Presentation by dattatraya pathak

Project Management – the Mantra for Sustainable Growth—Mantra for Leveraging Emerging Trends
Mantra for leveraging Emerging Trends
DATTATRAYA PATHAK
Principal Program Management Consultant
ASPECT MANAGEMENT SERVICES PVT LTD
Essence of social media is to know your audience and engaging them in what they love!!!!

Title of the Paper : Using Social Networks in Project Management
Theme : Project Management – The Mantra for Sustainable
Growth—Mantra for Leveraging Emerging Trends
Keywords : ‘Social Networking’, ‘Virtual Teams’, ‘Collaboration’,
‘Engagement’, ‘Collective Intelligence’
Abstract: 1
Virtual team
collaborations
Widespread
outreach
Enabling collective
intelligence
Improved
Stakeholders'
engagement
Improved
Collaboration
Extended
PMIS
Reduced
issue
levels
Collective
Intelligence
Increase in
business
value
Reduced
risk
levels
Better
engagement
Explosion of social media is changing the way we communicate. While managing projects, this
change is impacting communication and team management processes. With ubiquitous availability of
smart-phones, iPads, tablets and so on, information distribution can be outreached to virtual extended
teams comprising of vendors/suppliers, customers, contractors, etc.
With the advent of social networks and its wider outreach, the project managers have now have a
powerful tool in their hands, which can be used for the collaboration of geographically dispersed
teams contributing to project objectives.Practitioners and researchers can build-on enterprise social
networks (ESN) to realize more business value by using social media.
This paper will cover the following aspects related to the use of social networking to project
management activities:
1. Using social networking as a competitive advantage through
a. increase in business value
b. better engagement with different stakeholders
c. knowledge sharing among the teams to achieve project objectives
d. efficient on-the-fly communications among teams to project’s advantage
2. Using social networking for project management areas like
a. Scope definition
1 As submitted to PMI India

b. Project communications
c. Project collaboration
d. Project procurements
e. Knowledge base for a project and performing organization
3. Implementing social networks for project management collaboration/ communications
processes
4. Critical success factors
5. Challenges in ensuring Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA) requirements of data.
6. Future trends

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction...................................................................................................................... 5
2 Social Networking as Competitive Advantage ....................................................... 6
3 Using Social Networks for Managing Projects....................................................... 7
4 Implementing Social Networks in Projects ............................................................. 9
5 Future Trends ................................................................................................................ 16
6 References ..................................................................................................................... 16

1 Introduction
Explosion of social media is changing the way we communicate. While managing projects, this
change is impacting processes related to communication and team management. With ubiquitous
availability of smart-phones, iPads, tablets and other such devices, information distribution can now
be outreached to extended global teams comprising of dispersed teams, vendors/suppliers,
customers, contractors, public, and communities and so on.
Social networks have brought a radical change in the way people are communicating, which has
resulted in enhanced information discovery and delivery. Communication using social networks is
becoming more direct, natural and informal. Though social networks are supported by both many
technologies and a variety of applications, still it is a major cultural change in the interpersonal and
group communications. People will now use these channels for getting on-the-fly information related
to individuals, organizations, projects and so on.
With the advent of social networks and its wider outreach, the project managers have now have a
powerful tool in their hands, which can be used for the collaboration of geographically dispersed
teams to contribute to project objectives.
This paper will cover the following aspects related to the use of social networking to project
management activities:
 Social Networking as Competitive Advantage
 Using Social Networks for Managing Projects
 Implementing Social Networks
 Challenges of Information Security
 Future Trends

2 Social Networkingas Competitive Advantage
A research from Gartner suggests that social media will overtake e-mail as the primary method of
communications in the workplace by 2014. So project managers have to ready to use this channel for
their project communications effectively. Also, the Study by McKinsey Global Instituteifound that
companies using social technologies realized measurable benefits such as:
 25% less time spent on emails
 35% less time searching for information
 20-25% improvement in knowledge worker productivity.
Use of social networks for communications in projects is a major paradigm shift. It provides a very
powerful tool to communicate among the project stakeholders by reducing the gap between face to
face communications and remote meetings. This is possible mainly because of the following inherent
characteristicsof social networking:
 Awareness:Goes beyond mere physical proximity by using tools as chat, blog, and
streaming, video conferencing and so on. It is a big connectamong the project related
community.
 Relations: Connects individuals in effective way and builds direct and close relations
resulting direct communications and reduced communication bottlenecks.
 Emotions: Based on friendly relations. How emotional factors will drive and creation and
expansion of contents which is likely to be of better quality.
 Interactions : Communicationshighly interactive, breaking the time limits of working hours
and expediting information flow among the team members
 Trust: Social Networks is driven by trust among the members for free flow of suggestions,
criticism and recommendationsimproving quality of the contents. Project team members need
to be trained on what content need to be put on the social networks and what would be its
impact on the overall project performance – positive or negative.
 Information stream: Social networks can serve as a natural stream of information flows
emphasizing development of new ideas and concepts. History of such flows posted on a
project wall could be of historical significance and lead to benefit to the current projects and
future projects as learning.

