CHAPTER 33
Social Media Tools: An Introduction to Their Role in Project Management

ALAN LEVINE, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, AND CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD, TESSITURA NETWORK, INC.

It is likely that the trend I’ve noticed in our workplace in recent years developed gradually, starting with one or two people and spreading. But the revelation of it came to me suddenly, just before the phenomenon reached critical mass.

I walked into an office at the Kennedy Center, where our software developers sit in a U-shaped arrangement facing the walls with an open space in the center for group discussions that also allowed one to easily see what everyone was doing. I must have been unusually quiet, because nobody “alt-tabbed” to another screen when I entered the room. As I looked around, two of the developers were using Instant Messaging. Another was on a Web browser, reading a blog written by one of the lead architects of the software environment he was working in. All three were hard at work. Instead of working “heads down” trying to solve the day’s challenges, they were reaching out in new ways: asking questions, sharing ideas, and getting immediate help from other developers, inside and outside the organization. They were going immediately and directly to the best source of information, wherever it might be. On its own, without directives, the team had reinvented itself and its primary means of communicating and collaborating. The team had also extended its reach and the resources available to it—at virtually no cost!

This was a sea change from the traditional hierarchical, email-driven ways of the immediate past. It also represented a significant acceleration in the flow of information. Combined with “Presence” features that let one know who was available at any given moment, Instant Messaging was clearly a rapid, convenient, and nonintimidating way to reach out. Perhaps just as important, though, was who the team was reaching. The universe of contacts they could access had grown. They were going right to the source of expertise, where before they had been limited to the people in the room, those elsewhere that they had a personal relationship with, or the support person who answered the phone at a vendor service desk.

Companies who in the past had carefully shielded their lead developers and architects from informal, regular, and direct contact have had to quickly learn that the fastest road to relevant innovation and market acceptance is to break down traditional barriers. The new collaborative and social technologies are making it possible for them to do so with less fear of wasting valuable time and resources. No longer do they have to publish a book, wait for the annual conference, or spend all their time at customer-site meetings to have a direct, almost personal connection to their customers and peers.

The benefit is bidirectional: customers gain access to personal knowledge and answers right from the original creators, and those creators gain a direct understanding of customer perspectives and needs. A few minutes a day, a few hours a week, can have a significant impact. As in IT shops all over the country, my staff had quickly learned to take advantage of the new availability and access they had to people and information. There was no question that this was resolving our problems and challenges faster, and would accelerate our project success.

The next questions were clear: what were the underlying factors that made this new paradigm so readily and easily embraced, and could we leverage this phenomenon for project management? Of course, the answer was a resounding “Yes.”

SOCIAL MEDIA AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT PRACTICE

It can be said that an important, if not the most important, key to successful project management is the timely receipt and distribution of complete and accurate tidbits of information to all the right people in a useful format. In an ironic twist of fate, this is also one of the most challenging aspects of project management. There are many well-understood reasons for this challenge: project participants are sometimes too busy and see status reporting and updates as an imposition; for many, such writing is outside of their comfort zone and thus intimidating; for others, information is power, and the withholding of information means others must pay homage, or at least attention, to you.

There may also be less obvious motivations. I’m reminded of the story of the newlywed wife who, wanting to quickly establish her place in her husband’s life, decides the best route is through his stomach. She asks her mother-in-law for his favorite recipes. The mother-in-law, not wanting to refuse outright, provides her with the recipes. But no matter how much effort the young wife exerts, these dishes that mean so much to her husband never taste quite right. Years later, she learns that her mother-in-law, not wanting to be supplanted in her son’s affections, had left out one or two key details from each recipe.

In traditional Project Management, our top-down means of coordination and communication can be complicated by the manifestation of these very same issues. We ask for status reports or metrics, and we run smack into differing agendas, motivations, and comfort levels that limit the timeliness and value of the information we receive, as well as the utility it provides to participants at all levels. It may not be intentional withholding or transforming of information; sometimes it is just time pressure or not appreciating the relevance. I am perhaps exaggerating a bit to illustrate a point, but no project manager will claim they haven’t run into these challenges regularly in their careers. Social media allows us to change this paradigm and address these challenges.

