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In my post of Sept 22, I speculated about new verbs for project managers. Seems I’m quite behind the times. John Udell, formerly of Byte Magazine, wrote about his own use of weblogs for project management in May 2001 Telling A Story. He explores story-telling as an important element in successful projects.

Email and the readable web are the two pervasive forms of interaction on the internet. Two other methods are gaining influence: instant messaging and blogging. Weblogs are a part of the writeable web. But people are not writing. Those of us who do write are an anomaly. Just like email brought about changes in communication (less careful, full of punctuation errors and misspellings, spam) IM has brought about more spontaneity in communications (abbreviations, jargon, profanity). Blogging brings out the writing skills and more importantly the expression of opinion, sharing of knowledge, and story-telling. Udell puts it this way,

"What (weblogs) can do — and it is no small thing — is help people with latent abilities in these areas discover and grow their talents."

"Blogging as a form of mainstream Web entertainment, with its star performers and its popularity ratings, may or may not be a passing fad. What will endure, in any case, matters more: a powerful new way to tell stories that refers to, and makes sense of, the documents and messages that we create and exchange in our professional lives."

Projects lack story-telling, particularly the kind that shapes a context for what is occurring on the project. Udell outlines design requirements for a project klog:

"At the intersection of (email and the readable web) there is a niche for a storyteller to occupy. The story that needs telling is a project weblog." See picture and description.

Udell's proposed structure for project klogs puts the otherwise unstructured nature of day-to-day interaction in the forefront for the team. It is the same dynamism of the interactions that leads to project breakdowns and that keeps us on track and leads to breakthroughs. The usual practice on projects is to keep the baseline project schedule in the forefront for the sake of establishing a mechanism of control. That practice interferes with the dynamism of interaction and, in so doing, dooms the project.

Udell's proposal recognizes projects as human endeavors that depend on the quality of interaction, specifically trust-building and coordination. In essence, making assessments and moving to (new) action is central to project success. Equally important is keeping team members aligned…avoiding hearsay, bad moods, and breakdowns in relationships. His proposed structure lives outside the commonsense of the PMI.

Beware: project klogs are not nice add-ons to the usual practice of project management. They belong to a different paradigm altogether, where planning is conversation, where doers are planners, and where the future unfolds. There's no straddling paradigms. You're in one or the other. Choose.