence of technology as well. The study also shows that two thirds of project managers can access sensitive data; data that they probably shouldn’t have access to. Yet only a little over half of them have a software solution that manages version control for documentation, which has the potential to cause issues and confusion. Security and data management are covered in more detail in Chapter 12.

3. Being digital and social drives business results.

Digital tools have been shown to drive better business results. According to a study by McKinsey (Bughin & Chui, 2010), the main business benefits for companies using collaboration tools are:

increased speed of access to knowledge (77% of respondents reported this);

reduced cost of communication (60%);

increased speed of access to internal subject matter experts (52%); and

reduced travel costs (44%).

This report also shows that companies using collaboration and digital tools internally are:

more likely to lead their market sector;

reporting greater market share than their competitors; and

using management practices that result in higher margins.

Another study concludes that collaboration tools have the potential to raise the productivity of a knowledge worker by 20% to 25% (Chiu et al., 2012). And yet another study, this time by Cap Gemini, concludes that companies that truly understand how to drive value through digital transformation are 26% more profitable than their industry competitors (Westerman, Tannou, Bonnet, Ferraris, & McAfee, n.d.).

In a project environment, the results are similar. In Managing the Urgent and Unexpected, a book of 12 case studies about projects that were kicked off in emergency situations, Stephen Wearne and Keith White-Hunt write about the lessons learned from those projects. They frequently refer to the fact that collaborative working and cooperative attitudes drove project success, often in extremely difficult situations (Wearne & White-Hunt, 2014).

Even if you like to take a relatively cynical view of research like this, the data is pretty compelling. When you think about it, tools that make it easier to work together are, logically, likely to take costs out of businesses and speed up delivery.

4. It's the way business works today.

In the past—and it wasn’t that long ago—the monthly steering group report would be an adequate representation of the project status. It was acknowledged that it was not a real-time project position, but it was accurate enough for the purposes of judging progress against milestones and budget. This data would be sufficient for the steering group, and if anyone else wanted a formal project status report, the latest steering group report could be handed over as a snapshot in time. Most of the time, people were happy with this level of detail, even though, implicitly, they knew it could no longer be true. Only in an emergency would anyone ask to see anything more up-to-date.

Today, project stakeholders have different expectations about project information,