Isn't it great when you say something with authority and an even more respected authority in the field says the same thing? This happened to me twice today at the Web Conference.
The first was during the keynote when I realized that many of the items touched upon by Steve Krug would be elaborated on by our What Not to Wear on the Web session. Luckily, I am not the type of person to dwell on this or worry. After all, we were going to expand on what he mentioned anyway. Not a biggie.
The second one, and the one I really want to focus on here, is related to a point I made in Blogs and Wikis for Internal Communications: wikis make great project management tools. At the keynote, one of our distinguished panel of experts (I could not see who because I was in the back, so please comment if you were there and remember), mentioned that he does not use project management software anymore, just wikis. Wow, do I feel totally validated!
The first was during the keynote when I realized that many of the items touched upon by Steve Krug would be elaborated on by our What Not to Wear on the Web session. Luckily, I am not the type of person to dwell on this or worry. After all, we were going to expand on what he mentioned anyway. Not a biggie.
The second one, and the one I really want to focus on here, is related to a point I made in Blogs and Wikis for Internal Communications: wikis make great project management tools. At the keynote, one of our distinguished panel of experts (I could not see who because I was in the back, so please comment if you were there and remember), mentioned that he does not use project management software anymore, just wikis. Wow, do I feel totally validated!
Even though I have been reading about this use for some time, have used them as such on a few projects (most recently Penn State Libraries Meeting Maker to Oracle Calendar Migration), it felt reassuring to know I wasn't the only one giving my peers this information.
A wiki is flexible. With reorganizations, ad-hoc projects, shifting priorities, and changes in technology our projects are also flexible. We can adapt the wiki to any structure we want. It can contain any information and be seen and edited by any participants we want.
Project management software requires setup time. At best, you spend the better half of an afternoon figuring out the start-to-finish relationships of all the dependencies of your tasks and hope the calculations are correct. If something about the process changes, you spend another half-day reconstructing your timeline. At worst, you spend months in meetings setting up a solution that works for your organization's business processes, only to reorganize and have all the time and training lost.
Here are two warning signs that you should be using a wiki instead of project management software:
- By the time you customize your project management software to fit your organization or project or business process, you have reorganized and/or the project has changed.
- You can't do any real data extraction because no one understands the software, the fields are not applicable to the project, or taking the time to update the project management timeline would actually hold up the project itself.
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