Properly applied social media conventions can be a huge asset to project management organizations. Open collaboration and concentrating project information in a single interface improves productivity, decreases costs and cuts down on errors. Curbing the “social” part of social media overcomes one of the most persuasive cases against social media in project management: information security. By creating closed communities accessible only by project teams, companies secure proprietary information and prevent stakeholders – customers, partners, vendors – from seeing and hearing things they shouldn’t.

This white paper will discuss how organizations can adapt the useful elements of social networking into powerful project portfolio management tools. It will detail the goals of a social media strategy: closed networks versus open networks; strengthening work groups; sharing business information; collaboration; productivity and transparency. 

Typically New Product Development (NPD) projects are recognized for their rigorous gated process that ensures every step in the development cycle passes stringent criteria and scrutiny by all parties responsible for a product’s success. Moreover, at the heart of every successful NPD project lies a talent pool and leadership with a vision and objectives that not only need to be met, but more importantly accepted by its consumers at the end of this process.  With this in mind, it is crucial that the project activities and input of the project team and stakeholder’s are aligned with the overall vision of the project.  The product launch stage of NPD projects is critical in that it takes a working prototype and makes it available to consumers.  It’s the stage where a product will make its debut and prove its performance in the marketplace. 

In this paper, I will be focusing on the impact people have on the successful launch of a new product and the important role the effective planning of people and the projects they serve can impact a new product’s final acceptance in the marketplace.

Effectively managing the people and the tasks responsible for pushing a project along the road to success requires a balanced approach. This balance between product viability and available resources can only be delivered through an all inclusive project and portfolio management framework.

During the last 10 years Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) technology has greatly matured offering the desperately needed platform to facilitate the challenge of managing project information, improving collaboration among stakeholders and delivering critical status reports for multi-project environments. Like so many enterprise systems, PPM solutions are excellent at easily capturing the information needed. Where these offerings vary is the effectiveness in extracting and communicating relevant project information to improve the decision making capabilities of project management practitioners. A solid PPM strategy understands the power of analytics and how it can be leveraged to not only track project progress, but more importantly track project performance.