AquaMinds Weblog

Information aggregation. Information access. Information sharing.  All three are necessary if not essential to the productive management of a project.  In my experience, these three information-driven activities, in most cases, form the management and process foundation of every successful team.

Aggregation, access and sharing have all contributed to the active use of key knowledge assets (operational expertise) in any project I've ever worked on.  One of the earliest projects I had the privilege of working on was the launch of the Apple Family System.  The introduction itself was managed in a very innovative way.  In my opinion, it was both obvious and absolutely necessary if we were to succeed.  Our senior project lead created a "war room" or central gathering place where we could come and go to see all the various component parts of the introduction as they emerged.  We plastered the walls of the little meeting room with rows and columns of "3M Post-it" notes that were dynamically added, changed and removed whenever project meetings were called.  The scope of the project required that we work with literally every department and group within Apple along with our key vendors.

What struck me as being most innovative about this approach was that we had one central place from which to capture the essence and totality of the project.  It gave you a very powerful sense of progress while also providing a bird's eye view of every minute detail of the introduction down to the last FCC certification test for RFI device compliance.  And ironically, we had no dedicated project management software at the time to rigorously archive and keep a record of our war room notes except for a word processor.  E-mail was helpful but limited in helping us coordinate hundreds of tasks and actions items that we were responsible for tracking.  Apple was obviously surrounded by technology and personal computers but we had no way to use it to collaborate, coordinate or even communicate the daily flow and progress of the project.

Today, using NoteShare, our team at AquaMinds can manage multiple projects by collaborating, coordinating and communicating bits and pieces of information from a single shared notebook.  Notebook sharing also solves the need to capture and then synchronize information especially when it become time-sensitive and vital to the completion of a task.  The organization of the project's details can now be both fluid and transparent given NoteShare's compelling metaphor of the spiral notebook document model. 

It cannot be emphasized enough that notebook sharing by default provides an automatic archival function of the project's task history.  From my early days of stickies on the walls of Apple to the digital pages of a shared notebook today;  dynamic idea processing has always been an essential part of any successful project management process.  Instant notebook sharing can now be a part of every project team's toolbox.