A little while ago, in reaction to a challenge from Dion Hinchcliffe. I wrote an article about how Web 2.0 technologies could be used within the enterprise. I gave the example of using blogs to set up People Pages. This is the second article in this series.

Again, lets start with a very basic way to use blogs to create Project Pages. The idea is simple: one blog for each new project.

A project page should do at least three things:

1. Improve communication within the project team


2. Make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing by improving communication between the project team and the rest of the organization


3. Build a searchable reference for future use

It is a good idea to start your project page with a summary of the project. It is amazing how often people neglect to communicate basic assumptions and high-level context.

How do you do this? A blog does not have to write out all of it’s content in reverse chronological order. Instead, you can set up a template to first write out any article with the category set to “Summary”.

The brief summary can be followed by a main section entitled something like “Latest News”. Here you can set up the template to list every other project post in reverse chronological order.

Different projects need to communicate different types of information. A building project might require the team to coordinate design plans, while a marketing campaign might require the team to share creative proofs. So, get your users to help you define how the blog as a project communication tool should work within your environment.



Do this by letting the team define the specific post categories they need within the project. Examples might be generic such as docs and milestones, or they might be specific, such as Design, Planning, Development, Testing.

More dos and don’ts to make it work



• Links – links to the People Pages for everyone working on the project


• Aim to enter information once. So if people join a project, add them to the project and have a script automatically update that person’s People Page blog with a link back to the project.
• Capture structured semantic information during the set up process. Examples would include the name of the project leader, the name of the project sponsor, if you track projects for billing purposes, the project ID and charge code.
• Use interactive widgets, (aka Mashets) like the majikwidgets to add ToDo lists, a document versioning and check-in/check out system, or polls. The folks at Majikwidget haven’t come out with an enterprise version, but they will. If not, someone is bound to add the necessary AJAX to the Ruby on Rails framework.
• Encourage people to discuss project details using posts and comments.

• Get the project blog an email address. One interesting idea I heard recently was to set the email addresses up for each category.

  For Design articles: Project-x.design@our411system.com

  For Testing articles: Project-x.testing@our411system.com

  Encourage your people to CC the blog, instead of spamming their colleagues with things they do not need to know immediately.

• Make sure that every post has a byline which links back to the author’s People Page, so that people get clear credit and recognition when they write something.
• Keep statistics. It is important for people to see how valuable their posts are. A simply statistics package helps to address this.
• Make sure that you create a simplified set-up script so that end users can create a Project Blog at the push of a button.

And…. the information can be leveraged!!!

It is also important to think about how using a project blog as a day to day communication tool can quickly create a platform for capturing information in a way that can be leveraged more broadly. Here are some example of what a Project Page blog would give you over today’s mass of emails:

• The content can be made searchable using an intranet search engine
• You can create a central directory of things like project summaries
• Your people can link to it as in “Wow check out the brilliant way they solve this problem”.


• Your people can use comments to ask questions, start a dialog and thereby turn the whole company into a learning organization.

Finally, imagine if there was a central directory of every major project going on within you company, complete with a summary of the project. Now imagine how useful that would be if those summaries actually made sense to the layperson. Imagine if Instead of:

Project X is creating an enhanced feed from the trade blotter into HITS

you found:

Project X is a system improvement project for the Derivatives Trading Group. The Derivatives Trading Group sells risk mitigation products to the bank’s customers. The traders record each trade in an electronic trade blotter. Some of these trades should be passed into the Hedging Instrument Tracking System. The purpose of this project is going to

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