Another reason social media have rapidly taken root in project management is related to the changing practice of the discipline. Where traditional Project Management focused on managing the inputs and outputs of one project, with the goal of scheduling, we now focus on managing the processes and work of a project, where the real goal is successful collaboration. Social media enables this collaboration.

A SOCIAL MEDIA PRIMER

Let’s examine what is different about the new social media that makes this possible. This will also reveal some of the key success factors to their incorporation and utilization. Later, we’ll review more of the specifics about these tools and methods.

First, and perhaps most important, is that at this moment these tools are often being introduced and adopted from the bottom up, rather than as a directive from the top down. Many of our team members, regardless of their age, have begun to use these tools in their personal and professional lives without prodding. What pressure there is to adopt these means of collaborating and sharing information is often peer pressure from friends, professional acquaintances, children and other family members. Had I given my teams a directive to use these tools, the effort would likely have been much less successful.

Right away there is thus a trust (whether well founded or ill advised is another conversation) and level of comfort when using these tools. They feel natural. Furthermore, collaborative tools ask users to share control rather than cede control, which also helps to foster a sense of trust. This is the first lesson of success: Social Media forums depend on a sense of community. Social Media must be trusted by the participants before they will embrace it. They often have a higher level of trust in these social networks than in the hierarchical networks that have been imposed upon them. This trust is fostered by the community of peers, rather than by directive.

This brings us to the second critical difference. The networks (communities) must be self-sustaining, self-correcting and self-policing. The community itself fulfills these functions, not management. This involves several considerations.

To be self-sustaining, the community itself must recognize and reward the strongest contributors, providing powerful peer incentives for participation. The tools facilitate this recognition through community rankings and ratings of each post and participant, “counters” such as number of posts from each member or how many “friends” or “colleagues” are in their network, and the raising of successful participants higher in page displays and search results. This feedback-driven recognition and reward encourages full participation and sharing of knowledge and information. Rather than gaining influence (or the perception of power) through the withholding of knowledge and making oneself the sole source of important information so that colleagues must approach and ask directly, the motivation is now to become visible and recognized by the community.

As a direct result, the community is self-correcting. Less knowledgeable or expert participants automatically receive less attention, and once the community reaches critical mass, there is enough active participation that an incorrect or controversial post is almost instantly questioned, rebutted or augmented. Here it is interesting to note that participants often divide into two camps depending on their individual personalities: those who are active posters of new information, and those more likely to be silent until there is something that they can comment on and correct. The sense of ownership engendered in each member of the social network and the recognition given to the participants who contribute the most value also provide motivation to refine any content and correct anything misleading or inaccurate. Perhaps this is the hardest point to digest and accept, as whenever we are de-centralizing control of information, as we must for social media tools to be successful, the natural fear is that bad information will creep into the system. But who better to monitor and correct this than the sources of information and the expert participants? In virtually all cases this is preferable, more rapid, and more effective than ceding such control to a centralized, sometimes overwhelmed manager with a singular viewpoint. It is a significant change for many organizations though, and one that takes a while to digest and embrace.

Closely related is that the community is also self-policing. Communities develop “social norms” and, as in any society, a member who deviates from that norm in a harmful or detracting way is quickly called out and chastised. The same recognition mechanisms that reward valuable participants is called into play to discourage disagreeable behavior.

A last critical difference embodied by the manifestation of social media is the ease of information capture. More traditional forms of communication and collaboration, particularly email and formal documents, were point to point between sender and recipient, and resulted in duplicated and separate copies of the content in the possession of each participant. This made the information difficult to uniformly categorize and sort for all participants, and could not easily be referred back to, particularly if you were not a team member at the time. Now, blogs and threaded discussions replace email and Wikis replace documents. Content is categorized immediately. It can easily be referred back to at any time, even by people who enter the collaboration much later. Even Instant Messages provide a permanently viewable trace of not just the content, but the thought pattern in which it was developed. All of this fosters the continued transfer of knowledge across projects, a key sign of increased organizational maturity and an important project management goal.

