Collaboration

Documents can be a boon or a plague to projects, depending on how they are produced and disseminated. Done right, document management is a huge strategic advantage on projects, fostering visibility, collaboration and shared objectives.

How (and how much) is the project management community using social media tools to do their jobs and advance their careers? A recent survey explored these questions.

Despite an expanding scope, a contrained timeframe and a throng of meticulous stakeholders, the elaborate renovation to the David H. Koch Theater in New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts was completed to glowing reviews, on time and under budget. From prelude to finale, this extraordinary project had its share of plot twists and turns.

Dynamic projects demand that teams not so much follow plans as continuously rethink and reinterpret them, continuously collaborating on the way to value-driven results. Likewise, stakeholders and project managers must appreciate that clearly communicating their “command intent” has become more critical to success than dictating discrete orders.

Collaborative planning is never a simple process, and nearly impossible to distill into a reliably repeatable process. The fact is, we often marginalize or outright exclude those who frustrate our planning with opposing views. After pushing through the plan, we get to live with the result. But communicating your command intent through “clabberation” — not a tidy plan — might just be the purpose of every project.

It’s hard enough to track all the incremental tasks that go along with even a modest project, so what do you do when those tasks start to number in the tens of thousands? One environmental consultancy was forced to find out in a hurry while trying to land a major client.

A veteran Belgium-based project manager and current learning specialist at IBM shares his experiences on major projects in China and France, as well as the challenges of securing executive buy-in and working with different cultures.

The challenges of managing culturally diverse and globally dispersed teams are examined in this field study of technology-intensive product developments. The findings provide insight into the business processes, organizational conditions and managerial leadership style most conducive to high project performance in these environments. The paper also suggests a framework for assessing leadership effectiveness, and recommendations for building high-performance multinational project teams.

For the world’s largest processor of credit card transactions, real-time collaboration with no geographic constraints was the only way to get a handle on a slice of some 4,000 projects. It turned to a highly configurable project portfolio management application that emphasized social networking, visibility and usability.

Remote worksites, international time zones and dispersed teams can isolate project managers and stymie their problem-solving efforts. But communities of practice may help, connecting them with like-minded individuals and the tools to approach issues collaboratively. Here are five ideas for improving project collaboration through CoPs.