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As a project manager, how to you improve your project management competency? The industry is full of options to provide training and learning opportunities ranging from in-seat training classes, project management organizations, conferences, on-the-job training, mentoring and various books and magazines targeted to our profession. You can't forget all the websites, discussion forums, e-zines and blogs that produce daily content filled with tips and advice on project management execution.
Since project managers are tasked with successful project delivery, there simply isn't enough time to review all these training sources to learn new ideas and improve existing skill sets. Is there ever a good time to take training during a project? If we are lucky, we have a small amount of time between meetings to skim a few project management websites in addition to checking ESPN.com for last night's sports scores. The other challenge is that all of these activities are outbound activities that require you to search, sort and scour the Internet for relevant content.
Wouldn't it be easier if someone just sent you all the information that you needed to know? Social media helps accomplish this goal by leveraging the interactive and collaborative platforms that Web 2.0 provides. Wikipedia defines social media as "the content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies". Mashable.com defines social media as "platforms for interaction and interacting". I view social media as a great communication platform for learning.
Wordpress blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Really Simply Syndication (RSS) technologies are all examples of collaborative social media platforms that enable communication and interaction. By simply tapping into these technologies, you can improve your project management competency with just a small amount of effort. Below are just a few examples of social media and PM Competency in action:
1. Project Management and RSS
I recently wrote an article on gantthead called "Global Programs and Global Tools". Gantthead also distributes articles via an RSS feed. The RSS feed syndicates the website content to anyone who subscribes to gantthead using an RSS reader. A popular and free RSS reader is Google Reader (Figure 1). Users simply add RSS feeds to their reader and new articles appear in the Google Reader dashboard.
Figure 1: Google Reader
Google Reader also supports integration with other social media platforms. Tim is a project manager who sees the article in Google Reader and likes the article. He then decides to share it using the "Share with Note" feature in Google Reader. His Google Reader account is connected with his Twitter account, and anytime he shares an article it updates his Twitter micro-blog. He can also send an e-mail to his account on Posterous.com and it will publish his comment to all his social media services.
Donna is a project manager who follows Tim on Twitter and uses TweetDeck to read the project management Twitter stream (Figure 2). Donna also likes the article and decides to re-tweet Tim's post to all her followers. The process continues as other project managers read the article, evaluate its value and pass on the bits of wisdom to their project management connections. As a content producer, I only need to create the content once and my information is distributed to the masses. As a content consumer, I follow the project managers and project management sources that contain great content and I'm informed daily.
Figure 2: TweetDeck
You don't have to become a social media maven to benefit from this inbound river of project management knowledge. You don't need a Facebook account or a Twitter account to get started. I recommend simply creating an account at http://reader.google.com and start subscribing to a few project management websites that support RSS feeds. To subscribe to a feed, you simply click on the RSS icon highlighted in red (Figure 3).
Figure 3: RSS icon
I recommend the following project management resources that support RSS and have my personal recommendation:
http://www.gantthead.com
http://www.techrepublic.com
http://www.joelonsoftware.com
http://herdingcats.typepad.com
http://mikeclayton.wordpress.com
These should be enough to get you started exploring Google Reader as a social media consumer for project management!
Authors Note: I originally published this article on Gantthead back in July 2009.
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