quantmleap

A newsflash published by Slashdot mentions an article in the IBTimes where it is referring to the findings of a research done by researchers at the University of Maryland. The researchers “asked 200 students to give up all media for one full day (and) found that after 24 hours many showed signs of withdrawal, craving and anxiety along with an inability to function well without their media and social links”.

I have a clear and unambiguous opinion regarding the real penetration of serious social media in the workplace. Using Twitter and Facebook is by no mean a substitute for serious and main stream modes of communication. Having read the results of the above research I seriously wonder whether the results published by various Social-Media-Proponents reflect hype associated with a similar crowd associated with the above study.

In other words, the results obtained in previously published studies, are a mere reflection of the attitudes shown in the Maryland study, which suggests that they are a reflection of an addictive attitude towards the use of Social Media, rather than a serious consideration of the usefulness and appropriateness of using these tool-sets in the corporate environment!

Makes perfect sense to me!

Over the years I’ve read articles and analysis reports dealing with the role that the media plays in the process of creating news. The issue is about the role the media plays in creating pubic hype around a particular subject. This can be done to promote a particular idea, call for a certain action or activity, or, generally, fashion public opinion towards a desired outcome.

The reason I’m mentioning this known phenomena is because over the past few months, as I’ve become more involved in discussions taking place in a number of Project Management blogs, I’ve come across what seems to me to be a (well run yet uncoordinated) campaign aimed at promoting certain ideas, for which (at least to my mind) there is no real or credible corroborating evidence.

If you haven’t guessed by now – the focus of my (yet to be detailed) whinging is “SOCIAL MEDIA” or more specifically what I perceive as being misinformation and to some degree also disinformation regarding the role that Social Media plays in the business context generally and in Project Management specifically.

As points of reference I would like to mention two recent articles posted in two separate blogs, one being a post by Todd Williams, titled “The ITSuccess TweetJam“; the other being a study published by Elizabeth Harrin, titled “Social Media in a Project Environment“.

The TweetJam Noise factor

Imagine the following scenario:

• You are in the board room with a VERY large executive table,
• fifty seven people (yes 57!) sit around the table
• the meeting starts and all 57 people start talking to each other and, oh, by the way, each exchange is limited to 140 characters
• after seventy (70) minutes the meeting comes to an end
• you tally the number of messages transmitted around the table and you realize that all together there were 420 exchanges
• quick calculation (option #1) – 70 minutes and 420 exchanges = one exchange every nine (9) seconds.

When I imagine anything like the above, the first word that comes to my mind is NOISE. This is an inefficient and ineffective use of people’s time with the likelihood of being able to adequately and methodically ANY topic  is practically zero. In fact, I’m fairly confident that any person with a fairly average level of intelligence would immediately agree that the above scenario cannot be seen as being conducive to resulting in a valuable outcome.

Right? WRONG, as here comes Twitter and, as Twitter is a Social Media tool, and by extension it is a positively-contributing-collaboration-tool, a scenario not much different from that which was described above, can be reinterpreted as being a successfully coordinated interaction with smashing success. Let’s see how this was done:

• You are in front of your PC and you are taking part in a TweetJam
• fifty seven other people (yes 57!) take part in the TweetJam
• the TweetJam starts and all 57 people start tweeting to each other and, naturally, each exchange is limited to 140 characters
• after seventy (70) minutes the TweetJam comes to an end
• you tally the number of Tweets sent during the TweetJam and come up with 420 Tweets
• quick calculation (option #1) – 70 minutes and 420 Tweets= one Tweet every nine (9) seconds.

I’ve raised my concerns regarding the effectiveness of such a method in achieving any successful outcome in comments I made to the original post (see link above). I was surprise that of all the comments made mine was the only one concerned about the noise levels of such uncoordinated and synchronized discussion. But that’s not the important point here. The thing that really got me worried was the realization that for the multitude of people (all 57 of them) who took part in this uncontrolled concert, this seemed like the right thing to do, as they were using a tool which is now mandated  by recent “Social Media Specialists” as being the ‘in’ thing to use.

I will deal with the Social Media Specialists in a minute as they deserve an honorary mention here. But back to the TweetJam. If you read Todd’s article and the comments added later on you will see that this social experiment was attended by a fairly intelligent or, at least, well educated crowd. To think that none of the 57 attendees managed to step back from the hype and realize that there are much better ways in which information can be exchanged, besides using Twitter is, well, a concern.

