Benefits and Risks of Enterprise 2.0, a personal case study

Benefit scenario

Ross Dawson explores some key benefits of the Enterprise 2.0 adoption in the chapter 4 of his book. Today, I will explore the key benefit productivity & efficiency and share a personal use case scenario.

When it comes to efficient project management, people from different management methodologies such as PMI, Prince2 and even Agile would agree that one mandatory component for any project is the task breakdown, or product breakdown and then tasks/activities definition (what, who and when). And from that definition, usually a project manager comes up with a timetable and effort estimation.

I remember about 6 years ago when our development team used to have a meeting to define effort estimation, then the project manager used to create a schedule (normally a timetable using Microsoft Project tool), and periodically he used to consult the current activity status with each team member. And from that the project manager used to create a status report and share across the team and other stakeholders.

Well, that was before the Enterprise 2.0 paradigm inundates the companies. What I have seen currently is we still have the meeting to define effort, but the task definition (what, who and when) is now using collaborative tools such as the fantastic Jira. See the video

Using a phrase from Andrew McAffee: “Web 2.0 is an attitude, not a technology”, I completely agree that the tool used in the past (Microsoft Project) worked very well from a long period. But today, people don’t need the project manager to ask each team member about the task status. In a collaborative environment, we update our status by ourselves, and also we can “follow” other tasks from other team member, so we can receive for example RSS syndication when a dependent task has been completed. I have used Jira in my last two projects and I can tell you with no doubt that tool increased our productivity and efficiency.

Jira is produced by a company called Atlassian. That company one of the biggest Enterprise 2.0 evangelist in the word, and they produce excellent tools for Enterprise 2.0 such as Jira and Confluence (wiki style tool). Also there is an excellent blog from an Atlassian employee called Bill Arconati. And two excellent presentations about massive wiki adoption strategies and techniques for growing your wiki.

Risk scenario

Still using the same scenario and same Jira tool, I would like to explore a negative impact related to information Security and Confidentiality also listed by Ross Dawson in his book. Sometimes, some information within the project such as task and timeline are supposed to be confidential, even internally in the company. Therefore we need to be carefully about openness and filter the team members properly to avoid loss of confidentiality.