“Trust is at the Heart of Global Team Management” Binder (2007)

Power and trust are closely related. On simple projects we can have small agile teams that can co-locate with the critical stakeholders and rapidly develop deliverables.  It is easy to create, and quantify trust when people are working close to each other. Projects that are separated by regions, time and cultures present a different set of challenges.  How can we create, build and maintain trust?

Identify

Jean Binder in the book Global Project Management 2007 talks about 5 aspects. First identify the level of trust. The variables that effect trust are; complexity, schedule, number of different locations, number of different cultures, number of different organizations and number of new relations. As these variables increase we need to spend more effort managing and developing trust between people.

Second, Binder recommends drawing charts of communication channels.

Visualizing stakeholders influence on projects describes some of the ways we can create dynamic self-illuminating visualizations. A simple approach is to create a stakeholders survey that all people would fill out, that provides the data to discover the strong links or nodes between stakeholders. Critical planning information based on previous project experiences is to identify the strong channels, for example stakeholders that have identified each other as trusted.  Binder calls these “Strong Channels”. The “Weak  Channels” that are critical to project success will require more effort to create, build and maintain trust.  PMBOK describes the theoretical communication channels  (N*(N-1))/2.  The third type of Channel I identified is the “New Channel”  these are clearly the people who have little or no information about each other.

Third, Binder discuss 15 different trust building activities. One of the highest ranked is face-to-face. Two others are provide “opportunities to demonstrate integrity and competence of your team members” and “Use collaborative technologies”.  the problem we have is that we want to prevent information overload.

NASA Social Networking

NASA has identified communication, information sharing, access to information on how to do your job better, effective processes and team dynamics as leading causes of Project Failure  Emma Antunes (Feb, 2009).  Solutions to these common leading causes of Project Failure is Social Networking.  SpaceBook is NASA’s long term solution to solving this problem.  How does social networking do this?

“Social Networking is a tool for building teams and strengthening networks.  FOR FREE.”  Antunes  Feb 2009.

How Social Networking can Enable Mission Success: An overview for Project Managers

Attributes of Social Networking such as tagging. bring divergent and diverse groups together.  For example having access to everyone’s browser bookmarks, for example Delicious or Stumble Upon is a free way to browse by Keywords or tags.  Good Project Management would be to Socially Bookmark important sites and create notes for project team members.  When people have a question about some information, they can quickly and easily search their team members bookmarks by tags.  This is a critical way for people to share knowledge.  Enterprise will naturally embrace their social networks, connecting people with sites like: Flickr, Delicious Bookmarks, Google Reader, Twitter, FriendFeed feeds can provide critical Cultural Social Information.  The concept of Social Networking is that the “work” part of Networking.  It  allows knowledge workers to explore useful information.  It saves people time. It does this by filtering and pushing useful information to people who need it.  It is a very hot topic, many enterprises are unveiling applications everyday for example Lockheed Martin is releasing an open source social application.

Connectivity

Open, autonomess, diverse and connected networks produce more and better knowledge for organizations.  Stephen Downes November 2008.  Connectivism decreases the boundaries of projects.

Autonomy provides employees the granularity of the type of information they want to share.  It is a democratic view where each member of a project, can contribute about their culture, their beliefs and their values.  The combination of these social networks facilitate trust.  They naturally strengthen the “new nodes”.  They are building blocks for trust.  Consider using these free and open tools for your projects to foster trust.  While they will not replace the importance of live social interactions, they can provide the background chatter that can facilitate human interactions.  These social tools are about supporting people and giving people the tools to create trust in their relationships.  The goal is to open up our communication channels so that information and knowledge can flow freely between the knowledge workers who need to know.

How to implement this?

There probably needs to be a top-down approach, as well as a bottoms up grass roots approach with some middle management facilitating “Social Software Management Training.”  My personal experience is that there is a generational gap between adopters.  GenY will be accustomed to these types of tools, as they are already ubiquitous.  Baby Boomer generations may grasp the significance but will have a risk adverse approach to utilizing them.  There is also a growing technological gap, people with access to fast computers, with up to date software and high speed internet will have a much easier time utilizing the Social Networking benefits.  There are many companies that have there Social  Networking Policies spelled out online for reference as a starting point for managing the associated risks.  Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines by Laurel Papworth has an extensive list.

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