Now that you’ve understood how you can use blogs as part of your knowledge management strategy there is a need to educate your project team on how best they can develop a good blog. Though from experience i can say that there is a good chance a number of them already do blog outside of the office.

For those of them who haven’t been blogging or don’t know the benefits of it you might get the following questions.

Why Blog?

Blogging has become the cornerstone of information distribution for most people around the world. It allows you to get your ideas and views out to the entire world, and in some cases lay the seed for very interesting debates.

How do i Build a successful Blog?

Well, the fundamentals are simple Content, Content, Content. Unless you have decent content on your Blog you can be sure you’ll fail even before you get started.

Visibility for the Blog

As I mentioned earlier one of the biggest drivers of getting your employees to start blogging is the idea that there exists a platform from which they can promote themselves. Which means for them to be recognized their blog needs to.  The steps mentioned below hold good for any blog and can be replicated within the context of an organization as well.

Leave Comments :

Leaving comments is part of the foundation for starting a blog community. Most bloggers would be happy to respond to your questions, only if you are sincere. Do not use comments as a way of increasing the traffic on your site, that will happen gradually. Meaningful discourse is the target here.

Trackbacks :

A trackback is a mechanism that allows bloggers to keep track of which blogs have commented on their articles and if those articles have influenced other blogs. It’s a great way to start a community and get bloggers to read each others blogs. The plus point about this is that it helps in increasing the traffic flowing to your blog, which lets face it isnt altogether a bad thing.

Tags :

Tags make it easy to navigate a blog and find what you’re looking for. Tags are category names and people can select keywords for their posts. Usually you will see keyword names on the side navigation of a blog. It is also helps the you, the blogger as it helps to organize your blog and eventually your thoughts. Creating a structured layout is very useful to your visitors as it gives them a lot more information to go through, information they might have missed if not for the tags.

The single biggest blunder bloggers can make?? Not updating your content regularly enough. This is a sure way to lose readers on your site as most users ( if they’ve decided your blog is interesting ) expect new content on a “reasonably” regular basis. So keep this in mind, losing readers are a lot easier than gaining new ones.

Now what?

Once you’ve put together your blogging strategy and educated your employees / project team on how best to develop their blog you need to start figuring out how you can start extracting content that is relevant to your business.  I have some thoughts around this and will put them down in another posts soon.

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A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log”) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. - Wikipedia

Estimates have blogs growing at the rate of 20,000 every day. Now that’s quite a figure. Just imagine if you were able to tap into that vast array of blogs and extract something useful. Then imagine you could do this whenever you needed the information, would make your life a lot easier wouldn’t it?

So what makes them such marvelous information houses? well for one, it can be run by pretty much anyone, a single individual, a group or an organization. A simple layout allows people to collaborate , share presentations and other documents. It’s very well structured, allowing articles to be grouped by specific categories and to top it all of its search able. Now put a couple of hundred of these together and you get the picture.

The Blog is a platform that’s relatively easy to manage and can easily be scaled up to meet requirements of any size and the best part, most blogging software is available free of cost and even the ones that aren’t are reasonably inexpensive. Always a good angle to push when you have a tight budget.

Using these Blogs within your organization or project team is a great way to promote sharing of thoughts and ideas.

There are generally three types of Corporate Blogs:

• The CEO Blog
• The External Blog
• The Internal Blog

CEO Blogs

CEO Blogs have been gaining popularity for a while now as it becomes a medium for employees and people outside the company to connect with the leadership.

External Blogs

External blogs allow corporates to communicate with their employees, clients and vendors. Putting a human face to the company unlike the memo’s that every corporate employee receives when something of any significance ( well, most of the time ) occurs.

While external blogs are great tools for communication their primary purpose is for PR.

Internal Blogs

Blogs at the team level allow much greater collaboration than was possible before, ideas, thoughts and musing can be captured. Information that is generally lost in a large forum of ideas or that is absent from “reviewed” documentation. Simply, they are perfect tools for capturing and harnessing tacit knowledge in the organization.

It becomes a medium to allows users from different sections of the organization to connect with each other. More importantly it becomes a conduit to allow people to talk about subjects that are not part of their regular job description.