 Mush up: No pre-arrangement of contents providing opportunities for creativity.Project can
characterize in activities such as to conduct project design, identify project risks, etc.
Use of social networks brings the following 3 major competitive advantages to projects:
 Increase in business value i.e. by finishing the projects in lesser duration and start realizing
the business benefits early.
 Innovations, suggestions and knowledge flowing from the grass root level to any level
 Reduced communication time among the project stakeholders which increases overall project
performance.
3 Using Social Networks for Managing Projects
Virtual team
collaborations
Widespread
outreach
Enabling collective
intelligence
Improved
Stakeholders'
engagement
Improved
Collaboration
Extended
PMIS
Reduced
issue
levels
Collective
Intelligence
Increase in
business
value
Reduced
risk
levels
Better
engagement
With nuances of social networks, project Managers need to assume a role of a community manager
and guide his team and stakeholders on how social networks can be used in project delivery. Social
networking can be employedin variety of project activities for knowledge sharing, information
distribution, team collaboration, external communications, and customer engagement and so on.
Using social networking as a competitive advantage through
 Increase in business value by using open platform for team collaboration.
 Reduces costs of communications by efficient on-the-fly communications among teams to
project’s advantage.
 Reduced time on resolving burning issues or mitigating risks by getting inputs from the
stakeholders instantly.
 Better engagement and transparency among stakeholders through open and instant
communications.
 Better team collaboration to produce qualitative project deliverables through brainstorming.
 Better communications by sharing scanned images, photographs, etc.
 Define a separate Twitter name for your project for branding purpose. Let world know about
the project!!

Table 3.1: shows how Social Networks can be used in various areas of Project Management.
Table 3.1: Using Social Networks in Project Management
Attributes of
Social Networking
Project Areas Examples
Stakeholders’
Engagement
Customer
Management
 How do you manage request from customer on a
particular issue? Brainstorming can be done by a
predefined team to address the issue.
 Getting clarification from customer on requirements,
contract’s terms and conditions
 On the fly sharing of various documents, multimedia
files, etc. facilitating
Stakeholders’
Engagement
Stakeholder
Management
 Understanding information flow trends in the team
 Public announcements with specific pre-defined
hashtags like overall progress, likely date of completion
of the project, reasons for delays, major cost
escalations, milestone achievements and so on.
 Receiving and analyzing feedback to understand
overall sentiments.
 Internal announcements about project’s status, new
innovations, learnings and failures, etc.
Knowledge Sharing
Team
communications
and
collaboration
 The questions asked and discussed were available to
all the people who joined the discussions later.
 Using labels and categories to expedite search for
relevant information
Knowledge Sharing
Extended Team
Collaboration
 Collaboration and linkages to other communities could
provide quick and suitable support/advice to the project
team.
 Support from R & D Division, competency centers, etc.
 Leveraging on the expertise of external teams,
organizations, associations, etc.
Team collaboration Project Delivery
 Deliverables produced via online collaboration:
 Plans, Registers, Trackers
 Analysis, Design Documents
 Other project artifact reviews
 How we can improve on quality of deliverables?
Extended reviews can be planned to get feedback on
key deliverables just before they are released.

Attributes of
Social Networking
Project Areas Examples
Team Collaboration
Risks and
Issues
 Involving stakeholders for risk identification and
analysis, mitigation actions, etc.
 Publishing common issues and informing team
members on how to tackle such issues.
Team Collaboration
Quality
Management
 Involvement in creating and revising procedures
processes, checklists, procedures, guidelines, etc.
 Getting on the field feedback on the quality artifacts.
Information
distribution
Project
Communications
 Publishing details events, meetings, workshops etc.
 Project eventslike milestone achieved, leaning from
failures, sharing success stories, etc.
 Social Events like project party agenda, on-line meets,
etc. to get remote teams connected
 External information which are of some interest to
project team members.
4 Implementing Social Networksin Projects
No doubt, communications is the most critical part in project management. It is all-pervasive and
ongoing in the project life cycle. Social networking as now to be the integral part of an organization’s
IT strategy to improve internal collaboration. It is a new and very different communications
environment and project manager needs to plan for using social networking tools in his project.
Miscommunications are often caused due to haste in sending messages. It further cascades into a
series of mails/messages creating more and more confusion. Social media tools are also fast way to
communicate, so there are risks in using them for project communications.Social media can be
effectively used in project in firefighting issues by making quick and interactive communications for
early resolution.
To use them successfully, implementing social networks requires:

