Scope is a function of meeting requirements.

A project manager’s job is to gather the requirements and develop a solution whose scope meets all the  requirements.  Often, this is an iterative process.

It’s a mistake to have the customer define the scope of the project (or to believe that once defined, they are set in stone; further clarification/iteration is always needed -it’s a function of the imperfect nature of communication).

As a project manager, you should be the expert in bridging business needs with a solution developed by a team of subject matter experts.  Anything less and you reduce your value to the customer.

There is one and only one communication path between you and another person.

There are multiple channels, multiple tools, different ways you can communicate with them: email, phone, text, Twitter, Yammer, Skype, video conference, etc.

But there is only one path.

It connects two people, them and you, together. No matter how many channels or media you use it is always going to be about that one and one. It is always about you and another person.

Don’t forget that there’s a person there. It’s a human relationship.

Vertabase and our team were recently recognized as Project Management Visionaries by the popular PaperCut Edge project management blog.

The article explains our vision  on project management and project management software.

Big thanks to Geoff for the recognition and kind words.

Lady Gaga has over 10 million twitter followers.

That number makes other brands salivate - and jealous.

They want those kind of numbers. They’d be happy with a fraction of those numbers.

Those numbers, though, are in-line with her total reach, her level of exposure and the way people interact with media.

Human Behavior is a Constant

As mentioned in my presentation on social media, people’s behavior seems to be a constant regardless of the technology used.  80% of all a person’s phone calls are to the same people.  80% of all Skype calls are to the same people.  The medium changed, the technology changed, but human behavior does not.

Lady Gaga’s numbers are no different. They are generally consistent with the levels of engagement across other media e.g. the percentage of an audience that calls into a talk radio show or writes letters to an editor of a newspaper.

Anecdotally, this number tends to be 1-2% of a total audience.  For Lady Gaga, using a total audience of at least 500 million unique members (in mid-2010 total views of her three most viewed videos was over 1 billion), her 10 million plus followers is right in line.

Why This is Good to Know

It paints clear expectations for any social media effort. To get to 10 million followers, an established brand needs to reach 50 to 100 times more people than that.

No doubt, social media makes it easier to reach people and easier for people to engage with your brand. But it is not a panacea for growing your market. That, still requires having something special that people want.

Why Does this Matter for Project Management

1.Technology doesn’t change human behavior. Project management software or other tools facilitate and expand our actions, but they don’t change the fundamentals of how we act.

2. Projects are all about people. It remains critically important to understand people (see Theory of Constraints) to manage and design the right processes for your projects.

The Task Scratch Pad is a personal, simplified, online spreadsheet that allows you to easily create task lists, brainstorm on project plans or create project schedules. It is another new feature in the latest release of our project management software.

Here is a video about the Vertabase Task Scratch Pad.

You can drag and drop tasks, quickly add new ones and save task lists for re-use.

Import task lists into project schedules with the click of a button.

It is simple to use and extremely versatile. You can use it to create schedules from scratch or add new tasks to existing projects.

Keep as many scratch pads going as you’d like.

Google launched a new tool in labs called Google Correlate.  It allows you to track how well a time series of data correlates with specific search terms in Google.

For example, a marketer could run a time series of when their advertisement showed on TV , then see if it impacted the search volume for terms associated with their product. They could then correlate that against actual sales volume to see how much of the advertising was spent educating people vs driving sales.

It can also be used to create all sorts of nonsense.

For example, I ran a time series of the daily close of the S&P 500 stock index. The most tightly correlated search term was “Microsoft clip art.”   Correlation is definitely not causation.  I then ran it with a lag, groping for a theory on the relation between putting together PowerPoint presentations and bullish sentiment.  Alas, also nonsense (plus the minimum lag is one week, which is too large for daily closes).

To use the tool properly, you need a Theory of Search as it relates to whatever subject matter you’re studying.  The theory is what ties together the data.

Knowing that one side of the data set is always going to be search terms, as a general principle you could say that Google Correlate is best used for tracking the spread of ideas among people who use Google.

The data can be powerful or it can be more noise in an otherwise clear analysis.  It all depends on the theory, the framework, the context in which the data lives.

Bringing this around to daily work life, we create and receive a lot of information every day about the work we do and project’s in which we’re involved.  To be helpful, that information needs to live in a theory, in a framework, about work.

