Google Wave, ideal fit for light weight project management?
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 11:26 on July 22, 2010
In essence project management is all about making sure that different tasks are being done by different co-workers within time and budget. This sounds pretty simple, but every organization has problems delivering projects in a successful way. Barely one third of all projects are deemed to be a success.
Methodologies such as PMBOK and PRINCE2 are intended to keep projects under better control, but with a huge overhead in paper work and structured meeting moments. For today’s rapidly changing (business) world, a more ‘agile’ approach is often more appropriate.
Google Wave is being announced with the motto ‘Get stuff done with groups of people’. But does it?
As Google Enterprise Partner and Google Apps Reseller we have multiple projects running simultaneously. Most of these projects include tasks that need to be handled by customer employees. In the meantime we know from experience that the somewhat more sophisticated tools –i.e. Microsoft Project, Manymoon, Basecamp– are simply a bridge too far for them. Usually the learning curve is too big.
That is why we use something that everybody understands: a Google Spreadsheet as a task list with color coding for the status of the individual tasks. Green is ‘Done’, red is an ‘Issue’, grey is ‘In Progress’, white means ‘To Do’.
For many users this is a first time they use Google Apps and we present them an online and shared version of something they really know well and understand: a spreadsheet.
However, a huge disadvantage of this form of ultra-lightweight project management is that a lot of relevant information is kept in different places. Meeting minutes in Google Docs, opinions and feedback in Google Mail, tweets in Twitter, …
Is there really something that lay people can easily understand and is a combination of a traditional tasks list AND unifies the communications about the tasks?
We feel there is: Google Wave.
Trying to explain what Google Wave does, is next to impossible. It is a combination of mail, wiki, gadgets, etc. In a rather slogan like way some call it ‘email re-invented’.
Perhaps it is easier to show a real-life example of how Google Wave can be an answer to our project management problem: a simple way to manage tasks and communication about the tasks.
The coming weeks we will start a number of new projects where we will use Google Wave combined with Unawave.
Unawave, Google Wave extensie voor projectmanagement
Not only does this Google Wave extension allow you to assign tasks to different co-workers, obtain a real time status overview via a dashboard, but it also allows you to use all the Google Wave features to manage all communications in one or more Waves.
Want to know more on how to use Google Wave for lightweight project management? Get in touch and we can organize a webinar session on the topic. If you are Dutch speaker, join our webinar on the subject.
