One of my favorite Verizon ads depicts a couple of young teenagers and their parents talking about their new web-enabled cell phones. The conversation goes something like this:
"I’m sitting on the porch," Tweets Dad.
"Cool it with the Twitter updates Dad," says the son.
"Mom, you don’t need to write I love you, I love you, I love you on my wall all the time," bemoans the daughter.
The discussion continues with the son and daughter chastising their parents about spending too much time on the Internet with their cell phones … Dad tweets, "I’m still on the porch."
Fortunately, social media offers a lot more to project management professionals. In fact, I’m convinced it can play a vital role in building up project management knowledge in many organizations. Cindi has talked about this before. A couple of months ago, in a post she titled, Project Management and Social Media—What’s the Connection?, she spoke generally about how social media allows people to connect and form personal and business relationships with some incredibly smart and talented professionals.
"Post a question on Linkedin and see how many thought-leaders give up their time and expertise!" she said. "Or Tweet out a request for ideas about a dilemma you’re having with a project or that you need ideas for a PPM software. Answers will come flying back to you."
I agree. In my opinion social media, at least for all of us engaged in any kind of work management, provides a a wealth of experiential-based knowledge that can be successfully applied by anyone looking for a better way to get work done. I believe this type of knowledge-sharing is important as more and more organizations look to project management best practices to increase efficiency in the workplace.
In David Wirick’s book, The Project Management Imperative: Mastering the Key Survival Skill for the 21st Century, he writes, "The establishment of communities of practice can help sustain knowledge gains and spread a culture of project management learning."
He may not have been thinking about social media, but social media does provide a "community of practice" that is freely available for the asking—and can positively impact the way we learn. Wirick suggests that effective learning requires both explicit and tacit mechanisms for transferring knowledge:
- Explicit Knowledge: Is transmitted in formal, systematic language. It’s what we learn in training programs, manuals, and by reading books.
- Tacit Learning: Is personal, context-specific, and hard to formalize and communicate. In most cases it requires face-to-face interaction and is very dependent on the context where the knowledge will be applied. I believe social media provides an opportunity for an additional mechanism for tacit learning.
"Explicit knowledge transfer mechanisms include newsletters, presentations, status reports, project documentation, training programs, job descriptions, manuals, and the application of standardized processes and tools," writes Wirick. "Most managers are adept at explicit knowledge transfer; it is typically one-way communication from senior levels to lower levels of the organization."
Unfortunately, there are some things you just can’t learn from reading a book.
Some things require the framework of experience, collaboration, and the time for learning to evolve. This type of knowledge is best obtained by exposure to working project managers—and is the important role I believe social media can play in project and portfolio management. Combined with mentoring, workshops, and social events, social media provides another excellent way to foster communities of practice. "Tacit knowledge transfer requires informal contact and a willingness to share information," suggests Wirick. All of which can be found in social media.
Oh, I’m still sitting on the porch.
