We define a project as a temporary social system where people come together to work towards a common goal. The key to successful project management is therefore to understand how you make a temporary social system perform better.
To do that you need to understand how people are motivated, how they interact to create professional relations and how you can leverage technology to make people feel committed, empowered and passionate about their projects.
We believe that people at their core are driven by a strong need to contribute and feel that they belong, that they are part of a bigger whole. We also believe that an enjoyable working situation is important for projects to succeed.
This is not just something we preach as a company vision, nor is it a cultural thing. We believe this is general human behavior and a fundamental characteristic of our species. Companies that embrace this view are the ones that are going to deliver best value most effectively.
As a consequence, we believe in the following three success factors for all professional projects:
- Make it easy for people to align purpose, gain mutual trust and coordinate commitments while working together in the project.
- Make sure the team can learn and adapt to change within and outside the project. Things never go exactly the way you have planned them, and very often the customers of the project will need to change their requirements during the project.
- Tap into the strategic advantage of technology to open up communication and share information transparently across boundaries.
This is our attitude and stance towards how to succeed with professional projects. It is our take on Project Management. This is where we want to excel. It’s how we make project collaboration easy, efficient and delightful.
Based on this belief, we have defined our way of managing projects. We call it Social Project Management.
We believe that projects with the courage to open up communication and share information transparently to create trust will be the ones most likely to succeed.
Producing trust occurs as people participating in a network of commitments acting in language, come to see each other as reliable performers, and learn to align and connect their interests with each others’ interests and with those of the project.
As a consequence the main focus of Projectplace is to promote cross-boundary project collaboration by communication. Projectplace supports decentralization of control that promotes individual initiatives, concurrent work, continuous learning and innovation.
Projectplace tools will continue to evolve with new enabling technology, but always adhere to the way we think easy and efficient project collaboration should be implemented – The Projectplace Way.
Further reading:
- Social Project Management – The Projectplace Way
- Social Project Management, Wikipedia
- Sources and References
This post is taken from our help wiki. You can read more @ http://help.projectplace.com
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Posted on April 4, 2011
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