Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Project Blog as a Business Tool

We signed a large HR outsourcing implementation engagement last year. Our IT implementation teams are in Florida. Business consultants are in San Francisco and Hyderabad.

The Florida IT team's culture was new to us and we struggled to understand the key relationships we need to build and key people we need to know. One of my team members who moved there to work with the IT implementation teams started sending out a 'Lesson of the day from Florida' email. After a couple of those insightful emails we decided that a blog would be a good place to post those 'Lessons from Florida' emails. So we set up an internal blog powered by Movable Type . That was a good idea. Since then a few more of our implementation project teams started separate sections for their project. The information is company confidential and is behind the firewall.

Since all these projects are similar to each other the cross pollination has been very good. We do this despite the fact that we have document repositories to share documents. Some of the functional leads started posting their meeting minutes and updates in the blog. A few weeks after we started posting info on the internal blog, I shared it with my peers in the leadership team so that they can be informed about what is going on.

I wonder if blogger [This blogging site] has plans to provide features to attach documents to a blog. It will be a good feature. Providing password protected blogs for a small monthly fee to enterprises might be a good idea as well.

Until then Movable Type hosted by Yahoo might be a good option for small businesses and teams. I have not tried it out. But I use other services by Yahoo and trust that they will do a good job with this one.

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