Using Blogs for Project Management

I chaired the RSS and Web­log day at Sey­bold San Fran­cisco 2003 (I’d put in a link but there’s noth­ing use­ful there that isn’t pass­word-pro­tec­ted). One of the pan­el­ists was talk­ing about using blogs for pro­ject man­age­ment, espe­cially when new people are expec­ted on the team. The idea is that new people can come up to speed quickly and don’t need to have mega-mounds of email for­war­ded to them. Sounds good, but in prac­tice I’m find­ing that people have a hard time adapt­ing to using more than one meth­od of com­mu­nic­a­tion. So many people use email for a simple todo-list track­er and pro­ject man­ager that they send email first and think about maybe doing a blog entry “if they have time” afterwards.

I’ve star­ted to won­der wheth­er there are deep­er issues here than just people not quite being ready to move to a new tech­no­logy. There are, of course, tech­no­logy issues as well. One obvi­ous dis­ad­vant­age to pro­ject mana­gent via a blog is that you always have to be con­nec­ted to the inter­net to keep on top of it. This rules out those people who catch up on their todos while sit­ting on a plane. And VPN and secur­ity tech­no­lo­gies that involve pass­words and logons tend to put people off as well. RSS/Atom feeds that involve pass­words are dif­fi­cult to man­age (point­ers to good read­ers that can man­age pass­word-pro­tec­ted blogs are wel­come, and I’ll update this page to include them). 

Are there people issues as well? With email, it takes an action to for­ward the email to someone else, so a per­son can legit­im­ately claim they only expec­ted it to be read by the per­son they sent it to (wit­ness all the legalese on the bot­tom of much com­pany email). With a blog, there’s the sense that any­one could read it, even if pass­word-pro­tec­ted. This may be nerve-wrack­ing to those unsure of their opin­ions, or nervous of mak­ing a mis­take and post­ing some­thing they later regret. Even though delet­ing a post­ing is easi­er than recall­ing an email mes­sage, the thought of per­man­ent archiv­al can cre­ate a cer­tain angst.

One of the main prob­lems may be the unfa­mili­ar­ity of the user inter­face. For email, no mat­ter what soft­ware the sender used to send the email, you read it in the tool you choose (or your com­pany chooses). For a blog, you have to use the inter­faces provided by the web site (assum­ing you don’t just read the feed in a read­er that works with Out­look). This may or may not include use­ful items such as search, or cat­egor­ies, although many of these are now becom­ing more com­mon as the blog­ging soft­ware sup­ports them. It will be a while before usab­il­ity guidelines work their way through and people come to real­ise what is use­ful for dif­fer­ent types of blogs. For example, if you expect people to read the feed via Out­look, you might want to con­sider put­ting all the con­tent in the feed, rather than just an excerpt and then send­ing them to the web­site for the rest.

For what it’s worth, I think any blog­ging soft­ware com­pany aim­ing at rel­at­ively light-weight cor­por­ate pro­ject man­age­ment uses could do a lot worse than to ori­ent them­selves on email soft­ware. That is, of course, sup­pos­ing that any­one actu­ally does use blogs for pro­ject man­age­ment. Do they? Do you?