Social Project Management (SPM) is an efficient collaboration method developed by Simprove and is mainly used in the field of knowledge work.
The basic idea follows the Wikinomics concept introduced by Don Tabscott. This means to omit hierarchies and inflexible organizational structures and to collaborate in a way affected by openness, peering and sharing. But in opposition to Wikinomics, free collaboration is not a precondition of SPM. Instead, SPM is mainly used by distributed teams with concrete objectives limited by time and financial constraints. In doing so, all team members have equal rights. Task assignments as well as reviews are directly managed on the operational level.
The intentional abandonment of higher organizational structures avoids Chinese whisper effects and enables a fast and equal distribution of knowledge within the complete project team. At any time, each team member is able to get up-to-date on the project status and can contribute solutions to current problems. For instance, in case a project member is off sick, the affected tasks are independently reassigned by the remaining team. This requires an appropriate software platform to manage all project content.
SPM enables fast and cost-saving processing of projects. In the best case, no extra project manager is needed to observe the progress or to update task schedules. Additionally, the project team is highly motivated, because of equal rights and full access to all project information. However, a successful implementation of SPM requires that all team members are aware of those benefits and don't abuse the given degrees of freedom.
Therefore, SPM is mainly used by groups like:
- Startups, where both founders and investors are interested in a quick company success
- Freelancers and agencies working together on a bigger contract
- Scientists working together on R&D projects
But, based on an appropriate human resource and organizational development, even departments of larger companies can benefit from SPM.
In practice, SPM can be performed using Workity, a multi-project collaboration platform developed by Simprove. As a web-application, Workity is globally accessible via Internet. Thus, each user can always push the progress of all of its projects, at any time and in any place. According to the characteristic of SPM, each team member of a specific project can access and if necessary modify all related content. Instead of one-dimensional categories or directory structures, Workity provides tagging to organize information.
This enables fast and easy information retrieval and supports a consistent project syntax.
In addition to the collaborative development of reference information (e.g. specifications, documentations, etc.), Workity also includes functions to create tasks and appointments, which can be easily assigned to responsible team members.
Furthermore, each user can always get a quick overview about its current tasks as well as news and changes in connection with the status of all of its projects.
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