Social Project Management

Social project management is a non-traditional way of organizing projects and performing project management. It is, in its simplest form, the outcome of the application of the social networking (i.e. Facebook) paradigm to the context of project ecosystems, as a continued response to the movement toward distributed, virtual teams. Distributed virtual teams lose significant communication value normally present when groups are collocated. Because of this, social project management is motivated by a philosophy of the maximizing of open, and continuous communication, both inside and outside the team. Because it is a response to new organizing structures that require technologically mediated communications, Social Project Management is most often enabled by the use of Collaborative software inspired by social media (i.e. Ongozah). This paradigm enables the project work to be published as activity stream and publicized via the integration with the social network of an organization. Social project management embraces both the historical best practices of Project management, and the open collaboration of Web 2.0.

While Project management 2.0 embraced a philosophical shift away from centralized command and control and focused strongly on the egalitarian collaboration of a team, social project management recognizes the important role of the project manager, especially on large projects. Additionally, while Project management 2.0 minimized the importance of computer-supported scheduling, social project management recognizes that while many projects can be performed using emergent planning and control, large, enterprise projects require centralized control accompanied by seamless collaboration.

The concept of social project management emerged during 2008 when some developers of project management tools started to use the term to differentiate between traditional project management tools and tools for Agile software development.

While some have used the terminology Project Management 2.0 and social project management interchangeably, they exhibit significant differences in practice.

Communigram-NET, a network of excellence on social project management, has been set up since November 2011.

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