Thursday, December 11, 2008

Business Trends: Project Management and Client Coworkers

By Louis Soul

The world is getting smaller. Well, it isn't physically getting smaller but that is one way of saying that global communications have become so fast paced that the world is really one community in a lot of ways. With the advent of the internet, email, instant messaging and VOIP, it is entirely possible to do business with trading partners around the globe without ever leaving your office.

Conventional project management is a systematic approach to taking a project from scope to implementation that has proven successful in thousands of companies. We have no reason to abandon this well developed methodology. But as new business paradigms come to play, we have to adapt even a standard methodology like project management to fit the way business is done in this century.

Controlled email trees. As the project manager, email is an obvious way to quickly stay in touch with team members. However, it can get chaotic trying to keep up on fast moving email trees. That may be a good reason to trap all emails trees within your online project management software so the contributions of everyone on the team can be captured for further review.

The client coworker

There are segments of every business that have no contact with customers so it is difficult for them to develop a customer service mentality. And if the business itself is not structured to deal with the public or have conventional "customers", that approach to the business world can be lacking in the workplace. That is why a big business trend in all type of business settings is to change the work ethic internally so that workers view those who use their work as customers.

It's a noble effort to try to alter the traditional culture of an office based business setting. The traditional culture of a "cubicle farm" type of office setting often resembles the comic strip Dilbert. That strip can be painful to read if you are a manager trying to keep a creative and proactive team moving forward in a business setting. But Dilbert does point out some of the communication problems that are common in an office setting. The distrust of management, the tendency by employees to drift toward unproductive attitudes and behavior and the low morale of many office settings is lampooned by the strip.

There is very little room for creativity or individual judgment within the confines of Project Management and that is problematic because the nature of business problems have historically depended on the judgment and creative problem solving skills of middle management. By dominating the project process with the needs of the Project Management methodology, excessive cost is introduced as well as cumbersome requirements that do not benefit the business or the project itself.

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