Constraints

There are of course a number of constraints when blogging within a company. The most predominant is that employees are generally a lot more careful about what they say and how they say it. Unlike a personal blog there is always an apprehension about how what they say is going to be perceived. This could act as a hurdle to many of them blogging.

Selling the Idea

The leadership team would be very interested in promoting blogging as long as you have clearly defined goals of how you are going to harness the knowledge.

You might try talking to employees about the advantages of having a platform they can use to share their ideas and be recognized. A blog becomes a powerful tool to market themselves.

So, if you’re company hasnt started using blogs you might want to broach the topic to them. Start small, stay internal till you come up with a blogging strategy to maximize the effectiveness of the message and you might just surprise yourself.

If you’ve experimented with Blogging within your project or organization do leave a comment on what your experiences were.

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If you’ve ever worked on an Application Maintenance project you know the need to have a well structured Application Knowledge Base. In most cases these systems form the corner stone of the engagement.

How would a system like this work?

Well, the basic idea is of course to create a platform that will allow your team members to look up solutions for issues as they come in. Only if they do not find a solution here would they spend time trying to resolve it.

It’s equally important for them to input new solutions into the system so that future users can benefit from it.

The Benefits of having a system like this in place are numerous:

• Create a knowledge base around the application that can be used over and over again
• Reducing the turnaround time for issue resolution
• Decreasing the time it takes for a new member of the team to bring himself up to speed with issue resolution.
• Improving client satisfaction
• Decreasing the dependency on certain key team members

While I’ve talked about this subject before, this post is more to get an understanding from the readers of this blog whether such a tool is really important, and if it is how have you used this in projects successfully?

There are a number of tools out there that do exactly what I’ve described above and if you’ve come across a particularly good one do leave a comment.

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I’ve been a little lax in updating my blog in the last few months and have decided to start again with renewed vigour, i hope.  The first post is a quick look at the Project Office.net application that is designed to target the PM community.

For the last few months I have been familiarizing myself with the Project Management Tool ProjectOffice.net and found that it is a very simple and easy to use product.

They have an exhaustive feature list ( that continues to grow )  that will take a few weeks to dissect and what really makes it impressive is the fact this is a product that undergoes revision constantly to provide better value.

So what does ProjectOffice.net Offer?

• Virtual office - The concept of ProjectOffice.net is based on spaces. Imagine that you work in your own office, however if you have to work with John you will go in his office and work there. Each space in ProjectOffice.net represents each office where you work at, except that you don’t have to actually go anywhere.
• Project management - Creating and managing projects has never been easier. With ProjectOffice.net all relevant project attributes are easily defined. Also, a visual representation of each project is presented with the Gantt chart.
• Task management - For each project unlimited number of tasks can be created, also subtasks, predecessors and milestones can be set. Additionally, every team member assigned to a task can update the time spent working on the task.
• Import projects from MS Excel - If you use MS Excel 2003/2007 to create your tasks or enter team members’ time, it is time you start to use a real project management solution that will make your team’s work easier and more productive. Thus, import your projects, tasks and already reported time as it is in Excel and get a better visual presentation of your project status.
• Add/import contacts - Keep all important contacts in a single location. With ProjectOffice.net you can add your contacts or import them from Yahoo, MS Outlook 2003/2007, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL as well as from the resource pool in your space.
• Resource management - In ProjectOffice.net the resource pool is defined at space level, so the project managers can assign them at various projects and tasks in a single step. Resources can also be activated or deactivated in a space depending on the company needs.
• Time management - Every team member updates task progress on a daily basis and submits the timesheet to the project owner for approval. Also, overtime and grand total are automatically calculated. Moreover, time-off requests for various reasons can be submitted for approval.
• Expense management -  ProjectOffice.net allows reporting expenses at a basic level. Besides the general expense, subexpenses can be added. After submission the project owner approves or rejects the expense request.
• Issue tracking - Important characteristic of successful project management is tracking the inevitable issues that always emerge along the way. With the issue tracking system that ProjectOffice.net has, issues can be associated with particular projects and tasks and can be assigned to the responsible team member.
• Wiki collaboration - Project collaboration is critical to successful project management. Creating and editing wikis in ProjectOffice.net provides each team member with the opportunity to become an active contributor in sharing knowledge with the rest of the project team.
• Reporting - General project reports requested from our users are now available in ProjectOffice.net: General overview, project summary and milestones list.Soon to come are more predefined as well as custom made reports.
• Search - If you can’t find certain information the search functionality searches all over the application as well is inside of every attached document.
• Project templates - Project managers do not have to waste time and create recurring projects every time since ProjectOffice.net offers predefined templates that can be used when needed. Also, project managers can save their own projects as templates for further use.
• Data privacy/Permissions - Data in ProjectOffice.net is secured and can be viewed only by project managers/team members/guests who are assigned to the particular project or task. Moreover, if you want to give your clients with the opportunity to supervise a project, you can invite them as guests in the project.
• Dashboard - The Dashboard in ProjectOffice.net is the central place where an overall summary from all tabs in all spaces is presented. What is most important is that every user can customize the Dashboard to his likes.
• SSL secured data - All information stored in ProjectOffice.net is secured with a SSL certificate which prevents any possibility of privacy invasion, data theft or data loss.

