Social Management

First there was the Plan. Created by the Manager, it will pass all reviews. It will be shown to management, who in the face of such beauty and wisdom will nod its approval. It will be shared with the team, who like lambs for slaughter will march to its beat. Hailed as the solution to all ailments, it will sit on the wall, overseeing the work being done, and slowly, surely, fade into oblivion and obscurity.

For a plan without a life is not a plan at all. It is a static schedule.

To run a successful project, we must acknowledge that change is coming. While we may not want it or ask for it, change is the way of the world, and dealing with it is inevitable if you are to succeed. All projects will experience changes, and they better be prepared for it. Risk identified, contingency plans in place, and even then the unknown unknowns will hit you occasionally like a brick wall.

If you can create a successful project, you have also created a dynamic project management model. Your project will be delivered on time, and if not on the originally scheduled time, then on a time that is known at a prior milestone. More than that, your customers are aware of this, and understands what happened.

But what about your team?

With a dynamic project, you need a way to keep your team informed of changes. And if you're really serious about project management, you want your team to not only know about the changes, but to suggest some of their own. You need Project Collaboration. Because your team are the most important part of your project, and their combined knowledge and skills are greater than that of a single manager.

You need to apply the power of social networking to your projects. Social networking in the terms of project management, or as I call it: Social Management. A radical change from the old style of a manager controlling his team, Social Management instead lets the team run the team. Logistically, a project manager should be in place to be the point-of-contact, but his role can be minimized to creating the project plan outline. After that, Social Management takes over, as the team starts adding tasks, changing tasks, adding dependencies and optimizing.

Will it work? I don't know. For now, it's a thought that as far as I know has not been tried to the full extent. We're moving in this direction with Project Collaboration, SCRUM and other methodologies. Open Source Projects are run partly in this way (and seems to thrive). Will it work in a corporate setting, and will it work better than traditional Project Management? I don't know, but perhaps someday someone will try. Let me know. I'm curious.