Jon Udell has an interesting article on "Publishing a project Weblog". He also has a weblog entry on the article.
There's a subject near and dear to my heart! A couple of years ago I predicted[2] that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I'm even more bullish on the concept today. If you're managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. The serial nature of the Weblog helps you make it the project's newspaper of record. This kind of storytelling can become a powerful way to focus the attention of a group. The desire to listen to a compelling story and find out what happens next is a deep human instinct.
I used a project weblog recently, with some success. The goal was to keep stakeholders up to date on the project without inundating them with emails. During the most active phase of the project, I updated every three or four days.
I can see how the concept might be even more powerful when working with larger teams. Communication is always a big issue, and using a weblog can really help, I think.
But, Jon's comments in his blog ring true. In many cases, the software is a bit hard to set up and configure. I've set up Movable Type four or five times, and even I had to fiddle around with it for a while (installing perl on a windows box, mostly). It needs to be pretty much idiot-proof before it becomes widespread. It'll be there with time.
Posted by Karl
March 27, 2003 08:42 AM