Today, let’s discuss a high risk enterprise 2.0 project, i.e. an intranet deployment project. One of the needs for a project is a project manager. Let’s take a person who has a excellent track record in managing succesful projects, somebody who is of age, and don’t know very much about software development, trends and technologies, and intranets, the only thing he knows is a development cycle, business requirements, functional specs, technical specs, development, test, implementation. Also the PM is a dominant person, and thinks he knows best. Fine, this combination will lead to an intranet which will never be born, and if it is born, it’s handicapped and doomed to die. What the big mass of project managers don’t realize is that they entered a whole different and new world, where innovations follow up, and where the customer is most important of all. The customer has to deliver the input for a working intranet, but also he has to be part of it, better, he has to

So, a good advice to a Project Manager who needs to deliver a succesful intranet

1. Welcome in the world of Enterprise 2.0 where everything is a beta, when is your project finished and mission accomplished?
2. Bottom-up instead of top-down, don’t like that style? Welcome to Funeral 2.0 where your project just failed
3. Manage the process, and the people, not the content (you should have done so from the beginning, or are you not a senior high skilled project manager)
4. Listen with your consultants to the customer, not to yourself or your consultants
5. Managing and development the old fashioned way was a long time ago, nowadays we think about who is the user, and when will the user use the application
6. Don’t be afraid to lose a bit of control, controlfreak
7. Think out-of-the-box, think about the unstructured way, it is always nice to see how things evoluate when structure is released in certain ways
8. Take care of a good architect in your project, an architect who knows what SOA and WS-* means
9. If your Business Executive or CIO says Enterprise 2.0 he means Enterprise 2.0, not development the old fashioned way, not client-server, not static html, not ERP, no, Enterprise 2.0
10. If you think the Business Executive or CIO has to deliver end solutions, then you are wrong, today they deliver PCs with the MS Office suite of productivity tools (or was it yesterday), tomorrow they will need to deliver a read/write Intranet with a suite of productivity tools
11. Enterprise 2.0 applications need to be easier, easier than the applications and tools now used, else they won’t simply use them, get the idea? EASY
12. Not only your individual project members needs to act like a team, also the business users
13. It is not about what is needed now, it is about what is needed tomorrow. So, scope creep is not always bad. Remember, it is an evoluating application, always a beta
14. It is not about delivering a whole set of functionality, it is about leveraging the tools to create functionality
15. Testing is important, it was as always important, but nowadays it is still important, and can not be skipped
16. Divide your project in small increments, and iterate much, Small increments show visible progress
17. Many voices generate emergent order: you can get much value out of all that data.  

If you don’t recognize yourself as a project manager in the above listed points, please get another job, or decline the project. It is time for project manager 2.0 style