January - February 2003
Education and Career Opportunities

Project Weblogs

By Rainer Volz

One characteristic of virtual teams is the physical distance between the participants. The challenge for the project manager is to make sure that the physical distance doesn't transform into psychological distance. Physical distance can easily be overcome if required, it is much more difficult to align a team's values and goals. If these values and goals are misaligned and the psychological distance in the team grows the project has a communication problem, which usually causes delays and increased efforts due to misunderstandings and rework. Project weblogs could help there.

The conventional way to solve this problem is to have team or project meetings and to support social activities, so that a kind of project community can be created and team members hopefully align their goals with the project's goals. In geographically dispersed projects or large organisations this is often not possible, instead newsletters and occasional organisation-wide gatherings are used to create a shared environment. But these activities are often too rare (gatherings) or too impersonal (newsletter) to be able to create a shared vision. Weblogs could fill the gap and provide means to create a continuous and personal communication flow in a project.

To make the point clear: we are talking here of company/intranet usage of weblogs. We are not interested in the public versions available on the Internet, although it may also be useful to think about specially designed weblogs for external communication. But first, what do they offer for daily communication between teams or individuals?

Easy, fast, and continuous communication: Weblogs were made for people who wanted to update their web pages often and easily, so most applications are easy to use. Everyone who can handle a web browser should be able to master a weblog. In the simplest case updating the weblog means entering some text in a form displayed on a web page, pressing the submit button publishes the new story. Many applications provide multiple ways to enter text, such as web forms, e-mail, bookmarklets, XML-RPC, IM clients. The same is true for output. Additionally the typical weblog entry is relatively short - mostly only a few lines. Both features combined make it as easy as currently possible to publish a thought, encouraging people to write often and continously, maintaining communication over a long period of time.

Personalisation and identification: Weblog applications provide enough flexibility so that every team member can personalise the look of her/his weblog pages, sometimes even the behaviour. This increases the user's identification with the content and ensures continued input. Without the possibility to identify with his/her creation team members loose interest in providing their knowledge and thoughts very fast - the problem of many KM systems. The ability to use the weblog as a medium for self-expression makes it also more interesting for others and so helps to improve communication.

Automatic storage of knowledge: This leads us to the KM aspect of weblogs. Typically weblogs store soft, informal data. Examples are links, citations, articles, mails you don't want to forget - but also ideas, opinions about other's thoughts transforming into heavily-linked discussions across different web logs, which are finally leading to project decisions. This is the kind of information that often isn't included in project deliverables and therefore won't be stored in the corporate knowledge databases. But this is probably the knowledge that others are searching for when a project is finished: "Why did you choose to go this way? What alternatives did you have? ..." Without a weblog archive you will have to rely on the availability and the memory of participants.

The characteristics mentioned above show that weblog applications are very flexible tools, which can be used in many ways. Their popularity shows also that the feature set is interesting enough for many people - who never created a web page before - to actually start writing about their ideas and thoughts. With enough supporting project policies a project manager could encourage his team to actually use weblogs for the project as an asynchronous communication channel, independent of locations and time zones of the participants.

Although I emphasised here the team communication aspect, the same features can also be used to maintain the communication with project stakeholders. As a supplement or replacement for traditional reporting procedures it could provide you with a more direct communication with stakeholders. So you should include weblogs when you are thinking about your next project communication plan.

For those of you who want to give it a try I want to mention two products, which cover the functionality described - from simple communication/documentation to more advanced KM-like features. Of course, there are more, but these two I tried myself and found them quite easy to handle.

Six Apart's Moveable Type http://www.moveabletype.org is a weblog application for small teams or organisations. The application is small, installable on most web-servers and can be used with or without a database. One Moveable Type installation can provide multiple weblogs, so every team member can get his/her own and modify the look and feel, and it offers also a central administration interface. With these characteristics a team can install the weblog quickly on a standard web server and immediately start using it.

Traction Software's TeamPage Server http://www.tractionsoftware.com extends typical weblogs with features meant for use by larger organisations. The server is an all-inclusive Java package that installs very quickly on a variety of platforms. TeamPage combines the ease-of-use of a weblog with functionality to organise and analyse the stored information. It provides possibilities to tag content, even on paragraph level, with system- and user-defined labels and a good integration with the Windows platform, so that content from Windows applications (Outlook, Word, ...) can be easily transferred into the weblog. Once stored in the XML database users can search the information with a very rich search syntax that can also be used to create flexible dynamic views. Use TeamPage if you are working in an enterprise context or want to have a product that combines weblogs with portal/KM functionality.

The Tipu Ake Lifecycle Behavioural Model

The New Zealand Aukland University of Technology features a "Leadership Model for Innovative Organizations" called Tipu Ake. The Tipu Ake is a behavioural model based on some very old New Zealand Maori thinking that works in situations (including projects) of complexity and chaos where everything is interdependent and innovation is a requirement.

The Tipu Ake prospers in organisations that understand teamwork and more particularly the concept of shared leadership. Read application stories and download the model at http://www.tipuake.org.nz

Center for Business Practices KnowledgeBank

A selection of articles, links, and sources for best-practice information. See:

http://www.cbponline.com/knowledgebank/index.htm

The Center for Business Practices Project Management KnowledgeBank has an extensive set of web links on project management and IT project management. While this "KnowledgeBank" lacks a clear PM taxonomy for the resources listed, there are useful PM articles and a general listing amongst the following categories of remote resources.

The Center for Business Practices has special MS Power Point Presentations of :