It seems to me that the reason 57 highly educated individuals exhibit a crowd behavior similar to that described in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is because they are genuinely convinced, based on information and analysis distributed by Social Media Specialists that “using social media is not only good for you but it is what everybody else is doing – so you may as well do it as well if you don’t want to be left behind“.

Social Media Disinformation

So, let’s examine the facts:

The PM Magazine published an article where, amongst the other facts, figures and interpretations brought up, it mentions a study conducted by  McKinsey & Company, according to which “69 percent of the 1,700 executives surveyed reported having ‘gained measurable business benefits’ from social media tools”. As I’ve shown in an earlier post, this assertion is completely wrong as it is inaccurately represents the real study’s results.

So what does the McKinsey study actually say. Quite correctly, the McKinsey study understands that there is a vast conceptual difference between Social Media and any serious aspects of Collaboration. As such the study was set to investigate how companies are benefiting from Web 2.0. The answer, not surprising, was that companies that made use of Web 2.0 technologies were able to generate substantial and measurable business benefits.

Correlating the McKinsey study with the PM Magazine article demonstrates how the Social Media campaign is skewing results in order to promote their agenda.

Another study, published by Elizabeth Harrin, reaches similar conclusions to the ones published in the PM Magazine. In her study, Elizabeth identified that “Over 70% of survey respondents believe that social media and enterprise collaboration tools are a key issue for project managers this year. The range of tools in use across organizations show that both large and small corporations are adopting social media and enterprise collaboration tools.” Contrary to what Elizabeth says, I suspect that 70% of the respondents believe (as I do) that the use of enterprise collaboration tools is a key issue for project managers.

The Social Media Fab

Elizabeth’s survey suffers from the same methodological problems exhibited by the PM Magazine article. Creating a vagueness around the use of terms allows mixing up vastly different concepts where any interpretations, irrespective of how  ludicrous and illogical they are, are allowed, while presenting them under the pretext of a semi scientifically accepted research.

This is where the analogy I make in this post’s title to the impact of the Placebo Effect becomes apparent. Some people mistakenly get confused between what they WANT and what they KNOW. They want, for whatever reason, Social Media to be a prominent feature in businesses and project management to the point where they become absolutely certain that this is in fact the truth. And as we know from other aspects of life, If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

I’m not going to muck around with this one so I’ll say it up-front. My view (and I feel rather strongly about it) is that Social Networking is not positively contributing to proper Project communication. My conviction that this strong belief of mine is shared by most, if not all, fellow professionals has eroded somewhat in recent months after I’ve read a number of blog articles, each of which promoting some aspects of social media and social networking.

The straw that broke the camel’s back (metaphorically speaking) was a recent post by Derek Huether (from The Critical Path) where he elaborated on the following concept:

From our PMP Exam we know that the number of communication paths in a project is [N(N-1)]/2. Now, we all agree that communication is an important (if not crucial) aspect of project management. We also agree that knowledge accumulation is conducive to increased innovation and is paramount for correct decision making process. We can therefore conclude that by initiating and conducting large amounts of communication, provided that this is attentive communication (i.e. we actually listen and absorb the content of that communication) must result in positive results.

Right?

Wrong!!!

There is already a growing body of knowledge, supported by recent research papers, that not only ‘social networking attitude’ is on the rise but its true impact is yet to be realized.

• A December 2009 study by Helen Hodgetts of the University of Cardiff in the UK warns that “Email notifications and instant messages all cause a break in focus of the task in hand, even if they are attended to only very briefly”. “Hodgetts and co-author Dylan Jones found that even a five second interruption caused people to take longer than normal to complete the next step in a simple seven-step computer task.”

• A 2009 study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and which was set to explore the use of media by young people (age 8 to 18 – born between 1991 – 2001) has found out (amongst other things) that Young people were found to devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to daily media use (an increase of 20% from an earlier study conducted in 2004 – in which it was found that the time spent on media use was 6 hours and 21 minutes). The study further found that the level of multi-tasking (i.e. a combined use of varying modes of media simultaneously [for example, watching the TV, while at the same time browsing the net and sending a text message]) has increased from 26% in 2004 to 29% in 2009.
• A 2008 Accenture study made the observation that people who were born between 1977 and 1997 (corresponding roughly with Generation Y) expect their employers to respect their IT preferences, including their computers and applications and that employees in the above age group would show a preference to use instant messaging, text messaging, and RSS feeds to communicate with their clients and customers. The study further found that over a quarter of the employees surveyed use technology that is unsupported and unsanctioned by their employer. Amongst Gen Y employees, almost half reported that they use social networks, blogs, or Twitter without having their IT departments’ approval.

