Labcast: Is Social Media a Perfect Fit for Project Management?

In our latest episode of Labcast, Ty Kiisel, Manager of Social Outreach with AtTask, stops by the studio to talk about some of the ways social media concepts can be used to improve project management processes for companies of all sizes.

Labcast 60: Ty Kissel on Integrating Project Management with Social Media

For more from Ty, follow him on Twitter @tykissel and check out his Talking Work podcast. To learn more about AtTask, visit the company site and check out our profile page on the OpenView website.

Podcast Transcript

Brendan Cournoyer: Hello again, everyone, and welcome to this episode of Labcast. I’m Brendan Cournoyer. Today we’re joined by Ty Kiisel, Manager of Social Outreach for AtTask, one of the OpenView Venture Partners portfolio companies. Ty, in studio. Thanks very much for joining us today.

Ty Kiisel: Hi. Thanks for inviting me in.

Brendan: Sure. Today I thought it would be good to start off with a brief overhead look and elevator pitch of AtTask and what you guys are all about.

Ty: Basically, AtTask is about helping people get work done, managing and organizing your work. We’re a project management company in Orem, Utah, and we have customers all over the world who are more efficient and get more things accomplished because of our software.

Brendan: That’s great. One of the things I wanted to talk about today is a topic that I’ve heard and read about here and there online over at least the past year, or maybe the past six months, is the concept of social media and really integrating it into your project management and collaboration processes. That’s something that you guys are really invested in. Is that right?

Ty: Yes, that is. I think it’s been about two or so years ago we started looking at the project management process and realized that the process was broken and that we were part of the problem. The software industry was part of the problem. I guess the biggest secret of project management software is that it was so complicated that most people didn’t use it.

We started an 18-months long contextual inquiry where we just watched people work in their cubes and interact with their software and interact with their whiteboards and sticky notes and spreadsheets, and we came up with the conclusion that, for the most part, the linchpin as to whether or not a project is successful is the individual contributor on a project team. We wanted to create software that provided value to them and allowed them to participate in the process and become engaged. A social media-like approach is what we chose.

Brendan: My question is, is this because social media has become so big and so popular that it just can’t be stopped? It’s found its way into all sorts of marketing practices and online marketing now. It’s certainly starting to make a significant impact on SEO and search engine strategies, where people can be found online with their inbound marketing.

It seems like it’s really one-by-one social media. Say what you want about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, all of those things, the process of social media is becoming so popular that one by one it’s really finding its way into each individual process in a business. The way you explain it from a project management standpoint and collaboration, it just seems like a perfect fit.

Ty: I don’t believe it’s because it’s just a popular, climb on board the bandwagon sort of thing. As a metaphor for collaboration, it just works. If you’re a project manager, you know this. You’ll relate to this. How many people do you know who, during the day, they won’t update their project management software, but they’ll go home at the end of the day and spend two or three hours on Facebook updating status?

There were a couple of things that social media did very well that engendered this very easy collaborative environment. We leveraged that in our software. We give people an opportunity to collaborate in a way that’s natural to them. The Millennial generation is probably the most empowered and tech-savvy generation to ever enter the workforce. They’ve been collaborating in teams since elementary school. They collaborate personally with the social media tools since they were introduced, and doesn’t it make sense to leverage those technologies in a way that will help us at work?

Brendan: Sure. This sounds like it’s something that’s relatively unique, at least AtTask’s approach to integrating social media with those kinds of processes.

Ty: I think it is unique. It’s something that AtTask is doing. I think that a lot of companies are trying to implement Twitter or Facebook into the process. That’s not the answer, because I don’t know of a CEO who wants to pay money to know what their employees are eating for lunch. But a Twitter-like interface that focuses the conversation on tasks and projects and issues, that’s part of a larger project management solution I think works. We’ve seen at AtTask about a 400% increase in end user adoption.

Brendan: To shift gears just a little bit, but not completely because it’s still related to social media, you guys have your own content strategy, and of course we talk a lot about content marketing on OpenView Labs. Anyone who’s read my blog knows that I write quite a bit about content marketing. What can you tell us about some of the strategies that you guys have had in place and some of the value that you see in a content strategy?

Ty: Content marketing is an important part of what we’re doing. We have a blog that is daily. It’s Blogs.AtTask.com, and we have several contributors there. We also have a podcast that’s produced every other week at TalkingWork.com, and we’ve invited, I think, probably about half a dozen other writers that are outside of our company to contribute project management best practices and thoughts. We’ve got a very active Facebook and Twitter presence, as well as LinkedIn. Social media is a real important part of what we do.

Brendan: You mentioned project management best practices and thoughts. Is that really the focus of the content they are creating, to really present information for people where you can be a trusted source for how to improve your project management collaboration processes?

Ty: Absolutely. That’s the focus of all that content, is to try to help project managers and other project leaders to have a better job and do better at their job.

Brendan: Excellent. Well, Ty, thanks very much for taking the time to chat with us. Can you just remind us once again where people can go to find more information on the blog and at AtTask?

Ty: The website is AtTask.com or Blogs.AtTask.com. You can follow the blog. Every day there is something new posted, as well as TalkingWork.com.

Brendan: Excellent. Well, thanks for very much again for stopping by. Hopefully, we can do this again sometime soon.

Ty: Thank you.