Back in March of 2004 I talked here about how I saw blogs being used in the future by project managers. I wrote that I hoped that they could be used for quick status reports and information sharing with the team and the stakeholders. Before me there was even the very cool and sadly not still maintained “A Klog Apart”, post that was from 2002 that talked about the same thing.
Not only am I hearing more about this now I even saw a magazine article about it last week (though I cannot find the magazine).
Now it has even come up on a project I'm working on now. In it there are several project managers making changes to their specific schedule within a master schedule. They are looking at a process for having the PM that makes a change that impacts another PM communicate that change in some way so it was not a surprise to the impacted PM.
The idea was brought up that a simple blog could be used and subscribed to by those interested in what was happening with a specific project. The PM could create blog posts and note when certain tasks moved or dates were impacted and then list the tasks impacted. The PMs that subscribe would then be able to see this information. This was brought up as opposed to email because the project is already seeing large amounts of broadcast email that do not always pertain to everybody included in the broadcast. A Blog Post-RSS Reader scenario ensures that you are only getting the 'stuff' you are interested in.
I'm thinking now about how cool it would be if there was a Project addin that would allow a PM to select a task and generate a blog post that showed the task name, new dates and a list of its Successors. Hey! I think I just found my newest side project. All I have to do now is learn VB or C#. LOL
Any volunteers to help me on this one? It seems like we could leverage the Word 2007 Blogging feature. But it also seems like it is not too very hard to support the various blogging formats. Is there a blogging application developer out there that would like to build this as an addin for their tool? I would be happy to help with the Microsoft Project side of the code.