Experts say that up to 90% of a project manager’s time is spent on communication either with stakeholders, project team, suppliers or upper management within the organization. That volume speaks about the importance of communication to any project. Experienced project managers can relate to this, when communications is done properly, the project is more likely to achieve its objectives.

Easy formula! Not really. Managing communication is one of the most challenging tasks for a project manager. Daily, you might receive and send hundreds or thousands of emails and IM messages. Some issues start on email but get concluded on IM or vice versa. Keeping track of communication, and most importantly the sequence and relation between messages is really a hectic process.

A proper tool should be available to help. Ironically, available project management applications overlook this fact. However, they significantly concentrate on scheduling and reporting, which make them not of great help in this matter. Relying on web 2.0 applications to enhance collaboration and communication was introduced as what is called Project Management 2.0. However, the down side is that you still have to rely on too many applications e.g. twitter, email, IM…..etc. There is no real integration between different applications especially email and IM.

So what exactly we are looking for as project managers? What are the characteristics of the tool that will help manage communications at ease? I think we want the option to communicate in real-time, but also the ability to communicate at our leisure at times. We want a “passive-aggressive” method of communication. Passive communication is when you are just listening, not waiting for nor expecting a prompt response i.e. email, while aggressive communication is about getting a response promptly i.e. IM. We want both approaches in a unified tool.
Wave! Yes Google Wave is the answer. Google Wave is both a platform and a new communication standard. A wave is:

• Equal parts; conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more. A wave can be embedded in a web page as well
• Shared; any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback; anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when. You can send to everyone in the wave or select a subset of users.
• Live; with live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

From project management perspective, you can keep track of all communication and documents related to the project. You can track and follow up on issues till conclusion, you can coordinate with your team members and you can communicate with stakeholders using the same wave, awesome!
It is worth mentioning that Google Wave is still not finalized yet, it has been recently released to a limited group of developers for feedback and bugs reporting. However initial indications promise great potential and a mindset shift in our understanding of communication.
So will Project Management 3.0 be based on Google Wave? Most probably.

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Update 1: May 22, 2010: Along with  Google announcement  to make Wave public, a new project/work management extension is annouced;  Unawave.

Unawave builds task management and project management into Google Wave, providing a level of functionality to manage work and project teams. It has crowdsourcing elements that allows people to add videos or images, for instance, to give projects and tasks more context. A real-time dashboards gives insights into how work is progressing.

Agreed-on work has been completed. Yet more and more change’s requests are coming. The project is due but the work does not seem to finish. The client is shouting and project team members are whining. No body is happy and the project is heading toward failure!

One big reason behind this situation might be not not having a formal closure for the project . according to widely published IT statistics from John Hopkins University; 30% of IT projects never reach a fruitful conclusion¹.

It is implicitly understood that one of the defining features of a project is that it is finite – it has a start and an end. If the project loses this distinctiveness, loses some of its advantages over purely operational it management approaches. in PMP the project should have definite beginning and ending, in PRINCE2 a project should have a finite and defined life cycle.

So why we need to close a project? The following points make “Closing” a fundamental principle in project management:

1. provides a useful opportunity to take stock of achievements
2. Provides an opportunity to ensure that all unachieved goals and objectives are identified
3. Is always more successful than the natural tendency to drift into operational Management

Theoretically, closing a project is a matter of fact. However, practically it is not. Closing a project does not always come after the completion of planned work. Projects are always subject to closure whenever their business cases are no longer viable. Closing a project requires courageous decision, planning, organising , communication and effort from the project manager.

Said that, I believe being able to successfully close the project at the right time is a must  for  successful project managers. I have been called, more than once to handle swinging projects . Surprisingly, the only thing missing was the “Formal Closure”, and guess what? yes I got the credit of turning  them into successful projects just by managing the closure properly.

Conclude your projects, have the courage to say “Sorry, we are closed” and enjoy the taste of success.