Working on a development project can be complicated. The days where everyone is sitting just a cubicle away are long gone. You need to keep the project manager, the clients, the copywriter, the developers, the marketing people, the designers and the SEO team in the loop. Every decision that’s made effects every part of the project. There are lots of project management tools available, and they all fall short. Email chains get unwieldy after a few replies and sharing files can become a burden quickly.
Google Wave might be the answer we’ve all been waiting for. It’s a combination of email, social networking and file sharing that brings people and ideas into one place. We’ve been playing around with Wave for a few weeks, and it’s impressive. It especially excels as a way to keep complicated projects moving along while removing the bulk that comes with other methods of project management.
Here’s a few reasons why we’re using Wave:
Media Handling Forget attachments
- Wave handles every media file we’ve thrown at it in an elegant way. Relevant links, videos, audio files, copy and code can be shared right in the message. You seem them right in front of you without having to click around. That’s efficient. There’s also an option to browse media files which is very cool. Clicking through the various stages of a design, or every photo being used on a project is very convenient when making design changes.
Latecomers at Different Points in a Project
- It’s sometimes necessary to bring a new person into the mix. Getting them up to speed can be a difficult dance of dredging up old emails, zipping groups of files and filling them in on past conversations. With Wave, simple include the new people working on the project in the Wave and they can get briefed on thier own time, see all the past revisions and discussions, and view the various iterations and changes that have been made. This is a gigantic time saver.
Tags
- Tagging your projects gives you the ability to build an archive of your work over time, making it easy to see how problems were solved in the past. If you’re diligent about tagging specific issues and solutions, when you run into a similar issues, just search Wave and see how you developed a working solution in the past. That’s something so valuable you can’t put a price on.
Contacts
- Having your contacts right in your project management software is very convenient. There’s no imports that fail, no proprietary data formats, and since Wave is spreading quickly, after you’ve collaborated with someone, you’ll be able to add them to new projects with a click. Over time you’ll build a database of old and new collaborators expanding your business network.
Fast
- Wave is fast. Really fast. It swallows big media files, updates in real time, and is hosted by Google, who overall have a solid record of data integrity.
Is Google Wave the perfect project management tool? Maybe. It’s still new, but so far we’re really impressed with it. So impressed we’re about to start a huge new project involving a big team in many different locations, and we’re using Wave to keep it together. We’ll keep you updated.
What are your experiences with Wave so far? We’d love to hear how you’re using Wave for business or fun.
Hey now this is interesting, I’m conducting research for my honours degree on Google Wave and how it can be used as a repository of study course work for academic learning students and lecturers. I think wave will be able to be a powerful project manageable tool as well as a good storage facility.
I’ve been playing about with Google Wave now for about a month solid with both preview and sandbox accounts and I am really taken by it’s potential that it holds and it’s good that people like yourself are noticing it as well. I’ve been keeping my research studies on my wave at the moment for people to give feedback and stuff on what they think about the general whole idea behind the tool I will be developing.
Really enjoyed your article, you portray good arguments for your cause and I really think this is something that will lift off for people in the production of their projects.
Thanks for your comment Anthony.
I’ve used every project management tool that you can imagine. Google Wave definitely has the potential to wipe them all out. There is definitely a learning curve but I truly believe it will be well worth it.
Keep us posted on the tool you are developing & any insights you can share.
I will do, for anyone who is interested in my proposal that I had to conduct before getting into the in-depth interim report, just add me on google wave and I will be sure to invite you in to have a look and gain your feedback on what I have done and what I plan to do :-)
btw just bookmarked this website, loving the articles I have been seeing on here when I came across it today.
Your article is very interesting, your aguments are good too. But do you think that GW can be used for any kind of projects. I think that is THE tool for internal project or research project.
I’m very interested by the REX of your use of GW.
Hey Sara, thanks for the comment. Personally, I think it’s possible to use Wave for any project, with the exception of heavy duty code collaboration, for which there are already many specialized systems out there.
For any project that requires coordinating people, media, and various iterations and changes, I think Wave is the way to go. I’m still learning the ins and outs myself, but so far I’m impressed.
What type of projects do you have in mind? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Didn’t know for the google wave. We’ll definetly try it in our firm. thanx for the usefull tips
Projects like innovation, validation of new technologies, feasibility are for me the kind of project wher GW is suitable because they need fast communication, getting people quickly and introducing change quickly too.
But I’m afraid that posssibility to modify the TL is blocking to manage correctly a project.
Only practice and feedback on a project will tell us how best to use GW
Lucia,
I agree that Google wave has potential but there is an area of concern that I’m not sure has been addressed yet. Since all participants of the wave can edit the content there is the potential that content can be deleted or maliciously edited when other users are not present on the wave. There needs to be a way to administer a wave and enable wave locking to prevent such edits from happening.
Great point Chris. I hadn’t thought of that. Luckily I really trust all the staff here and we really encourage an open spirit when it comes to trial, error, successes, failures, etc… For us everything that could go wrong is a learning lesson to make us better. However I see how this could be an issue with others.
I really hope this is something addressed in further GW revisions.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Another really good way to use Wave that I recently thought of is during vendor review sessions or demos.
I have the furtunate/unfortunate task of being able to/having to sit through numerous vendor demo sessions during RFI/RFP processes. These sessions usually have a large audience that each keeps thier own notes on the demo/presentation which usually never get conslidated into a single list. This is a side effect of laziness or of the individual users feeling that they are not contributing anything of value.
Enter Google Wave.
If all participants in such a session are in a wave together, they can create a back channel and realtime collaborative note taking session that helps facilitate a richer Q&A session and can help deepen understanding and streamline the whole process.
Until Wave becomes more entrenched and reaches critical mass, this use will be sporadic and will require that current wave members save their coveted invites for sessions such as this.
Thanks for that Chris. You just gave me a great idea for one of our projects & now I know what to do with all my invites.
Google Wave is great for collaborative notes & I would imagine it may help inspire people to contribute that usually may not. At least, that is what I would hope for.
Hey Chris,
Just going back to your comment about administration on the wave and people deleting or editing certain areas of the wave without any approval from staff while staff aren’t participating on the wave.
Can’t the play back function act as a type of administration to the staff controlling the wave? For example, if a random staff member deletes a certain part of the document that is being worked on, surely with play back function this not only helps to pin point the deletion of that specific area, but allows re-runs to going back to that state of the wave.
I totally approve of the “needing to lock waves so nothing can be changed until approved by a higher authority” and I am sure GW will probably implement this function very soon, if not I can already see developers programming a robot to do this job.
But I agree, there needs to be some kind of permission system for users in a wave, but at the moment GW is still very much young and can see no problem with this area expanding!