These elements combine to make a social media-driven network stronger, and quite often faster, than one based solely on technology or an imposed organizational structure. Tantek Celik, Technorati’s Chief Technologist, has called Social Media “Parallel processing for people rather than computers.”¹

The Tools

What has enabled this shift is a perfect storm of new technologies arriving almost simultaneously that have made this shift in paradigm feasible. We can divide these technologies into three categories: Synchronous, Asynchronous, and the underlying technologies that support and enhance both.

Many if not all of these technologies first came into people’s personal lives, and were later introduced and adapted into the professional realm after they had already been embraced.

TABLE 33-1. A PERFECT STORM OF SOCIAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES

THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS: TWO CASE STUDIES

The Kennedy Center

At the Kennedy Center, we’ve moved beyond the initial communication and research uses that first led to our revelation. We’ve turned Project Management upside down, using these tools to make everyone a Project Manager. Team members now use Twitter throughout the day to send status updates, share new insights, and identify challenges. These “tweets” are monitored by the whole team; everyone is constantly aware of where things are in virtually real-time. They have also to a large extent replaced formal status reports—the Project Manager simply monitors or refers back to the stream for relevant information. The ease of use, lack of formality, and 140-character limitation all combine to remove past barriers and reluctance to take the time and effort to share the information. For some team members, taking the time for these tasks was like pulling teeth, now they universally enjoy passing around tweets.

Our project plans are collaborative and hosted in an online Portal, with key team members all having direct access to update them. Automatic alerts notify everyone of any change. Everyone “owns” the plan and the project, reinforced by, and reinforcing, the sense of community.

Wikis have largely replaced formal documentation, to the same affect. They can be constantly and easily edited. When there are questions as to relevance or importance, gray or controversial areas, these can simply be added to the discussion behind the Wiki page. Everything is in one fully searchable location. Again, this has removed the intimidation of creating formal documents, reduced the perception of the time and effort required, made ownership shared, personal, and fun. Thus it has been widely embraced.

All of the project resources are accessible not only to developers and project managers, but also to business unit participants and external consultants and collaborators, further strengthening the team cohesion and sense of community, and adding even greater value and efficiency to the tools. Replacing more traditional forms of communication and collaboration, such as email and distribution of formal documents with these social portals has meant project participants can access information when and where it is most needed, not just when it is sent.

This has resulted in somewhat surprising shifts. The collaborative tools offered new avenues for communication, and monitoring. Staff members who in the past were reserved and quiet became much more vocal through the online tools. We gained new insight into who the real influencers were, who the “go-to” people were, and where the bottlenecks were.

All of this has resulted in Project Management morphing into an integral part of everyone’s existence, rather than a separate discipline imposed on the project. This has streamlined operations, and made projects more predictable and repeatable.

Tessitura Network, Inc.

Very different from the Kennedy Center is the Tessitura Network, Inc., of which I currently serve as Chairman of the Board. The Tessitura Network is a not-for-profit organization that develops and supports a sophisticated Customer Relationship Management system that is highly specialized to meet the needs of performing arts organizations, handling complex functions such as ticketing and fundraising. The company is owned and governed by the over 200 arts organizations that license and use the software. Member organizations include some of the most prestigious arts organizations in the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, Kennedy Center, Sydney Opera House, and the Royal Opera House. Tessitura Network, Inc. was designed from the start to be highly efficient with low overhead. It is a virtual company, with no offices. The more than 50 staff members are distributed throughout the United States, Australia, and the UK. Tessitura Network, Inc., was also designed from the start to be highly collaborative and inclusive, seeking input from and involving all member organizations.

With such a distributed team and a “virtual office,” social media tools quickly became indispensable. One thing missing from a highly distributed team is the sense of “being there,” the kind of cohesive, personal contact a group gets from being able to look up and see who is in the office, from standing around the water cooler and gossiping, from going out to lunch together. Instant Messaging and Chat were quickly adopted, not just to share critical information, but also for the staff to simply let each other know when they were going to lunch, or getting up to get a cup of coffee. At the same time, they were of course sharing critical project information. This group of isolated individuals quickly became a cohesive, close-knit, committed team, facilitated by the intelligent application of social media tools.

