Project management Trends – social media

Social Media will become the Norm & not the exception

Communication is a critical element to the success of every project.  And with the increase of virtual/distributed teams comes the need for better communication and collaboration mechanisms.  Social media is here to the rescue.

Even teams that are in the same location are considered virtual if you have to get up from your desk to go talk to them across the hall or in another building.

The traditional tool such as Email can not fulfill this need.  We see collaboration tools such as Instant Messaging (IM), texting, web conferencing, Wikis, Cloud computing, and other tools being used to help bridge the communication gap.

Social tools are becoming the norm especially with mobile and virtual teams growing at an accelerated pace.

“The need to communicate will increase our reliance on social networks – both inside and the business boundaries.

Outside the business tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are used extensively now.

Inside the business tools such as cloud based collaborative project management applications, file sharing, screen capture and share and document collaboration are getting traction.

Blogging tools like WordPress are gaining wide acceptance and thousand if not millions of developers and web designers are learning to publish articles the same way as big publishing houses.

Jesse Fewell, from project management institute’s Agile Community of Practice, adds,

“Social media will become more of an expectation and less of a novelty.  From Twitter to blogging, more and more people will try using these tools, with mixed results”.

The need to communicate – as well as capturing that communication so it is accessible to team members that couldn’t make that meeting – is desperately needed & growing.

Social media tools will be leveraged individually to fill the communication gap,  until we see integrated collaboration tools start emerging as the primary tool of business.

This is the third article in this series.

Click here for project managers will be more often independent contractors.

Click here for virtual teams article.

Credit goes to Donna Reed in CM Crossroads who originally covered this subject.