Hope this can be useful for you before make a decision

I count with a excellent 3-company 30-people team, supportive project sponsor and comprehensive steering committee.

Follow me on Twitter and find out my adventure at @JesusCarlos

As soon as we get together I will find 5 minutes (or maybe more) to talk with them and continue my experiment.

My goal: Teach them some PM basis and make them realize that Project Management can be so useful and helpful with their school experiments and projects (and for life).

So, the big challenge in this experiment is convince them to adopt Project Management as a discipline that will help them forever with their projects. Maybe that will be as hard as any client, or even harder

I will post this experiment progress, keep coming back for updates.

I was a huge fan and lover of Palm PDAs for many years, actually I was Palm OS architect and programmer, I developed several business solutions from an entertainment portal mobile client to assurance quotes calculators. Even I made a kind of game for Palm.

Time changes and now I am a Project Manager realizing the powerful and useful a Blackberry is for my daily job, with lots of tools for work, for fun and for share, like WordPress.

20 years ago, if you needed to get an advice from your peer or from your favorite guru, you had to take your phone (leaving your place in some cases) and dial some numbers to get it, wasting time and money.

Time has passed by and now you just have to search that guy on your buddy list of your IM client, type in your keyboard and voilá, it doesn’t matter where in the world are you or where your friend is, the cost is cheaper than phone.

IM services like Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger or (my favorite old one) ICQ have been tools that helped me and all the team members sharing tips, sending documents, discussing project issues, reporting task status and more. The single fact of save me to drive 10 miles for something I can do with an IM client is enough to love it. Like everything in this planet, IM has evolved into an intelligent-weird hard-to-understand specie called Twitter, which allows to do the same with only one thing in mind: To share to the world.

But let’s get back to the point with these questions: What if one of your team distracts from work chatting with friends? What if your team member doesn’t get the objective for having IM in the project? That’s the moment when (for some people) the IM gets the shape of some kind of monster eating team productive time. The Project Manager (or somebody) asks the Internet-communication-LAN-or-whatever manager for denying any IM permission to everybody. Is it fair? I don’t think so.

Project Managers must give IM a chance to be part of the project tools. There are more advantages using IM than not having it. We have to think in an IM-usage strategy establishing some rules and conditions that allows the team to be more productive.

Here are some tips I’ve been using ‘til now:

1) Everybody can use everything on the Internet after 6 o’clock unless we have to do an extra required effort and

2) if someone in the team doesn’t get the idea, he/she will have to pay lunch/pizza for everybody one day.

I hope this can be useful for you.

That project was chaotic, everybody in the team had to work 14 hours at least by day because it was bad estimated, bad planned and bad managed. Yeah, you know, the kind of projects that sometimes you can’t avoid them; your boss tells you “now you’re on this project, that guy is your manager and guess what? You’re already late”.

But in the middle of that nightmare we had a very funny team member, he told us about his experiences, jokes and weird thoughts that made all of our late nights just easier.

Everybody knew that the funny guy was not productive at all, but even the Project Manager knew that guy was that gear on the machine that kept the rest of us productive at night, kept the fun in the project, he made the schedule for milestones celebrations and he kept the team united, in few words, he made a little part of the manager’s tasks.

So, remembering that guy and thinking about that situation and now me in the Project Manager role, makes me think about the following:

Have we, the Project Managers, to be that gear in the project? I think yes. Obviously keeping the right limits to avoid everything that can give to us a negative impression, like lack of authority and lack of seriousness. Of course there are a lot of variables in every manager’s mind like personality, management style, sympathy-empathy ideas and more, but in that kind of projects we have to worry even more about the team members. It’s up to us find a way to make their work easier that let them be more productive.

Now I realize that maybe Project Manager’s knowledge of his own variables was the reason he let that guy stayed in the project. We were very lucky.

These are the PMs I follow everyday:

@corneliusficht – producer of the PM podcast I’ve ever wanted to find, posting great tweets at @pmExamTips

@projectshrink – producer of the best PM video podcast and great blog posts!

@gcimmarrusti – expert sharing lot of knowledge

@pmstudent – shares lot of great posts for begginers (and not begginers)

@threew – excelent project notes and quotes

@pawelbrodzinski – great great posts

@pm4girls – love her blog

@dinag – love her blog too

Sorry If I missed someone, I will keep updated this post

By the way, now I’m the PM in a 6-months ERP migration project in a corporation with 5 companies and I’m tweeting my experiences, you’re invited to follow me, I’m glad to share some knowledge back to you.