Social Media In A Project Environment

Elizabeth Harren - Author of survey
Contact:  elizabeth@elizabeth-harrin.com
www.pm4girls.co.uk

Why the survey?

There’s growing evidence that ways of working are adapting to include social media tools and that they are becoming prevalent in the workplace. The author of this survey, Elizabeth Harrin, felt that project managers should be taking advantage of the available tools and wanted to find out if they were.

How the survey was done

An online survey was used to collect responses to the survey during January and February 2010. There were 246 respondents from 32 countries.

The survey has a confidence level of 95% and a confidence interval of 6.25% i.e. you can be 95% certain that the views of the project and program management community fall within +/-6.25% of the numbers in the survey.

Results

• Over 70% of people agreed that social media and enterprise collaboration tools can, or do currently, improve the way in which they manage projects.
• The most widely used tools in a business setting are LinkedIn and Microsoft SharePoint. While SharePoint is a collaboration suite this survey was also looking at enterprise collaboration tools as they often incorporate elements of social media such as wikis.
• Instant messaging (chat) was used by around 80% of respondents for business and/or personal use, and it was one of the few tools that everyone knew about.