A complete overview of the features is available here. and I would recommend setting up a free account and experimenting with it.

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Brandon LeBlanc explained the nature of the updates in a blog posting Thursday:

Starting February 24, we will be releasing up to 5 test updates to PCs running the Windows 7 Beta (Build 7000) via Windows Update. These updates allow us to test and verify our ability to deliver and manage the updating of Windows 7. We typically verify servicing scenarios during a beta.

Windows 7 Beta users will be notified that new updates are available beginning February 24 through Windows Update. Even if the user has Windows Update configured for automatic update - these test updates will not install automatically. Users will need to manually install the test updates through Windows Update.

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I came across another interesting article on the Google Blog that allows you to harness the power of Google Analytics.

Would you believe me if I said you don’t need a Ph.D. to understand your website data? No? Believe it. Free tools like Google Analytics can help simplify website data so that you can better understand what visitors are doing when they arrive on your site.

One of the coolest innovations in understanding your website has been to provide delightful metrics on your web data so that you can make direct changes to your site. In lesson one of our series on The Power of Measurement, we will learn about bounce rate and how understanding it can improve your website.

You may be used to reading about how many “hits” a site or a page has received. But reporting a “hit” meant something back in 1985 when it was essentially a pageview (the number of times your webpage was viewed). Today, you will find that each web page gets many “hits,” rendering the metric meaningless. While the number of “hits” a page received used to be the best measure of success, we now have more in-depth and detailed metrics to analyze the performance of our web pages.

Bounce rate is insightful because from the perspective of a website visitor, it measures this phenomenon: “I came; I puked; I left.” (OK, technically it also means the number of sessions with just one pageview.) While metrics like visitors show the number of people who came to your site, bounce rate will tell you how many of those people were unimpressed and left your site without taking any action (not even dignifying the site with a single click!).

Bounce rate has these attributes:
1) It is really hard to misunderstand. It measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click!
2) It is available in most web analytics tools, including our own Google Analytics.
3) It is quick and easy to use. Bounce rate will help you understand where and how to make changes on your website in under an hour.

Read the full article here.

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For those of you interested in hosting News stories on your Website Google News has come out with a widget that will allow you to do just that.

You can choose from a range of topics to dispay.

Top Headlines

World

Business

Nation

Science & Technology

Elections

Politics

Entertainment

Sports

Health

For more information, check out their  post on the AJAX Search API Blog or dive directly into the wizard to automatically generate the code for you.

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TopTechNews reports that Microsoft has switched strategy with the way it handles bug fixes. Unlike in previous versions they will not move from a beta to a release candidate for windows 7 rather work with vendors to sort out issues before they release the product.

This definitely comes as good news for Windows users after the fiasco that is Vista ( I still can’t bring myself to use it ). It’s a positive step that Microsoft has decided to become a little more transparent about the way it deals with its products.

“As we have said before, with Windows 7 we chose a slightly different approach which we were clear up front about and are all now experiencing together and out in the open,” said Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s senior vice president for Windows, in a blog post Friday.

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