With the closing of 2007 it is time to take stock of where you are in project management and look at where you want to be in 2008.  Some of the work we (at Collaborative Strategies) have been doing over the last few months is to look at the enterprise and how well it is adopting Collaboration 2.0 technologies (or Web 2.0 technologies moving into the enterprise).  It probably would not surprise you to know that these more traditional technologies (I will call these Web 1.0 for now) have wide spread adoption in the enterprise, but these new Web 2.0 technologies are not being adopted as quickly into the enterprise as many (not in IT) would wish. 

Your Situation

The situation is this.  Your 30 years old, a few years out of college and in your first or second commercial job... your mom is so proud of you.  When you get to your new job environment you find that they are still using e-mail as the main messaging infrastructure, a few people at the company use IM, there are no blogs, no wikis, and web conferences are used on special occasions, while audio conference calls happen every day. You are the only one in meetings with your laptop, and wireless connectivity is as scarce at hen's teeth.  You are able to do more with your blackberry than your laptop or Macbook Pro.

It is kind of disappointing, since you were so looking forward to a fun work environment and changing the world.  You are use to knowing the location of your friends from sites like Placzs and knowing what they are up to from minute to minute because they are chronic posters on Twitter. You have been asked to start a new project (very visible) with a new team in the New Year, yet there is no wiki on which to start the discussion with your team about the project constraints, resources, etc.  You never bothered to learn Microsoft Project, and prefer to work with SaaS (software as a service) based tools, as they are inexpensive or free to try, don't require software installation or IT intervention (or permission) and tend to be very cost effective for smaller project teams.

Even though you work for a large company, your group behaves like its own small company, not quite a start-up since you do have a budget, but most of the other groups in the company leave you alone to do your business and keep things profitable. So what do you do to get these new projects started?

Why are these tools not catching on in the Enterprise?

Tools, like Clarizen, have taken some of the Web 2.0 advances in the consumer space and are trying to make them acceptable to the enterprise.  There are a few reasons why these tools have not had a wide rate adoption at the enterprise level, but have done well over the last year at the group, team, and departmental level.

1. Accountability - In the consumer space there often is no concept of accountability. In the open source arena companies like Red Hat (for Linux), Qwaq for 3D collaborative environments and Spike Source for many other tools, are providing accountability in terms of a place to call when you want support, bug fixes, maintenance, updates, etc. Many of these new firms provide these services as premium services, i.e. the software is free, but the services are an additional cost. Some of these firms even provide consulting or professional services to round out the mix of requests from the enterprise.

2. Security/Access - there is the notion of access in the consumer space, but nowhere as rigorous as in the enterprise. For the enterprise there needs to be integration with the LDAP directory and the ability to assign granular-level access and privileges based on names, roles and groups. In addition, roles change over the course of a project, and someone needing a high level access at the beginning of the project may not need it after the project progresses past a certain point. In addition, many people in the enterprise play different roles on different projects, so it is not enough to give Joe Blow project manager access on the XYZ project, as his role on the ABC project may be just that of an advisor, or a worker but not the project manager. For the enterprise project tools need to provide not only enterprise level support (see above) but enterprise level access and granular controls. For regulated industries access may also need to tie into governance tracking and restrictions.

3. Ease of Use - one of the big benefits of Web 2.0 tools in the consumer space are their ease of use and lack of training needed. However, many collaborative tool vendors have chosen to take a Web 1.0 strategy and go for more features over ease-of-use. In our survey work over the last year we have found that ease-of-use, or rather a positive and empowering user experience is usually more important to a majority of users than an additional function. This seems to be the philosophy for the products from 37 Signals, like BackPack, or BaseCamp. Provided the tool has the minimum number of functions used by the majority of users, ease-of-use is much more critical than additional functions. For example, in the document management space, most document management tools have to have the standard functions of: check-in/check-out, version control, search and notification. More than that starts to get very complicated, and you begin to lose users exponentially the more features you add.

But there seems to be a trick in finding the right level of complexity in the project management tool, and the number of projects it will support. I talked with Andrew Heard, a project director at WSI, one the country's largest consulting franchises, and found out that they were currently testing Clarizen because they deal with 20-40 projects per month and had outgrown BaseCamp (which Heard says works fine for a small company with 2-3 projects but not for the project volume they are currently engaged in). What Heard liked about Clarizen was:  

•  
  • It is a SaaS-based application - allows people (with access) to log in from anywhere (and allowed their SEO and writers to collaborate on client projects no matter where they are).
  • It has a good interface, and was easy for his people to get up to speed and use
  • They were able to track projects more seamlessly
  • They were able to communicate with their clients through Clarizen (e-mail) and did not have to go out to Outlook (or some other e-mail) to send messages
  • Found BaseCamp too simple for their project volume
  • BaseCamp required too many clicks to do simple PM tasks
  • Clarizen allows you to assign tasks, layout tasks and navigate the task tree, and provides better time tracking

4. Cost - In the consumer space there is the idea of "try before you buy." For example many services offer a 30 day trial before they want your credit card to begin charging you. In 30 days, or maybe 60 in the enterprise, you and your team can figure out if you can use this service, if it fits your needs, and fits the way your company works. This makes it a very low risk proposition to sign on for a subscription to the project management service for your team after such a trial. In addition, the cost for a small project team may be below the $ threshold that the project manager is allowed to sign for, allowing the team to use the software without having to get additional permissions from IT or management.

5. Infrastructure - For licensed software, IT often needs to provide not only infrastructure (networks and bandwidth) but also management of that infrastructure and sometimes management of the application. With a SaaS you can bypass all of that and let the application company do the hosting and deal with the infrastructure. You are renting access to the application along with the infrastructure to support it. Again, this is a much lower risk proposition than requesting IT resources.

6. Temporary Applications - Often a team will need to use some software or an application for a specific amount of time. It might be 2 weeks or 2 months. In either case the issue is critical to the business unit, but there is no ROI case for IT for such a short term application. If requested, IT will put it on their list, but it might be years before they get to it. Only with hundreds or thousands of these short-term applications might IT begin to approach a positive ROI for this situation, and even then, it is not clear that they even want to deal with this stuff.

It is hard to argue with success. If you pick your project carefully, use the right SaaS, and can show some real metrics for success after about 60 days, it will be very hard for IT or management to argue with that strategy, especially since there is very low risk associated with it.  I recommend this course for the New Year, pick a project, try a SaaS, see if it works for your team, limit the amount of time and budget you spend on each SaaS option, and look at different solutions until you find one (or more) that works for you, and fits your group, team, or departmental needs.  Don't worry about if it will work with the whole enterprise. In our research, most enterprises do not have an overall strategy for these things, and just say "no" to anything they don't understand. Make sure you have some strong ammunition (metrics) on your side if you have to engage them in a conversation.