 Training to the team members and the stakeholders for using tools and techniques and
applications to post their view to appropriate groups.
 Understanding and using tools and techniques and various applications to perform analytics
on the available data to get various patterns
 Rules for privacy and confidentiality to control the project communications.
 Content definition and its management stipulating areas for communications on the social
networks.
If you are not using social media in your project, it is quite possible that project team members are
exchanging information using personal social networking. This could harm the project interests and
uncontrolled information will flow within and outside the project team.
Project team members and stakeholdersshould understand sensitivity of the information and its
impact on the project. Emphasis is to be given on the demerits to minimize damage due to
miscommunications.Without this awareness, team members will be sharing too much information
which could be detrimental to the project.
Project manager can think of using social networks for the project use depending on the preferences
of the team members to use a particular network(s). The posting can be embedded or linked with
other sites and published over there to the target groups.
4.1 Using Twitter in Project Management
People are using social networks for quick communications and mostly it is unstructured and informal.
Search engines will use these tags, lists, keywords, security setting and applications find required
information patterns, overall activities. To control this information, the social networking sites are
providing tools and applications. However, project manager should define policies, processes and
procedures. New role and responsibilities also need to be defined to take care of posting, reviews,
publishing the content.
As an illustration, how Twitter can be used in project management is shown in Table 4-1.
Table 4-1: Using Twitter in Project Management
Facilities Purpose Typical Usages
Tweet/Retweet/Dir
ect Messages/
Sending/forwarding messages
 Sending alerts to the project team for
document readiness, approval and
completion
 Sharing the successful completion of a
key project milestone(s)
 Sharing audio or video conference
details
 Sharing the completion of key project
tasks / milestones

 Alerting the project team a new issue
has occurred and what measures need
to be taken to control such issues
 Advising the project team that a key risk
is no longer current and needs no
immediate actions or otherwise.
Buffer Apps
Schedules of publishing of the
information periodically or as
required.
Posting can be planned in advance and
posted.
Lists
Allows you to listen to
conversations, identify
influencers and filter out noise so
that you can focus on the topics
which you are interested in.
Pre-defined lists can be used to conduct
communications on specific topic(s) among
different groups created for different
purposes.
Hashtags,
Keywords,
Used by search engines to make
query and analyze.
All related people know what the purpose of
such tags is and how they can be used to
communicate and to make searches. #hash
tags also help in finding trends in the
communications by the stakeholders.
Privacy Setting
Privacy setting can be set to
control addition or removal of
members from the social
network including lists.
Social networking accounts can be set as
“Private” to control the information within a
defined group, protecting the confidentiality,
access and availability of the information.
TwitAdder/
Tweepi /
TwitterReach
To know who to follow and who
you want to follow
This facility could be very useful in a
government projects where public, social
communities, unions and other interest
groups are actively involved and influencing
the project outcomes.
Social mention
Search engine for analyzing
social media conversions to
analyze metrics such as
 Number of visitors,
followers, friends, fans,
members, etc.
 Amount of time spent on the
social networks
 Level of activity on the
social networks.
To analyze and understand what
stakeholders are talking about the project?

Twitpic: /
Upload photos and easily share
Yfrog /
them on Twitter.
YouTube videos /
AudioBoo
Get status of project using
photos/videos/audios for remote locations
Tweetdeck or
HootSuite
To listen conversion about you,
you project, your organization,
Get feedback your feedback and take
appropriate actions.
Tinytorch
find relevant social content about
your industry
To compare in the industry vis-à-vis in the
project.
Embedding Twit
Leverage twitter in other social
networks like Facebook LinkedIn
by embedding the tweet
Very useful as posting can be done on one
social network and can be posted on
another social networks such as Facebook,
Google+ etc.
Like Twitter, Facebook can be used in project management is shown in Table 4-2
Open Group
Create an open group to trigger
discussions and get feedback from
anyone on posted topic related to
the project.
 Project team can seek the opinion on the
posted topics
 Some project-related artifacts can be
displayed and feedback is sought.
Closed Group
Create a closed group and anyone
can see who are the members but
cannot see what is posted.
 To know who are the member of the
various committees
 Who are the team members of a
projects?
Secret Group
Create a secret exclusively for its
members
 Reviews of project documents
 Brainstorming on various topics
Posts/
messages
Posting a message on the wall, in
the open, closed or secret book
 Similar to the use of
Tweet/Retweet/Direct Messages/
Chat
For instant messaging and very
easy and direct way of
communicating with some.
 On the fly queries can be made on
burning or urgent issues
 Quick feedback on some topic, issues or
risks.

