I have already mentioned that many-to-many structures employed in project management 2.0 software offer a better way to organize your projects. Here is an interesting angle on the same topic.

Have you ever thought about how our mind organizes ideas? We do not organize all the information we know in one strict hierarchical tree, life is too diverse for that. Associations radiating out (or in) from many different connection points help our brain to navigate through a vast information pool and quickly make decisions. Many connections in many different directions connect items together. We could say that the structure in our mind is a network of connections or a many-to many structure.



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Dave Prior and Bob Tarne have recently blogged about the so-called post-modern project management with a reference to Dr. Davidson Frame. Their idea is that there are lots of methodologies available, and that in real life, there can’t be just “one true way” for managing a project. Each project is unique, and each time we need to find a new way of managing and completing it, very often mixing several methods and techniques. This is the creative part of the project manager’s job. The project manager needs to be flexible and try to view his or her project from different angles to understand which methodology he or she should apply and how to use different methods together harmoniously. Here, the right tools will be a great help. Project management software should support a manager’s flexibility, giving him or her options to look at the same project from different perspectives.


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In my previous post I wrote on gaps in efficiency of traditional project management tools. The major problem with these tools is that they are not flexible and that they do not leverage collaboration. These tools created lots of additional routine operations the project manager should perform. Many of these operations are connected with project planning and updating project plans.


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Recently I came across an article about how hard it can be to introduce new enterprise business intelligence technologies to a company. This article reflects an important corporate phenomenon: “mandating and forcing users to adopt a standard practice or technology will often create resistance and political backlash.” The author underlines that transforming and changing the way people do business is never easy, and she advises the heads of IT departments on the best ways to implement the changes.

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Top-down and Bottom-up Project Management: Leveraging the Advantages of the Two Approaches
Significant changes are taking place in management and especially project management today. We hear that organizations, like the New York Times, Tribune Co., Ernst & Young switched from the so-called top-down management style to bottom-up management. Others, including some of the world’s biggest corporations, such as Toyota and IBM, implemented bottom-up management style elements in some of their departments. The popularity of the bottom-up approach to management is growing. In spite of this fact, the discussions about the two major approaches are still hot. Why have organizations become so anxious about changing their management style? If we compare the two management approaches, the answer to this question will be clear. 

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Today I would like to give a definition to the new term used by me in the title of this blog.

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Every year and even every month, new technologies, markets and competitors spring up, and today’s businesses have to be agile to be able to face the impending challenges. In such an unstable environment, traditional principles of managing product development may lead companies to failure. If the product requirements change drastically from the time the product is designed to the moment when it is released, it can result in the delivery of outdated products. Otherwise, ineffective change management processes may destroy product development, and the product will never be delivered.

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Organizational change experts stress the need to develop agile companies. Major Enterprise 2.0 theorists say that new-generation technologies can turn inflexible companies into agile and efficient organizations. They praise social software for optimizing management and overall company activity.

To start with, why is the word “agility” so popular in management nowadays? Every year, new technologies, markets and competitors emerge at a rapidly ascending pace. Future threats and opportunities become harder to predict, and emerging challenges include increasingly novel elements. Today’s businesses are affected by globalization processes, and enterprises often become bigger, therefore more inflexible and bureaucratic. As organizations grow into huge corporations, it gets more difficult for them to react to constant market changes fast enough. This results in an ongoing agility gap. 

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As we all know, the project manager in organizations traditionally has the burden of compiling plans and information for the team’s work. The information is then kept in disconnected files, no matter if it is a Microsoft Word file or a Microsoft Project file. The manager is struggling to bring the project plan to life as all the information on the project is concentrated only around a single person - himself. He first has to pull facts out of employees by meetings and e-mails, then put them into a file, then update the information, then communicate it to upper management and clients. The usual means of getting information from your employees turns out to be time-consuming and effortful. This “bottle-neck” effect creates additional, but unnecessary, duties for project managers.

The new generation of Web-based tools unleashes the power of collective intelligence and changes the pattern of project management. It allows associates to collaborate on project plans.

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