Episode 154: Social Media for Project Managers

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This episode is sponsored by https://www.pducast.com:

Do you tweet? Are you on facebook? Or maybe you have a LinkedIn account, a Xing account or an account on any of dozens of social media websites and you may have asked yourself... OK... so how do I use this to 1) find my next job and 2) manage a project using a virtual team?

You've come to the right place because I have invited Bas de Baar to discuss exactly these two topics. We'll start out with a definition of social media, how a project manager can best use social media to network to improve career options and Bas's many suggestions on using social media in a project setting for improved team communication.

And in our Gizmo's section we take a closer look at www.projectmanager.com. We talk with their CEO Jason Westland who has been a guest on the program previously.

Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.

Podcast Introduction

Cornelius Fichtner: This is The Project Management Podcast™. We bring project management to beginners and experts. Find us on the web at www.pm‑podcast.com or send your emails to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to Episode #154. I am Cornelius Fichtner. This is The Project Management Podcast™, nice to have you with us.

Do you tweet? Are you on Facebook? Or maybe you have a LinkedIn account, a Xing account or an account on any of dozens of social media websites and you may have asked yourself: “Okay, so how do I use this first of all to find my next job and then maybe also to manage a project using a virtual team?”

Well, you've come to the right place because I have invited Bas de Baar to discuss exactly these two topics. We'll start out with a definition of social media, how a project manager can best use social media to network and improve career options and then we also have Bas's many suggestions on using social media in a project setting for improved team communications.

This episode is sponsored by The PDU Podcast™, which is our sister podcast. It is a convenient way for you as a PMP® or PgMP® to earn unlimited PDUs. Get project management webinars delivered to your portable player like an iPod, Zune, Blackberry and earn at least 1 PDU every month. With The PDU Podcast™, there is no need to go to a classroom. You don't even have to sit at your computer. Instead, enjoy the freedom of earning your PDUs anywhere. Well, it is a podcast. You can take it with you just as you’re taking The Project Management Podcast™ with you. Simply download the webinars to your player and play them wherever you are; for instance on your way to work. Your PDU Podcast™ puts you on autopilot for your re-certification. Visit www.pducast.com. That's p-d-u-c-a-s-t.com

Before we get to our main interview, I have another Gizmo for you. We haven't had a Gizmo in a while, so here as a reminder: We occasionally present a website, a tool, a template collection or really anything that we like as a Gizmo. Today, we present www.projectmanager.com and I contacted the CEO, Jason Westland.

[Background music]

Cornelius Fichtner: Hello, Jason! Welcome!

Jason Westland: Hello, Cornelius. How are you?

Cornelius Fichtner: I’m very well, thank you. So tell me, what is www.projectmanager.com?

Jason Westland: Okay! So it’s a brand new website that’s been going for a year or two or now. But it has taken the world by storm. It’s online software that helps you manage projects.

So 2 years ago, we surveyed 3,000 project managers and we found that the most common reason for project failure was that people tend to work in silos. So communication was quite a big issue. Then we decided to create www.projectmanager.com to fix that problem so that everyone can work together online as a team. It’s one of the fastest growing project management applications in the market. In fact, we are doubling the number of customers every 8 weeks. So yeah, people seem to like it.

Cornelius Fichtner: What type of companies and projects is it for?

Jason Westland: To be clear, four teams work two or more projects on at anytime. The teams constantly on the go, under pressure, there are very tight deadlines that have to be met. So they have to work together by entering data on one place and that place is strictly online. It’s also the teams that want to see the project status real-time so they want a project dashboard online that shows the project progress at a glance.

Cornelius Fichtner: And what makes it unique?

Jason Westland: Well, we’ve got two killer features in www.projectmanager.com. The first feature is the Project Planner and it’s like an online version of Microsoft Project but it’s much simpler and easier to use.

The second killer feature is the Graphical Dashboard and it does show you the actual status of the project real-time and tells you if the projects are on time and the budget is complete with your under every resource. It’s also got a suite of other unique features such as online one-click reporting which aside from having to generate project status reports and you can also manage people, their expenses, risk changes, all the normal things, but at a glance, the most important thing is that it makes project planning a real breeze because it’s like Microsoft Project but it’s online.

Cornelius Fichtner: On the website, it says that it is the world’s smartest project management software. What makes it the smartest one?

Jason Westland: Well, it’s really a good question. We did think real long and hard before we put that up. It’s actually a project vision, a company vision and we believe that we’ve achieved that. It’s the world’s smartest for the simplest reason that it’s the only software in the world that contains all of the most commonly used features from Microsoft Project and it has a graphical dashboard that tells you the status of the project at any time. Also, the reports would have to be the smartest. We’ve got customer reports, the online reports for instance where they create a project status report or a portfolio status report at a click of a button. The [effort] of the company is to try and allow the project manager to get data out of the system as quickly and easily as possible. In essence at a glance, you can tell if your project is on track and we don’t know if any other systems would allow you to do that.

Cornelius Fichtner: Now, since I will have to enter all my projects online into your system, that means that you’ll have all my projects, all my data, all my information on your server. What about security?

Above are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete PDF transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.