Without a theory, without a framework, all the data generated (in meetings, reports and project management tools) can fast become noise. The good news is that there is a theory of work -it is easily accessible and doesn’t require a Ph.D. to understand.

Project management is a Theory of Work.

Project management is a framework of how people work together on projects and expend resources to achieve a particular goal.  It explains what data to monitor and how to use that information to improve processes.

Use project management as a skeleton on which to hang your information and as a guide to determine what information you need. You can accelerate your understanding of how to get things done more efficiently (and maybe even cut out some unnecessary meetings).

Putting out fires is not risk management (it’s poor planning).

Before you kick-off your project, ask for the problems that could arise.

Don’t just think about them. Ask everyone involved on your project team. Ask your customer. Ask the project sponsor.  Ask experts who have done these kind of projects before.

Ask for the problems.  Make a list of them. Then figure out ways they can be solved when they happen. Put these solutions right next to the problems on the list.  Keep the list handy if/when problems arise.

Take a look at your project plan and see if there’s anything you can change that will reduce the chance of the problems happening. But keep in mind, that every change brings with it potential new problems.

This process is called Risk Management.   Contrary to popular belief, Risk Management is not about managing problems when they arise.  It’s about looking for them beforehand and being prepared for when they happen.

Like any part of a project, planning and preparing early on saves money, time, morale and headaches, as opposed to be surprised by problems and dealing with them on-the-fly.

Seth Godin and Ian Greenleigh propose promoting hashtags with books to facilitate persistent conversations about the books or topics.

This is similar to the experiment I participated in with StackExchange and Rally Dev last week at the RallyOn11 conference.  (The idea was to keep the conference conversations going and searchable long-after the conference ended.)

StackExchange is the perfect medium to make this happen. Twitter is dangerously unmoderated for this to work there.

What we’re talking about is knowledge discovery and knowledge creation. The act of people finding knowledge, discussing it and creating new ideas.

Knowledge needs to function in a context to have meaning. This context can be provided by a community -by an audience.  This is facilitated by creating ways to categorize knowledge or discussions.

By giving anyone the ability to publish to a hashtag, the knowledge loses context. It becomes highly diluted. Quickly.  (Unless, Twitter comes out with a business model where there’s an entrance fee/ a gate to publish to a specific hashtag or to search on a specific hashtag.)

StackExchange has a community that puts knowledge discovery and knowledge creation into a meaningful context.  It creates a taxonomy of knowledge and structure to the process of knowledge creation and discovery that is meaningful to the community (and highly findable).  And since the privilege of determining that structure is based on participation in the community, it is theoretically open to all. (Shades of Wikipedia but with fewer barriers to entry into the editors club.)

What’s more, by providing structure and clear rules of participation, StackExchange has a built in revenue model waiting to burst: offering knowledge-process management services to organizations that value it. Like pharmaceutical companies, healthcare, telecom or aerospace, places where innovation carries huge multiples.

Longer term, unstructured conversations will become just more noise and meaningful conversations, conversations in context, will gain value. This is the challenge for Twitter, turning audience into power.  This is where StackExchange currently has the lead.

UPDATE: Let me know if you have any questions on using StackExchange for your organization, particularly the project management or programmers site.

I will be teaching a seminar at the PMI -Great Lakes Chapter this Thursday, May 19th.

The seminar is entitled Team Communication Near and Far. It is the third class in the Spring Seminar series.

I will be discussing the importance of context in communications, how different communication media create and contort context, and how to improve communication in our highly distributed, socially networked world.

Workshop exercises will be used to increase participants awareness of these issues and train participants on techniques that can lead to better project communication, happier teams, happier stakeholders and more innovative solutions.

Participants receive 3 PDU’s (continuing education credits) from the PMI.  You can register and get more information at the link above.

Here is a list of articles and podcasts related to the seminar.

Project managers fail because they are often brought in by a manager looking for a baby-sitter until the team somehow gets that manager’s attention again.

Project management fails for the same reason. It is put-in as a proxy for spending time, by a product owner who really doesn’t want to get involved in the details but somehow wants the perfect outcome at the end.

Of course, these are straw man arguments.  Project managers don’t always fail. Project management can be extremely successful. But if you find yourself in the situations above, don’t be frustrated if you or the discipline are not effective.  The environment is standing in your way.