Project Management’eur

When a project is ready to begin, typically care has been taken to communicate with the project owner and other stakeholders to define the project requirements in as much detail as possible. Various documents are published describing what needs to be accomplished and the methodology or plan to accomplish the objectives. This plan usually involves the breakdown of the project work into various tasks which can then be assigned to various team members.

For many years project managers have struggled to solidify the requirements at this point, avoiding what is commonly known as “scope creep” in an attempt to ensure the ability to meet the deadline and be able to clearly articulate the details of various tasks to the assigned team members. However, it is beginning to be recognized that in the real world, it is not possible to know every detail before embarking on the project, and that there must be a way to build some flexibility into the project as it progresses.

In 2008, we are now seeing a paradigm change occurring in project management as the project community settle around a new contingency based paradigm for project management. This new paradigm embraces both traditional and complex project management. Key to the new paradigm is recognition that projects vary in their levels of certainty and emergence, and that fit for purpose strategies, architectures, competences, contracts and tools need to be used.
– Redefining Our Profession Part 2: The History and Future of Project Management by By Professor Dr David Dombkins

In software development, new methodologies, such as Scrum have emerged which recognize the inability to know everything up front and prescribe ways to deal with emerging requirements. Part of this approach involves regularly scheduled team meetings for planning work for the next specified time interval, reviewing status, and reflecting on the past interval’s progress in order to improve progress in the next interval.

Two key elements to this approach are:

• The need to adjust quickly to emerging changes, which requires
• The need to quickly and accurately disseminate the new information to all the team members to eliminate having to backtrack

This rapid dissemination of new information can be especially problematic with virtual teams perhaps located around the globe where face to face daily meetings are impossible and video conferencing can be expensive. When a team member runs into a problem that requires an answer before proceeding, waiting for the next meeting or teleconference can cause delay. But when getting this answer via email, typically the new information is not immediately shared with all the team members, if at all. Even if all the team members are copied on the email, the information is not stored in an organized and readily retrieval format, and runs the risk of being deleted before the team member realizes that he/she needs that reference information at a later time.

One solution to this problem is to have a blog-type discussion area, accessible by all team members, including the stakeholders. With a few well thought out guidelines from the project manager, the team can work together to build a central web-based knowledge base in real time, with every update accessible immediately to everyone in an organized format with instant email notification to all team members of each update.

Keeping this central knowledge base current can reduce time spent in meetings and reduce video conferencing expenses. In fact since everyone has easy access to this information, it may be possible to get by with audio conferencing, at least some of the time.

The following video demonstrates how Project Management for the Real World can be used to create such a web-based central knowledge base for a project team.