Episode 187: Project Management Concepts for Enterprise 2.0 (Free)

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This episode is sponsored by... NOBODY!

Let’s be honest with each other. Last week, when you finished your project status report... how did you distribute it to the intended audience? You sent it via email... right?

Well, that is SO internet 1.0.

Our interview guest today is Dennis Brooke (http://www.dennisbrooke.com) who’s passion it is to help you adopt Enterprise 2.0 project management tools and move you into the 21st century. At his website you can read stories about life, business, and even project management

Episode Transcript

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

Podcast Introduction

Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to Episode #187. I am Cornelius Fichtner. This is The Project Management Podcast™ at www.project-management-podcast.com, nice to have you with us.

Let’s be honest with each other here. Last week, when you finished your project status report, how did you distribute it to the intended audience? You sent it as an attachment to an email, right?

Huh! Well, that is so internet 1.0.

Our interview guest today is Dennis Brooke who’s passion it is to help you adopt Enterprise 2.0 project management tools and move you into the 21st century.

This episode is sponsored by nobody! But I can tell you that later on this year, it will be sponsored by the 2011 ProjectWorld® & World Congress for Business Analysts. And I can also tell you that we will be able to offer you a 20% discount coupon as well as one complementary pass that we will be giving away. The event is 5 months away, so just keep listening.

Dennis Brooke is a Senior Program Manager for a small, but important, division for GE Aviation. He has managed successful projects from Seattle to Sydney, and confesses to being at the helm of at least one klunker. He’s been using web based project management communications tools since the late 90s and speaks and writes on the topic.

At his website, www.dennisbrooke.com, you can read stories about life, business, and even project management.

And now, would you please close Facebook and pay attention? Enjoy the interview.

Podcast Interview

Female voice: The Project Management Podcast’s feature Interview: Today with Dennis Brooke, program manager and speaker.

Cornelius Fichtner: Hello Dennis, welcome to The Project Management Podcast™.

Dennis Brooke: Hey! Great to be on the program!

Cornelius Fichtner: You recently gave a presentation titled “The New Collaboration for Project Management Success Enterprise 2.0” for the Puget Sound PMI Chapter. Let’s begin at the beginning. What is Enterprise 2.0 in your view?

Dennis Brooke: Well Enterprise 2.0 is really what we call Web 2.0 used for business. Original internet, what they called Web 1.0, is basically one-way communications. But Web 2.0, it’s collaboration. It’s two-way communications and I mean it’s really as significant meet board. And when you think of Web 2.0, you think of social media. But Enterprise 2.0 is that collaborative software internet-based that’s used for business purposes.

Cornelius Fichtner: What got you interested in this?

Dennis Brooke: Well, I actually got into this before the internet was really big back in the late 90s. I was working at a tax software company as a project manager and I got annoyed at how people would ask for the same status report. It was going out by email and people would say: “Hey, can you send me that again?” or “Can you send me this document again?”

And I had a really smart intern who said: “Hey look! I can set up a company internet site and we can have a portal for our project. And so we composed status reports, schedules, specs and all the types of things. So instead of people having to come back to me time and time again for the same report that I sent them before, they had a one-stop shop for it. So that was really how I got started in it.

Cornelius Fichtner: Right. And why should our listeners be interested in our conversation here? What’s the hook for them?

Dennis Brooke: Well the bottom line is people who are in project management or business understand that successful projects, successful businesses are really based around communications. And if I’m just sending stuff out and it’s to a small audience, it’s typically one-way communications. It’s a little bit of collaboration.

But Enterprise 2.0 really opens up the door for collaboration on a much higher level and it really opens up the communication so successful projects are about communications. Enterprise 2.0 is all about communications.

Cornelius Fichtner: What is the most common electronic form of communication that we use in projects today?

Dennis Brooke: Well, when I asked that question at seminars, people go: “Oh, it’s Microsoft Project or it’s Excel.” But the answer is email.

Email is good for sporadic communications but the problem with email is I’m having to dig through it and manage it and say: “Okay, where’s the latest status on this?”

Cornelius Fichtner: Right! It’s not Enterprise 2.0, right?

Dennis Brooke: Right!

Cornelius Fichtner: It’s one-way communication only.

Dennis Brooke: Exactly! You have to manage the email file things and Enterprise 2.0 puts in a format where I can always go find what I need.

Cornelius Fichtner: Right! But you have to know where to find it, right?

Dennis Brooke: Right. And I mean that’s part of the cultural change and making a change from email to Enterprise 2.0 is you have to teach people how to find it, put it in a format that’s easy to find and read and then work with them and make sure that it becomes their new standard instead of email.

Cornelius Fichtner: Okay. So what are the advantages of Enterprise 2.0 over the other methods of communications that we’ve used in the past?

Dennis Brooke: We’ve kind of touch on a little bit of this. But really to sum it up, it’s about

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