What is Conversational Project Management?

07/23/2006

To answer that, we need to ask:
    What is a “conversational project?” And to answer that, we need to remember:
    "What is a conversation?”

Many people believe, with some justification, that the art of conversation is lost. We do not agree entirely, but we have some sympathy for their point of view. Many “conversations” are really monologues - even two or more simultaneous monologues. And too many “conversations” are devoid of content - you know, conversations like:
A says:- “(insert adjective) weather!”
B replies:- “Yes, isn’t it?”

So what exactly IS a conversation? For example, from wikipedia we get (the emphases are mine)

A conversation is communication by two or more people, often on a particular topic. William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, the Dick Cavett Show, and many other television programs described as “talk shows” are exercises in conversation. Conversations are the ideal form of communication from at least one point of view, since they allow people with different views of a topic to learn from each other. A speech, on the other hand, is an oral presentation by one person directed at a group. Conversers naturally relate the other speaker’s statements to themselves, and insert themselves (or some degree of relation to themselves, ranging from the replier’s opinions or points to actual stories about themselves) into their replies. For a successful conversation, the partners must achieve a workable balance of contributions. A successful conversation includes mutually interesting connections between the speakers or things that the speakers know. For this to happen, conversers must find a topic on which they can relate in some sense

So there you have it:

• Conversations are the ideal form of communication
• They allow people with different views of a topic to learn from each other
• Conversers naturally relate the other speaker’s statements to themselves
• For a successful conversation, the partners must achieve a workable balance of contributions

Conversational Projects

To paraphrase what was said above, a conversational project should consist of interchanges in which all participants can bring their different views (preferably without merely descending into exchanges of differences,) where each can relate what the others are saying to themselves, and where each strives to make contributions which progress the project to mutual benefit. In my opinion, the most important and most elusive of these criteria is the one of recognizing and providing for the participants’ natural need to relate what others are saying to themselves. Unfortunately, too many projects are run more like secret societies, in which the conversations, if any, are incestuous in the sense that they are confined to the respective “in groups.” Suppliers, customers, teams, contractors, whatever, each converse among themselves about projects and run project management systems (if they run any systems at all,) by and for themselves, while throwing more-or-less limited bits of self-selected information over the transoms, rather than engaging in meaningful dialogues in which information is provided according to others’ stated needs.

This is not necessarily or even usually malicious or negligent - it is out of culturally ingrained custom-become-habit that this happens, aggravated by the transference of the habit into both management and IT systems. For this reason we have extremely powerful project management systems which are almost completely unintelligible to laymen - even articulate and very well educated laymen. Systems whose steep learning curves, burdensome resource requirements, arcane jargons and stilted cross-organizational interfaces render them of no interest to ordinary busy folk. To quote a business associate, “I am drowning in gantt charts which tell me almost nothing I need to know to run my project. I get what I need to know by talking to everyone involved all the time.”

Enter Conversational Project Management

Without the worldwide web, conversational project management without actually getting participants together physically, would be unthinkable. Imagine trying to manage a project using only a telephone? Yet many online project management systems do little to promote real conversations between participants. The most conversational phenomenon to take root on the web owes nothing to existing IT-based project management systems and everything to the conversational meme as articulated above - I refer to the phenomenon known as the weblog or “blog.” It is only a short step from the blog to the conversational project management system that is JobWarden

If you take the time to examine JobWarden, you will find it is conversationally blog-like, with added project management features, such as:

• The ability to track project status
• The ability to assign action items to individuals and track progress/performance - call them time cards if you wish
• Clients and/or suppliers can add entries and all participants can comment on existing entries
• Access can be password-controlled for security
• Status can be tracked via a calendar
• A highly effective, concise graphical project status is provided using sparklines

To explore further, poke around in our demo area, and please comment freely while you are there - we believe in practicing what we preach.