The “R” word is perhaps still the most popular word in the news today. Everywhere we hear, read and see that some analysts are trying to predict the future of the national and global economy. Others are offering tips on how to survive in the situation of economic turmoil. Yet almost all the analysts agree that today is no time to panic; rather, you should rethink your strategies.

The question arises: what strategies can help your business survive the economic downturn? Lots of experts, including Bill Gates, answer: “Innovation.” Innovation means finding new ways to do business in this harsh situation and learning to think differently. It is said that innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity and not a threat.

Today, indeed, is the time to seek new opportunities, leveraging the full potential of your enterprise. One of the ways to do it is to improve the efficiency of your operations through innovations in project management. These innovations come with the development of a new trend in project management – Project Management 2.0.

Project Management 2.0 can be viewed as Enterprise 2.0 applied to project management. It relies on two simple Enterprise 2.0 concepts – collective intelligence and emergent structures. Collective intelligence, also known as the wisdom of the crowds, appears in Project Management 2.0 as series of team members’ interactions taking place in the course of their active collaboration. The value of collaboration grows with the number of participants. It helps to build, maintain and evolve an up-to-date picture of operations. Flexible Project Management 2.0 tools merge this picture from various pieces (such as tasks, status updates, relevant files, etc.), giving a perfect example of what enterprise social software researchers call “emergent structures.” Project Management 2.0 tools become a system that lets members contribute and modify content in a ‘freeform’ manner—with a minimum of imposed structure in the form of workflows, decision right allocations, interdependencies and data formats. The best tools in this field contain mechanisms to let the structure emerge over time. Such mechanisms include linking, tagging, building views and hierarchies.
Now let us investigate how these practices can help companies to innovate.

Project Management 2.0 characteristics pushing innovation

• Stay in control.
First of all, Project Management 2.0 tools allow you to weigh the collective intelligence of employees and at the same time keep tight control of all of your internal operations. In a sluggish economy, managers have no room for error. So a close insight into your business will help you to focus your resources and direct them correctly. With Project Management 2.0 tools, you have insight into every action of every team member, and you get immediate updates about the changes in the project plans. Thus employing the collaborative planning model introduced by the new technology, you will be able to build the strategy, taking the valuable, bottom-up field knowledge into account. You also get an opportunity to use this knowledge to back up your decisions, so that you make fewer mistakes in resource allocation.

• Keep plans up-to-date and have a real-time picture of your business.
Second, the new-generation technologies help you to make your plans easily adaptable. Today, there’s no time to waste on gathering information from e-mails and meeting outlines, incorporating the updates into project plans and reporting the changes. When the economy is unstable, information quickly becomes outdated. So by the time you finish merging the latest updates into your plan, it can become obsolete already, and your work will be useless. But what is even worse, your company might miss an important opportunity. When all the routine work is performed by the software, managers have more time to evaluate the situation and to make the right decisions. Making the right decisions quickly is what your company’s prosperity depends on.

• Make project management cost-effective.
Third, Project Management 2.0 tools, which are usually delivered on a SaaS model, can help you cut your upfront and overall expenses. When the present economy makes businesses more conscious about their expenses, the new-generation technologies do look attractive. Project Management 2.0 solutions are usually lighter and cheaper (up to 70% cheaper in some cases) than traditional enterprise project management suites.

The new tools can also make you more flexible for the frequent adjustments in the IT budgets. The SaaS model allows you to pay as you go, so you disburse only a small amount of money upfront. If you are not satisfied with the service you get from one provider, you can easily switch to another provider, as no big investments were made in advance. In fact, the interest in SaaS offerings is already growing, according to Jeff Kaplan, managing director of the reputable consulting company ThinkStrategies. Companies see an opportunity to reduce IT investments and direct their cash flow to other important things.

These are three basic ways that your business can benefit from the new-generation applications. As a conclusion, I should note that the Project Management 2.0 solutions alone certainly will not be the main remedy for your business in the current situation of an economic downturn. But the innovation in processes that these solutions accelerate probably will be. You can increase the well-being of your company through optimizing expenditures, realizing the most advantageous resource allocation and making smart decisions rapidly. The adoption of Project Management 2.0 tools may be a first step in this journey.

Another success strategy in the present market situation is paying attention to your customers and improving customer service. So next time I plan to speculate more on how Project Management 2.0 technologies can help businesses to listen to their clients and get to know their customer communities better. An economic downturn not only breaks fortunes, but also creates fortunes.

Meanwhile, if you could share with readers your strategy for surviving this economic situation, we could turn this into a very helpful discussion.

Andrew’s innovative ideas and passion to improve project management tools are applied in Wrike, a leading online project management solution. Andrew now leads the company as a founder and CEO.