Are you ready for changes to project collaboration?

Social networking tools, sites and products are hands-down the most annoying breed of tech products. There is no bigger time suck or waste of energy…  That said, they’re probably here to stay. At the time of this writing, MySpace is at least 6 years old. That means that in 2008, the majority of college graduates will have had a significant portion of their lives shaped by social groupings formed and followed in social networking products and services.  I wonder, how many of them will go to the corporate intranet on the first day of their new job and look for the “Add to Friends” button?

Seriously though, the social networking tools have set up a method of collaboration and information distribution that is entirely different from the top-down heavy project management solutions and practices of large companies. As new graduates enter the workforce and make purchasing decisions, they will inevitably look for solutions that seem like a “natural fit”. What feels natural to them are products that distribute information and let them work with others the way that they do with the networks they grew up on.

So how do we as a project management community learn to adapt our communication and organizational processes to incorporate the cultural shift of social networking on our projects?