Pages
Project specific pages can be
created to publish to share
information and get feedback from
the target audience on project-related
topics.
 Share project milestones achieved
 Share changed schedule dates
 Share budgeted costs and actual cost of
the public and infra project.
Interests
Project specific pages can be
created to discuss common interest
topics.
 Create common interest groups for
specific topic.
Events Creating events and informing to
the relevant people
 Invitation for project related events
 External events like training can be
shared with members for nominations.
 Birthday party of a team member.
Ads Adds can be created on Facebook
by using information like page post
engagement, page likes, clicks to
websites, conversions, event
responses, etc.
 To understand overall trend and what
Facebook users are talking about the
project and analyze the data to align with
project objectives.
 To publish project achievements.
Project manager can consider other social networks (Google+, LinkedIn, etc.) for publishing project
related information and also to provide a platform for communications. One of such networks could be
primary and he may selectively or grossly synchronize other sites bye linking or embedding the
contents.
Recently, in General Elections, 2014, Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) used social toolsiito build a team
of volunteers to
 Take up individual tasks based on time available
 Express your views to selected groups by joining the group and actively participating and
expanding the group by tagging volunteers’ friends for discussions.
 Participation in open forum on critical current issue(s)
 Share on social media using Twitter, Facebook or other social networks in suggested post
and share it on volunteers’ pages.
 Add media worthy watch on the web and spread through.
 Earn points and badges to climb up ladder of the active volunteers and selected volunteer get
chance to meet top leaders!!!
4.2 Advantages of Social Networks
Harnessing the power of social media technologies is one way to do this.
 Support team-based collaborationiii through quick and direct communications to get updates
on the project progress status in various forms on 24X7 basis.

 Enables collective intelligenceiv
 Strengthening social connections
 Facilitating knowledge management
 Fostering situation awareness
 Enhancing business value
 A variety of groups with spatial characteristics and interests can be created for theme
discussions.
4.3 Disadvantages of Social Networks
Due to its openness and informal nature, social networks has to be used with caution. Some of the
disadvantages are:
 Set up very high expectations for quick, direct , informal and concise communications.Sending
a message a few minutes late could be very late!!!!
 Responses are mostly quick, but very informal and not very precise. Project has to have
process to review the responses and then take formal action on information shared on the
networks.
 Risk of too much of uncontrolled communications form any level.
 Opens up the possibility for hackers to commit fraud and launch spam and virus attacks
 There is a danger of criminal prosecution in case of abusive language used while
communicating to the external stakeholders.
 Limited to those who have access to the internet and mobile networks. Other channels need
to considered to reach the target audience which not covered by social networks
4.4 Critical success factors
 Organizations that should embrace the social media rather than blocking their employees
using them, will find themselves at competitive advantage.
 Organization that will engage customer for trust building, effective use of push mechanism for
communications.
 Identifying the right kind of project activities that can be accomplished using social networks.
4.5 Challenges of Information Security
Everyone must understand that the information shared to a friend or a group is not limited to whom
you are sharing to. The information can be in turn cascaded to the world like a virus by your friends.
Fundamentally, social networks are not designed to keep the information private. This is a curse or
boon. Depends on what you want to achieve and what you don’t want to!!
In the haste for open and outreached communications, project manager should ensure that the
sensitive information is not shared on the social sites. Social networking sites have become a
potential target for attackers due to the availability of sensitive information, as well as its large user
base. vSocial networks for project are likely to be behind firewall for security. There are some
instances that some social networking sites have shared data to advertisers. In such situation, project

managers should perform information analysis and categorize with the consent of the key
stakeholders about what information can be put in the internet, intranet and extranet.

5 Future Trends
Going forward, project management software will include media suites as a common features. This
additional functionality will facilitate the management of various data streams centrally.New tools will
be launched by different service providers for enriching user experience and all such tools will have
common interface to integrate with various social platform.One of the predictions for the
changing social media technology market is that biometric scanning will be incorporated into the next
generation of tools (Phillips, 2008, p. 83)vi. Major advantage of using biometric traits for identification
will to resolve identification crisis and reduction in the fake user accounts.
Using social networking is not just implementing of social tools in the organization as an IT initiative,
but it is a business need to understand them and implement them for achieving business objectives.
Project managers will have to embrace these new channels of communications and plan for its usage
to reap the benefits due to quick, direct and open communications.
Social networks are going to stay, and organizations will increasingly use them in project
management, sales and marketing, brand building and many more areas.
6 References
[i] http://www.clearvale.com/clearvale/mkt-av/en/whitepapers/7StepsSocialBusinessSuccess_Whitepaper.pdf
[ii] “Shaili Chopra”, The Big Connect- Politics in the Age of social Media”, “Random House India”
[iii]http://www2.mitre.org/public/jsmo/pdfs/01-01-evaluating-uses.pdf
[iv ]http://www2.mitre.org/public/jsmo/pdfs/01-01-evaluating-uses.pdf
[v ]http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/cse571-11/ftp/social.pdf
[v i]http://pmi.books24x7.com/assetviewer.aspx?bookid=35846&chunkid=771155376&rowid=260

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