Blog + PSA = New Killer App?

Blogs as a Project Management Tool?

There’s a short piece in the 3/6/6 issue of InfoWorld titled “Six Apart Brings Blogs to Businesses”. The most intriguing part of the story was a sentence that said “Corporate workers are increasingly usurping blogs and wikis for collaborative efforts such as project management and bug tracking.”

Years ago, I wish I had something like a blog technology to share bug fix information with other, even non-Accenture, project teams. I led the implementation teams of several ERP implementations back then and one vendor’s product had more holes than a block Swiss cheese. I did manage to create informal collaboration links with other users of that software product but it was time consuming and hard to do. A blog would have worked so much better.

At another time in my career I was dealing with an email/knowledge sharing tool that many consultants still use today. My dissatisfaction with that product was the extreme amount of time it took to create a new knowledge sharing database within the product. Complicating matters was the fact that any new database addition (or change) required CIO approval. I could finish five client projects before I could have made any of these changes.

The newer technologies resonate with me as they can:

-          be quickly built/deployed

-          do not require internal CIO approval

-          do not affect internal systems

-          get rapid answers to consultants and others with similar issues

Non-hosted solutions cannot make that claim. Most PSA and PPM solutions also meet these criteria.

Time is money for most service professionals and tools that place critical information into the hands of these workers fast and inexpensively are a boon to clients, users and the service firms that incorporate them into their tool chests.

Comments

[Dennis Howlett]

I don't even think you need to go that far. I'm wondering whether a wiki/blog combo like Near-Time might be an interesting approach. For the time/cost element, I've been raving about thingamy. Yes - you read it right...