Can Blogs Aid in the Role of Management?
April 25th, 2003 by HalManagement by Blog? Some see it coming, but it's not here yet. writes
Jimmy Guterman in this week's Business 2.0 Barely Managing column.
Blogs are popular. This business blogging thing is like a solution looking for a problem. So where might the problem lie? How about the ongoing articulation and activation of the network of commitment? Guterman offered these observations:
The internal weblogs I've seen work are those that track an idea's progress from offhand notion to fully matured proposal. I have seen three such blogs, always-on virtual whiteboards that have sped development and kept the status of projects clearer than they'd been before.
Weblogs can fill a gap in the systems and practices of coordinating action by providing a tool for the team. Some think management's job is to control what is happening on our projects. Let's leave that job to an informed team with appropriate tools.
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April 28th, 2003 at 4:34 pm
Hi Hal,
Project collaboration software is (now) widely available. What advantages does blogging offer over these alternatives?
April 28th, 2003 at 9:04 pm
The first ‘advantage’ is the ease of setting up a weblog for a project. A second advantage has to do with the flexibility and versatility of weblogs. A team can choose to follow protocols or not, to have a project blogger or team blogging, and to archive or not.
While project collaboration tools have been around for over ten years (Lotus Notes) the use of those tools has produced mixed results. For the most part I see this as matters of the design team practices and the inertia of individual habits. Teams are together for relatively short times. Further, many team members only participate for part of the life of the project. I don’t see team leaders taking the time to design (declare) the practices for coordination and the following discipline to carry out the designs. This holds for formal collaboration environments as well as the informal blogging environment.
One further note…so much of what we see in collaboration tools comes from the management as problem-solving or management as decision-making paradigm. While it’s true that the collaboration tools can be used in ways more in line with a linguistic action perspective, they tend not to be used that way. I think this has to do with our commonsense. You see we share a commonsense that is all wrapped-up in the pursuit of optimal circumstances — the one right way — that conforms to the paradigm above. People need help engaging in a different way, a way that embraces our humanness without throwing away the best of the other paradigm.
I intended to provide exactly that help in my Proposal for a P-Log Specification.