Using Twitter for Project Management

By Toby Elwin

In this article it is introduced Twitter to manage projects. Why Twitter? Twitter is a great communication and community collaboration tool and once a project starts, 90% of a project manager’s job is communication. Project communication and coordination is vital to project success and important:

• keeping the stakeholders informed;
• managing project scope;
• identifying risk;
• coordinating teams;
• ensuring milestone schedules;
• managing work stream progress; and
• coordinating resource needs

Imagine 90% of your role communicating? How does your day look now? Any room in your calendar to increase your communicating even more? I can’t imagine the amount of email that hits your inbox that requires you to read, decide “what’s this got to do with me”, create acceptable options, and then fire off your email. Think your project sponsors and stakeholders are looking for even more communication in their lives? I’m sure your sponsor or boss does not appreciate an email you forward without an explanation or concrete options you suggest to try. Lack of value added communication creates little confidence in your boss that you have things under control and, that you respect their time or that you are even worth the gobs of money you are paid to make decisions.

Think you’ll get a lot enthusiasm calling more meetings? Having more conference calls? more emails? or setting your project and users up with shared sites like an online PM tool? Well, good luck to you.

We need to communicate to manage expectation and results. There is nothing more damaging to your reputation then a project delivered to a sponsor who says, “You should have added this” or “this is really not what I expect”.

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