Project tools were initially built for large linear projects and for the people managing those projects. However today, most people that manage projects are not professional project managers and many people have begun to realize that projects are often anything but linear. In addition most project management tools do not support the interactions of people on the project with either project objects (schedules, Gantt charts, presentations, diagrams, documents, etc.) or with other people. However, with the advent of the Internet and now Web 2.0 the focus has turned from content to interpersonal interactions through online communities and social networks. This blog is an overview of how these new Web 2.0 (social) technologies are helping project management evolve, and be more effective.

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Background

Project Management (PM) is a very old practice, but computer-based PM tools are relatively new (1950’s). Whenever we move an old technology to a new paradigm, we tend to use the old technology in an old way rather than a new way. A good example of this is when the Internet became all the rage in 1995, we moved many pieces of content that were on paper, or documents stored on our PC desktops to the Web to become static web pages which too were focused on content. It was not until 10 years later that people began to figure out the Web was not only a content network but a social network, and so there has been a shift in Web 2.0 to Web-mediated social interactions.

A similar pattern can be found in PM tools. The initial tools created for these projects focused on the linear nature of the project and included support for such concepts as PERT charts, critical path management, and eventually WBS (work breakdown structures) which captured critical dependencies in the project. The problem is that PERT-based linear models for projects were developed for large-scale, one-time, non-routine projects like the building of the Polaris missile.

In the 80’s and 90’s we had PC-based tools, which were just smaller versions of the tools that had been created for the Mainframe in the 60’s and 70’s. These are what I call the Web 0.0 (or pre-Internet) PM tools (or PC desktop tools). These tools were then put on the Web with a Java or Flash interface (Web 1.0 tools) but often had the same functionality (or maybe a bit less) than the PC-based progenitors.

But the Web had more than one effect and as projects become more complex and distributed, more and more people of various skill sets become involved in executing a project successfully, creating a labyrinth of communications, teams and deadlines to manage, and the chances of a project being “successful” using the pre-Internet, PC-based tools kept dropping. These tools just were not working so well anymore. According to a 2004 Standish CHAOS report on Project Management success and failure, this report found that “29% of projects succeeded, 18% failed and 53% were “challenged”” (where the project does not provide the same value as a successful one).

How Do We Fix the Tools?

Obviously something is not working, and one of the avenues of attack is to look at the tools to see how they can be improved. Not by adding more features and functions (like in Microsoft Project) but rather by looking at the underlying assumptions of these tools to see where needs are not being met. I believe that a new class of PM tools is emerging, driven by a number of pressures:
1. The social nature of projects, and the easy availability of social networking tools and more sophisticated collaboration technologies in the consumer space
2. Support for both linear and non-linear project planning and better tools for estimating (both time and resources). This allows project managers to deal with “wicked problems” which can be much more challenging.
3. The high level of failure of many PM projects indicates that there is something wrong, there is some need that is not being met, or that the current PM methodology does not apply well to many of the projects it is being used for.
4. Most of the people today using PM tools are neither trained, have the time to be trained and are not professional project managers. This means that the tools have to be easy to learn and use, inexpensive and easily accessible not only to the project manager, but to their team which may be distributed across countries, and companies.

These tools integrate not only asynchronous collaboration technologies (VTS – virtual team space) to create a secure virtual project space, but they also begin to integrate RTC (real time collaboration) functions to support more rapid interactions between project team members and cut down overall task and project duration.

Besides PM tools not supporting the social nature of projects, they also do a poor job of estimation. New tools like LiquidPlanner offer better ways to not only estimate time and resources but to come out with a more flexible project plan that better reflects today’s realities for the project.

Viewpath offers a way to do non-linear project management. All of these new Web 2.0 tools are offered as a SaaS (Software As A Service), have lower up-front costs, risks, and low learning barriers. They start to support people in the way they want to work instead of making people change their work behaviors to deal with the limits of the software.

Project Communities and the Future

The software is also co-evolving with new social structures in the enterprise and its value network (those you work with outside the firewall) to develop project communities where there are not only social interactions, but project knowledge can be stored and shared. In some more forward thinking enterprises these communities are taking the place of the Intranet. They provide the added value of feedback (rating and ranking) as well as expertise location and can also be deployed outside the firewall so as to allow easy interaction with the value network.

I believe that over the next two years we will begin to see some radical changes in the PM world, both because of the co-evolution with Web 2.0 technologies, but also because of the realization that some of the assumptions we made when initially creating these PM tools do not support today’s more complex, Internet-oriented and non-linear project environments.