Today, no company can be immune to the current economic situation. So it is the time for many businesses to analyze their business model and risk profile.

Economics experts join their voices stating that the best thing you can do to withstand the crisis is to improve your customer service and be attentive to customer needs.  Terry Leahy, the head of TESCO, a British-based international grocery and general merchandising retail chain, noted in one of his recent interviews that staying close to customers is the key to surviving the current, difficult economic conditions. “We learned some lessons, and the message is simple – stay with your customers. Listen to your customers.”

For project managers, it’s important that you treat your customers as stakeholders.  John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods) and Kip Tindell (CEO of The Container Store), who drove their companies with a constant growth over good and bad times, explain their take on stakeholders in this very interesting interview. It’s a must-read for executives in the current economic conditions.


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I was invited to write for the influential Cutter IT Journal a few months ago. I composed an article on the benefits of executing project management the 2.0 way. You will be able to find the full text on Cutter's site. My article, “Discovering the Benefits of Project Management 2.0,” was then republished in a larger Cutter Consortium report, titled “Next Practices in Modern Project Management: Supporting Communication, Collaboration and Collective Intelligence.”


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I recently wrote an article for PMHut.com. The Project Management Hut is a very useful site for project managers and those who want to know more about this sphere. Articles on topics like traditional and innovative project management methodologies, project leadership, the history of project management and much more are written and gathered from all over the world by a group of project managers, who decided to make their vast experience accessible to everyone.



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Many analysts, including myself, say that project management 2.0 tools make teams more productive and make organizations agile and more competitive. But does this mean that they prevent project failure?


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I presented Project Management 2.0 at the UTD Project Management Symposium on August 18. The audience was terrific. I was pleased to find out that many project managers who attended my presentation had previous experience in using wikis and other Project Management 2.0 tools in their work. We had an interesting 30-minute Q&A.




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I was interviewed by Bas de Bar recently. Bas has a great blog called Project Shrink. It is a valuable source of tips, ideas and other important information for project managers. Bas is also the  author of "Surprise! Now You're a Software Project Manager." Those of you who are in software development might want to have a look at it.

We had a conversation about the nature of Project Management 2.0, emergent structures, collective intelligence, project management software and my work on Wrike. It was a pretty long dialog, so Bas decided to publish it in parts. I will be glad to get your feedback on what I said there.


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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 one of my recent posts I wrote that using project management 2.0 software helps project manager guide his team’s work, delegate some of his initial duties and allocate roles and responsibilities so that they are clear to everybody on the team. Project management 2.0 tools also let one apply some traditional methodologies of structuring responsibilities more effectively. Let’s take RACI as an example.


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Hundreds of people are already looking forward to this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. One of the most interesting sessions during this conference last year was one by Leisa Reichelt. Leisa is interested in the changes going on in project management and she calls these changes Social Project Management or Project Management 2.0. At Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2007, she gave a presentation on Social Project Management, where she pointed out several distinctive features of the new wave in the project management discipline.  According to Leisa, they are: small teams, motivated people, limited planning, minimal scope, small projects, rapid release, responsiveness, and iterations. Leisa noted that the essential point of her presentation was that “there are other ways to manage projects than ye olde fashioned waterfall methodology.” According to her, these ways emerge in project management due to the penetration of social software into in the enterprise.


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