Almost every day, someone passes me a link to a study or article worth a chuckle and then gets prompty filed away or deleted.  It's not that the thought it unwanted or unappreciated, just that they often don't elicit further thought.  Late last week, I received a link that was just the opposite.

Dennis McDonald - a Northern Virginia local that I've talked with a number of times - has released the preliminary findings of his study entitled "Blogging and Project Management".  Both as a long-time blogger and as someone building and working with Project Management tools (*cough*web2Project*cough), I found his initial discoveries useful.  Some of the findings were what you'd expect but some of the questions and comments that popped out at me were interesting:

• It appears that Project Managers are mostly unaware of blogging.  Is it simply ignorance and lack of exposure or has there been a conscious decision to exlcude it from consideration or has it been determined to be unsuitable?
• In their "replacing email" points, are they wanting to document discussions (dynamic, like a forum) or the decisions made (static, even if changed later)?  It seems like each of these would encourage/necessitate different tools and mindsets... neither of these seem appropriate for a blog.
• While I have yet to interact with a single organization that is doing wholly internal blogging, I've find high acceptance of Wikis within a number of organizations and have helped them develop "wiki best practices".  Do organizations see these as mutually exclusive tools/concepts?
• In the Open Source world - a skewed sample, no doubt - the acceptance of blogging/wikis/etc has been high and the creative application of the tools has been amazing.  I wish more companies would look at Open Source - not just to use - but to learn and review best practices from.  I think there's a huge amount of experience, knowledge, and mistakes that can be learned from.

Yes, I've already sent these to Dennis, maybe he'll have/gain insight to share with the rest of us.  I look forward to the full report.  In the meantime, the preliminary findings are available.

In terms of full disclosure, Dennis interviewed me about two years ago for his white paper - "Business and IT Must Work Together to Manage New 'Web 2.0' Tools".  I completely forgot about that until I wrote this post...  wow, hard to imagine that it's been two years already.