There are a number of basic and self explanatory risks associated with the growing proliferation of social media and social networking. These are:

• The development of bad time management attitudes, associated specifically with over reliance on multi-tasking.
• An apparent lack of adherence to corporate policies regarding the use of corporate mandated application and communication protocols.
• Inefficient use of management time on non-productive communication approach.

I’d like to finish off with explaining why I believe the approach outlined above, regarding the utilisation of a large number of communication path to increase effective project communication is flawed.

The reasoning is simple. If there are 200 people in your communication network this will equate, using the formula above, to 19,900 communication paths. So, using the Twitter example of having 200 contacts, if they each send one message to all other contacts, you will enjoy the wisdom spread over just under 20,000 messages.

Let’s think about this prospect for a minute. If reading each of these messages took you only one second, how much time will you need to invest in order to review all these messages?

19,900 messages / 60 seconds / 60 minutes = 5.5 hours!!!

Got that? With just one second per message, you will need to invest 5.5 hours to review all messages in your communication path. That’s not quite realistic though, is it? So let’s assume you spend, on an average 10 seconds per message. Got the point? With 200 contacts and 19,900 messages, with 10 seconds required to properly review, absorb and internalize each message, the amount of time required will be staggering 55 hours!!!

Tom Davenport of the Harvard Business Review has a wonderful post about the suggestion (inferred from a couple of recent studies)  that the content of social media is trivial at best. In another excellent post he speculates about the contribution (or in fact, the lack) of  Social Media to the decline of our civilization. The reality is, and arguing against it based on solid facts would be difficult to do, that it is hard (if not plain impossible) to gain much from the clutter of information (and mis-information) stored in the millions of Twitter messages floating in cyberspace. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise ought to provide hard, objective and measurable evidence to substantiate their claims.

Did I mention already that as far as I’m concerned Social Networking is not positively contributing to proper Project communication?

Have a great week.

Just when you thought it is safe to go back to work, a 2009 study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and which was set to explore the use of media by young people (age 8 to 18 – born between 1991 – 2001) has found out (amongst other things) that:

1. Young people were found to devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to daily media use (an increase of 20% from an earlier study conducted in 2004 – in which it was found that the time spent on media use was 6 hours and 21 minutes).
2. The level of multi-tasking (i.e a combined use of varying modes of media simultaneously [for example, watching the TV, while at the same time browsing the net and sending a text message]) has increased from 26% in 2004 to 29% in 2009.

I’ve mentioned in an earlier post a 2008 study by Accenture that made the observation that people who were born between 1977 and 1997 (i.e. people who would be today at the age of 13 to 23 – corresponding roughly with Generation Y) expect their schools and employers to respect their IT preferences, including their computers and applications and that students and employees in the above age group would show a preference to use instant messaging, text messaging, and RSS feeds to communicate with their peers, clients and customers. The study further found that over a quarter of the employees surveyed use technology that is unsupported and unsanctioned by their employer. Amongst Gen Y employees, almost half reported that they use social networks, blogs, vlogs, or Twitter without having their IT departments’ approval.

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s study provide further reasons for concerns in Corporate HR and recruitment departments. The trend reported on in the Accenture report seems to be intensified with a generation, that is yet to enter the workforce, who’s time management attitude are or particular concern.

On one hand there will be the issue of over dependency on media, including the constant need to use social media tools in order to keep in touch with and keep track of family and friends. There is also an increased probability that there will be an increase in the unauthorized use of social media.

On the other hand, the over reliance on multi-tasking, the productivity impact of which has now been well and truly understood as having negative influence on corporate and project performances.

The trends shown in recent studies are not a real concern and should not be used as reasons to be alarmed. What they do however, is raise the awareness that the appropriate training and policies will need to be put in place in order to ensure that once this generation joins the workplace, they are able to be integrated in the smoothest and painless way possible. Project Managers who are on the recruitment path will need to be aware of the generational attitudes of this generation (fondly called Generation M² – as in ‘Multi-Media) while they make their HR decisions.

On a lighter note, this is what Mike Melanson from ReadWriteWeb.com had to say about this issue:

“With teens spending more time with media in a week than the average person does at a full-time day job, we can only wonder what this next generation will look like as they enter the work force.

Oh wait, are they called “bloggers”?

Have a great week.