Successful Project 2016 / Onnistunut projekti 2016- event in Tampere pondered current topics in four workshops. The second question was: How to have digitalization benefits put to use faster with projects? To ponder:

• ICT tools for efficient development projects
• Increasing the productivity of project work with ICT
• Project management models – how should we manage projects?
• Project management practices

Picture: At the workshop

Three groups underwent the questions and clearly what stood out the most was communication.

Quite the cliché but always current topic. Even though the importance of communication is discussed widely and it’s acknowledged, there’s always room for improvement. Here are few top picks from the summary:

• Everyone sees the information, not just the project manager
• Involvement of the whole project team, customers, stakeholders
• Centralised tool for data and to manage work
• Less emails, less meetings
• The importance of communications has to be emphasized. It’s not just the technical tools, but content

The communication content, distributing data to all participants and complete visibility are critical parts in having successful projects. As for the solution, joint tools for creating a virtual environment for the project where everyone in the project can see the progress, documentation and their own tasks was suggested.

I cannot go past this. In fact, it makes me want to burst, because the need for project management tool is so apparent and we have already been developing the solution for this over ten years. This tool exists, and it is called ProjectTOP Roadmap! Of course there are many others, but rarely these tools are actually in use. I do understand that the reasons for this are many, for example my last post was looking at this from the information security point of view. Some parties may have their own tools in use, but they are not collaborative tools.

Obviously no tool can offer a solution for the content problem of communications. What was considered important, was the form and content. It should be easy to read, understandable and as visual as possible. This has its own challenges in this world where our attention span has fallen to eight seconds according to Microsoft’s study. I’ll just leave that there and end this post in that spirit.