The Swiss Project Management Journal
Young PM
Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless.
JULIA CAMERON
Research indicates:
Social Media improve Communication
How Projects can benefit from Social Media. By Giulia Tonelli
The adoption of social media has changed the way
people communicate worldwide in the last ten
years. As this new communication channel is now
being introduced in corporations, it enables employees and executives to connect in more involving
and dynamic ways. And how can it be helpful for
project managers? At a large international corporation, I conducted a research project during six
months where I investigated how a global IT program in a large corporation adopted Google+ as a
social media tool. I would like to share some of these
takeaways with you.
T
o begin with, the decision on when
and whether to use of social media
needs to be put into context.
Are you managing multipletime zone
projects?
Are you keen to improve the connections within a mainly virtual team who
can rarely meet in person?
Do you need to improve transparency in
the communications on your project?
If the answer to any or all of these
questions is yes, then social media can
meet your needs. To use social media in
your project successfully, however, it is
recommended to follow some basic principles. Start by clearly defining and sharing goal and vision on the adoption of the
social medium and find a pool of members endorsing this new concept. Define
clear guidelines on what and when to
share. This will support you in managing
expectations effectively and in fostering
the use with people who are not used to
the tool. Lastly, clarify responsibilities in
your team on managing the use of this
new communication channel and do not
underestimate the effort required to manage the channel properly. G+ is a social
medium that allows users to create individual profiles and to set up online communities. These communities can either
be kept public, i.e. for everyone to browse
content and contribute, or managed as
private groups with access controlled by
Project Management Institute
SWITZERLAND Chapter
How to Get Started
Define a goal and vision around how the tool will be used in the project
Ensure the stakeholders or project members endorse this new concept
Define clear guidelines on what and when to share to manage expectations
effectively
Clarify responsibilities of managing and fostering the use of this new
communication channel
Monitor the engagement
the community managers. In the company where I conducted my research, this
channel was first introduced in a pilot
project in several IT functions. In 2015 a
project was initiated to expand the cur-
18
rent availability of G+ to all employees,
driven by the strategic decision to introduce a common collaboration platform to
the whole organization that can be used
by functions, groups and individuals for
sharing information. G+ is targeted in this
company to become the enterprise social
networking tool that allows users to share
knowledge, connect with expertise globally, discover communities of interest,
and to crowdsource and collaborate on
ideas.
Given this organizational context, the objective of my research was to understand
2016 Edition