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e-Dimensions of Project management Introduction Electronic communication represents a giant step forward for project management. Internet revolution of 1990's has created new opportunities in project management. This paper will take a look at the opportunities and challenges of using Internet in project management. e-Tools that bind In the last few years, we have seen the explosion of new tools for project management. At a click of a button, users can enjoy sophisticated capabilities for:
e-Tools also divide The tools that make it possible for people in far off places to collaborate and coordinate also makes a way for members to avoid face-to-face contact. This sometimes becomes dehumanizing and demotivating to the team. Often the absence of face-to-face contact hinders creative solutions or breakthrough ideas. The absence of physical contact or face-to-face meetings creates communication problems. Team members cannot read the body language or understand the tonal differences of the other members. Lack of immediate response and use of email sets the stage for some dangerous misunderstanding. LAN, Intranet and Internet Initially in 1970's LANs were used to connect team members and collaborate their activities. In the 1990s, Internet technology got too good to resist, so organizations began to use it to develop networks of their own. Intranets, which don’t need to be connected to the Internet at all, have all the graphic interfaces, hypertext links, and ease of use that make the World Wide Web so appealing to everyone, but are exclusive to the employees of an individual enterprise. With project management now speeding its expansion into white collar and manufacturing sectors, project teams began to create their own Web pages on their company intranets, both for sharing information within the team, and for educating the whole enterprise about what they were doing. Project teams that once would have labored away in obscurity now increased their visibility with regularly updated Web pages aimed at the rest of the organization and intended to build support for their work and anticipation for their deliverables. Increasingly, organizations are creating central project offices to coordinate the work of all projects across the enterprise. For such an office, an intranet is a perfect location for a unified project calendar and for a repository of historical information on projects throughout the enterprise. Such a repository allows project managers to reap the benefits of past experience instead of reinventing wheels. But even intranets have their limitations; they’re accessible only to connected computers (although dial-in access can be provided, but even that is restricted, since the whole point of an intranet is to keep it within the family). For communication, collaboration, and commerce with their partners, customers, and vendors, organizations took to the Internet itself, building extranets, password-protected communities that know no geographical, hardware, or company boundaries. With projects going global, outsourcing components to outside providers, and often working in close collaboration with their customers, extranets provide a medium for:
The rise of the virtual project teams If you were building a dam in the 1930s, you hired people to work exclusively on your project until the dam, or at least their part of it, was done. If you were developing a breakthrough minicomputer in the 1970s, as Tracy Kidder vividly described in his book, The Soul of a New Machine, you brought people together in a basement somewhere to devote themselves to your project 18 hours a day until it was done. But in the early twenty-first century, a typical project manager may be charged with a very different kind of task, such as developing an information management system for an insurance company with nation-wide operations. If you are that kind of project manager, you are probably working through a team of people assigned to your project part-time, who represent a range of business interests and are located in offices around the country. These days, the virtual project team, composed of people separated by vast distances who communicate primarily by computer and telephone, is more the norm than the exception. For them, e-communication is not an alternative to face-to-face, it’s the only way they can operate. They use networks to develop a sense of community among project team members who may be far-flung geographically and to keep channels open to various regional and functional units that can contribute to the project or be impacted by it. Network-enabled project software helps virtual project teams plan and track progress of widely dispersed project components, keep the various components in sync with each other, manage project change across the board, and deter local scope changes from overwhelming the project. It’s not a question of people on a project team e-mailing each other instead of walking down the hall or driving across town to talk in person. It’s a question of using electronic means to take advantage of the skills, knowledge, and input of people who would not be accessible to the project any other way. The electronic revolution not only changed the way projects are run, it also spawned a new kind of project, one with significantly different needs and priorities. All those electronic advances don’t happen in a business-as-usual environment. They are the result of projects. With its roots in engineering and math, the IT community has always had a project mentality. Whether for building new hardware or developing software, the approach is to start with a specific goal, a dedicated team, a deadline, and whatever resources are available – from the legendary garage and a shoestring budget to the Microsoft billions. Hardware and software projects survive by their ability to balance the three tradeoffs that raise the tension on any kind of project: time, cost, and quality. The Big Difference Internet-related projects are different. On an e-project, time is the overriding priority. That’s as true for the development of a glitzy Website as it is for the deployment of a small but technically exquisite applet (for those of us who are Web-challenged, that’s a small application we never have to worry about but can be glad is there helping us surf). Pundits liken the explosion of Internet technology to the gold rush: if you don’t stake your claim quickly, you’ll be left in the dust. So what are the tradeoffs? Well, your finances may be limited or all the money in the world may not speed up the creative muse. So, by the standards of other kinds of projects, if something has to be sacrificed, it’s quality. Accepted procedure is: get something out there and fix it later. Customers have come to accept, even to demand, this new reality. They wouldn’t buy a car without doors or headlights and wait for those features to come in a ‘‘patch.’’ But they’ll eagerly grab new technology before it’s clean of all glitches, let alone been gussied up with bells and whistles. From small home businesses to multibillion-dollar corporations to municipal governments, the Web is the place to be now – if not yesterday – even if it’s just with a basic site that permits add-ons later. Because of this emphasis on time, e-projects:
Criteria for Success Getting to market at warp speed may force a project to lower other priorities, but there are two additional criteria that no communication tool can sacrifice and still succeed.
THRIVING IN AN E-WORLD Internet technology is changing so fast that managing any e-project is like throwing darts at a moving target. Project managers in other fields who use Internet technology to help them manage their projects experience similar effects. Just as they learn to get the most out of one electronic tool, there’s a new one out there enticing them to switch or to add another layer. It’s dizzying, and it’s not going to slow down. As developers or users, we’ll all be riding this roller coaster for a long time to come. E-LESSONS FROM A CUTTING-EDGE COMPANY When you are a project manager in a leading technology services firm, you learn fast to make the most of electronic advances. Three project managers in such a company shared lessons they learned managing the development of Websites and a systems maintenance project that affected every computer and application throughout the company’s worldwide offices. Here’s what they said.
One of the project manager’s crucial responsibilities is to see that they all understand each other. These project managers found on several occasions that what appeared to be an insurmountable obstacle was a translation problem, not a resource one.
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