Friday, August 29, 2008

Social Networking within Project Management

I'll be the first to admit that trying to find a reason for implementing new technology is not as prudent as finding a business reason for the technology. That includes trying to find various usages for social-networking functionality not necessarily on social networking web sites.

Some people in the office have been kicking around the idea of integrating social-networking features within project management and/or requirements management. Many of us are on linked-in and facebook, and we like the idea of sharing with people
-- what they are doing right now??
-- sharing any new thoughts??

If you have a mini-social network within your project team, it's definitely doable to share features or ideas within the project team. If someone adds a new features and you select to share it, when people log in to the project tool you would see:
-- Fred Gates just added a new ecommerce feature
-- Sean Smith is posing the question about xyz

Yes it could work, but is it a stretch? The short answer is that we're not sure and until we start seeing a gravity towards this kind of functionality in other tools and having customers consistently request this functionality, this won't be a part of the project management platform for some time to come.

But we'll keep an eye on it.... Happy Labor Day Weekend!!