Is it possible to successfully introduce the best bottom-up practices to an organisation by utilising traditional tools? Traditional project management software was originally designed with the top-down approach in mind. Traditional applications are not meant for bottom-up management. They are complex and hard to master. These applications are focused on the project manager and make him the major link in project communications. Team members very often do not have access to the project plan and cannot make contributions. The employees e-mail their updates to the project manager in disconnected files. The project manager then has to collect all the data and put the information manually into the project plan. Then he has to communicate the changes to the corporate executives. The misalignment between the bottom-up best principles and the old tools may cause situations when the project manager's talents are buried by the routine operations. Sometimes project managers just do not have time for leadership.
The old methods of how people share and receive information have been radically transformed in recent years. Now there are more means for the successful implementation of the bottom-up management best practices. These are Enterprise 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs and collaboration tools. The new technologies come into organisations and change the old way of managing projects. They turn traditional project management into Project Management 2.0 and bring new patterns of collaboration, which are based on collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is a collection of valuable knowledge from different fields that each project team member is an expert in. This knowledge is now successfully collected and shared in a flexible, collaborative environment brought by second-generation project management software. The project manager is the one to conduct the work and choose the right direction for the project development, based on the information received from individual employees.
The role the project manager plays in the project changes. Project Management 2.0 software helps him create complete delegation. People become less dependent on the manager as a to-do generator. The project manager turns from a taskmaster into a project leader who facilitates the team communications, provides a creative working environment and guides the team. He becomes a visionary who can leverage the team strengths and weaknesses and adjust project development to the external changes.
The second-generation tools allow project managers to merge the advantages of the two initial management approaches. These applications let you combine control and collaboration, clarity of project goals and visibility of internal organisational processes.
Thousands of companies now report that bottom-up project management, implemented with the help of Enterprise 2.0 tools, improved their business performance. Among them are Bell Canada, Sun and Yahoo. These corporations created their corporate blogs to streamline project communications. Even giants, such as IBM, realise the benefits of allowing contributors to have a more active hand in how collaborative work is organised.
Democratising project management is never an end in itself. The primary goal is always to find ways to make project management and project collaboration more efficient. New technologies applied to projects offer us the powerful ability to make projects more successful and teams more productive. With the help of new-generation tools, projects can be delivered much faster, and this is to everyone's benefit.
