August 2006 | Blogging Your Project

Elizabeth Harrin, a senior project manager and writer describes how blogs enable project communication and includes two Traction case studies, August 3, 2006 The ability to share views in real time can also help combat the silo mentality that grows up around projects. A blog is a level playing field, owned by the project, and easy enough to use for everyone to feel they can get involved... early signs are that blogs are a low-cost solution for project managers to improve communication and collaboration on projects. That alone should make them worth investigating further.

Paul Wormelli of the IJIS Institute described the benefit of his Traction deployment: "One of our project committees is producing guidelines for victim notification systems. It saves time on the phone and when we’re collaborating on documentation. The Institute used to send out Word copies of reports for review and one person was nominated to collate the comments. If there was an error in the document it would be picked up 25 times. Now we have 400 people working on 37 projects collaborating virtually. One committee cut the number of phone and in-person meetings it holds by half.”

Similar benefits were reported by TextWise based on their Traction deployment: Sharp-eyed developers at software company TextWise LLC noticed a duplication of testing effort mentioned on their project blog and managed to avoid a month-long development delay by flagging it.

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