Many organizations are struggling to manage and control their projects. Customers, clients, and project teams need to understand what is progressing day-to-day on a given project, but the formal, expensive and centralized project management (PM) or knowledge management (KM) tools are often not up to date fast enough to be effective at monitoring progress. We encounter this business problem frequently with our customers and on our own projects. While we still use formal tools to monitor and manage our projects and products, we find it doesn’t keep pace with the need to quickly share ideas, information, and progress day-to-day.
We have several systems that we use to manage on projects. These systems include online financial and project management systems, wikis that contain information about the projects and social content that we distribute via WordPress, Facebook, Google Docs, and our online CRM tool. We have customers that use 12 – 15 different systems to manage this information. This can be extremely frustrating and overwhelming, to say the least.
We were looking for a collaborative tool that could help manage the content generated from and shared with these disparate systems. After reviewing several different products, we settled on Alfresco. Alfresco defines itself as a social content management platform. In addition to being a world-class ECM, it can help organizations keep the control that is expected from content management systems over the social business systems that create so much unstructured, unmanaged content. This is a perfect platform to solve our business problem.
Fresh Project was the first tool that we wrote for ourselves when we became an Alfresco partner. Its original purpose was to provide a consistent way of managing Alfresco Share collaboration sites for our customers and internal products. We have since expanded it to be our social project management tool. Fresh Project is an extension (AMP) that combines the social or collaborative features of Alfresco Share, Project Management Institute (PMI) best practices, and a collaboration philosophy borrowed from our modified Agile Development Methodology.
If you are interested in learning more about it, please contact us or read more about Fresh Project in our product section.
It isn’t just our firm that has noticed the need for socialization of content, here’s what Gartner has to say:
“Unfortunately, many of the KM initiatives undertaken in the late 1990s and early 2000s did not turn out as planned. Often, it was not the technology that stymied the projects, although some technology implemented for the “KM cause” was not intuitive and therefore difficult to master.”
“The traditional KM project was typified by a centralized effort to organize resources and content via taxonomies and complex vetting. It missed the point that knowledge resides with people and, especially in complex situations, is difficult to access and use without collaboration. What was lacking was a model that puts users at the center of the process and helps them find existing content easily, as well as create new content from the bottom up”
Gartner Research: Socialization of Knowledge Management Drives Greater Reuse; by Carol Rozwell, May 1, 2009.
