Google has announced Google Wave, an open source real-time communications and collaboration platform. It was first announced at the Google I/O conference in 2009 and released to the public May 2010. Wave has a broad feature list designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. There is also a large selection of extension including automated translation among 40 languages. Google Wave is now an ideal platform for project and program management communications. Are you using Google Wave with your project, program, portfolio, management?
Some of the features requested by project managers include:
- Issue Tracking
- Timeline
- Integration with Google Docs
- Brainstorm/Mind Mapping
- To-do Tasks
- Shared Calendar
- Event Planning
This is just a short list because there are many gadgets or robots that could be used for PM depending on the project itself. What other robots or gadgets have you found to be helpful? Wave Gadget is one of two types of Google Wave extensions. Gadgets are fully-functional applications. According to Google, gadgets are primarily for changing the look and feel of waves, although this seems to only scratch the surface of the potential of a wave gadget. Robots are the other type of Google Wave extension. Robots are like having another person within a Google Wave conversation, except that they’re automated. They’re a lot like the old IM bots of the past, although far more robust. Robots can modify information in waves, interact with users, communicate with others waves, and pull information from outside sources.
Some specific techniques you can use for your team to collaborate inside of a project environment.
- Shared Tags and Saved Searches: To keep all the project-specific waves into a single bucket, the first thing all members of your team should do is agree on a project-specific tag. Wave tags are visible to all wave participants. You can create a project tag like “Issues,” then everyone on the team can find waves based on that tag.
- Choose to Reply Below a Blip, Inline, or Edit the Blip: Unlike email, where you can either reply to an entire message or chop it up into quotes and reply inline, in a Wave, you can do either of those things – or just edit the message that someone else wrote, as if it were a Google document.
- Private Replies: Sometimes in a group conversation, you want to direct a private reply to a single member or subset of a group. These comments will show up online but not everyone will be able to see the private wave.
- Playback and Wave Forking: Since wave is more a document collaboration tool than an email replacement, its contents are living things that go through a series of change and revisions over time. Wave’s playback features lets you move forward and back through those revisions. You can always restore an older version.
- Helpful Bots, Gadgets, and Add0ons: You can select from tons of Wave bots and gadgets depending on what you need for your project management needs.
You can share text files, photos, and videos. Again, it’s a great organization tool, because all of your files can be stored in one place for you and your client to reference and download at any time. Wrike.com, which makes a well-regarded project management SAAS suite, said it is now automatically syncing with Wave to help distributed workgroups leverage the real-time capabilities of Google’s collaboration platform to manage projects.
What are your experiences using Google Wave? Which bots or gadgets have you found to be helpful within the project/program/portfolio/enterprise management requirements?
References used in this blog.
1. “Google Wave for Project Management” by David.
2. “How to manage a Group Project in Google Wave” by Gina Trampani
3. “Use Google Wave as a Project Management Tool” by Erik Folgate
4. “Google Wave Gets Project Management via Wrike.com”by Clint Boulton