Dennis D. McDonald (ddmcd@ddmcd.com)consults from Alexandria Virginia. His services include writing & research, proposal development, and project management.
In episode 72 they discuss three project management apps they are familiar with, Asana, Trello, and Basecamp. Veteran project managers will be amused — and will recognize — Gina’s comments at the end about her “Giant Life-Defining Spreadsheet”:
I usually don’t pay much attention to “death of” web posts — unless I’m writing them, of course — but Kevin Cavanaugh’s Death of the Document is definitely worth a read.
One recommendations often made to professionals about blogging is that blogging, and reading others’ blog posts and commenting on them, are ways to engage in “conversations.” These conversations, so pundits like me say, can evolve over time into valuable social, professional, and intellectual relationships.
Despite its failing as a collaboration tool, though, email still has great value for communication, as Chaney points out. In my own case, email provides not only a tool for two way interaction, it also serves as a type of “glue” that makes it easier for me to interact with the various online groups I belong to.
In my recent post Questions to Ask Before Replacing Corporate Email I listed questions management should ask about corporate email to help plan for adoption of more modern collaborative software applications. The idea behind that post was simple:
This document discusses some of the questions you can ask about your organization’s current use of email and how improvements can be made. Also discussed is email’s impact on the adoption of new tools more suited to supporting workgroups and collaboration such as blogs, wikis, and groupsites for sharing information about people and projects.
Jamie Notter’s post Web 2.0: Participation, Trust, and Beta comments on an earlier post by Virgil Carter titled Web 2.0: Culture, Belief System, or Tool-Kit?
Jim MacLennan, a seriously thoughtful corporate IT manager, recently published Update on Blogs as PM Tools - Tales from the Front Lines. There he made the following statements about the challenges of adopting blogs and wikis in support of project management:
One of the things I’m doing to get control of my email is to cancel subscriptions where I receive unrequested broadcast or narrowcast emails from individuals, organizations, or news services. My goal is to dedicate my two main email addresses to personalized incoming and outgoing communications. I am making progress toward that goal.
A while back I published an announcement about a new book by Tom Wheeler called Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War. Tom sent me a note suggesting I also check out the book’s web site, which is here.
One of the things listed on the web site is a discussion of how Abraham Lincoln used telegraphy and how this might relate to modern usage of email.