The Tessitura Network has also recently taken on the challenge of beginning a total redevelopment effort, from the ground up, of its application. One of the big challenges of such a project in a company of this nature was how to ensure that the customer base (in the case of Tessitura Network, the “owners”) of over 200 independent organizations was highly involved throughout the process, made even more critical by the stipulation that the new application had to be designed and built in such a way that it was forward-looking and could likely meet the business needs of its member organizations for the next 15–20 years. This would be a big enough challenge in even a single organization, let alone across 200+ independent and highly creative organizations. Once again, social media tools have become a critical element in the project, engendering a highly engaged community with minimal resources and expenditures.

A Collaboration Portal was set up very early in the project, with significant effort expended to get strong participation. The portal substantiated the community through social networking profiles and links. Project visions and charters were shared and collaborated on in document libraries and wikis. A blog from the core project team started very early. An online Forum was created, with all organizations invited to actively contribute and participate. Leading questions were asked, and project members continued to seed the conversation and maintain the momentum. All of this was done before even the first in-person project summit was held. Simple polls were taken, allowing those who didn’t have time, expertise, or confidence to participate in fuller conversations to still get involved, have input, and be a part of the community.

These were not just superficial marketing efforts. Tessitura Network was “crowdsourcing”—asking the community for substantial, meaningful expertise and input into the project. The team could not have even conceived of ultimate success without this, and the social media tools enabled it to be done effectively and at very low, almost no, cost.

These social collaboration efforts were so successful that a planned in-person requirements gathering summit was reduced to only three days in a single location, versus the originally envisioned multiple weeks in multiple locations. Prior to the summit, participants, many of whom had never met each other in person, were already using the social media tools to plan social outings around the summit gathering. The group of highly distributed, diverse virtual strangers quickly developed a strong self-awareness and sense of commitment and involvement in the project.

As the project continues, the portal will be used to deliver prototypes, gather further input and review, and keep everyone at all levels completely informed and involved in the project every step of the way.

What traditionally would have been a staggering challenge—building consensus among over 200 unique organizations around a highly sophisticated, integral component of their operations, in a short period of time at a reasonable cost around a highly innovative vision—became a realistic, even fun, community effort, all thanks to some hard work around the fully integrated use of social media tools.

THE FOUR A’S

Lee Ramie of the Pew Internet Project recently described the “Four A’s” of communication and influence in the modern social media age. They are:

1. Attention to information.

2. Acquisition of information.

3. Assessment of information.

4. Action, the ability to act on information.

Organizations and project teams that can effectively position social media tools to form a community and a platform that together can address the four A’s will no doubt experience a significantly higher project success rate. There has been a “Perfect Storm” of technologies and paradigms introduced into personal and professional lives. Companies from Google to Chrysler are learning the wisdom of flattening structures, supplanting centralized decision making with close collaboration and community and team building. Google, always recognized for allowing its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on personal projects, recently introduced management changes designed to increase collaboration and visibility into promising projects and bring upper management closer to the engineers. As Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne took over leadership of Chrysler, he set up office not in the company’s Executive Tower, but rather on the fourth floor of an adjacent building where the engineers worked. Companies all over are recognizing the importance of innovation, the competitive advantage of a close knit, diverse, committed community of stakeholders of all types. Social Media is one of the key tools they are turning to.

To be sure, challenges remain. Security, integrity, confidentiality and availability of information is always an issue. People are struggling with multiple competing technologies, multiple profiles, and the difficult to distinguish boundary between personal and private. New standards are constantly emerging, and it can be difficult to separate valuable trends from short-term fads. Nevertheless, the potential of social media to radically improve and change the way we approach project management is too great to ignore. Properly done the costs of entry to social media can be surprisingly low. Embrace what is happening, and harness it!

REFERENCES

¹ Don Tapscott, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Penguin Portfolio Books, 2006.

² The primary method of learning about social media is by using it. Visit Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Facebook, Twitter. Download an instant message program. Start reading blogs and listening to podcasts. Find a way to incorporate Skype (with video) into meetings. Try replacing paper documents with an online collaborative document. Get hooked.