Using A Blog as Project Management Tool

During the last time a have constantly feeling that awareness about projects state is poor. Top management often doesn't know project status and weekly reports don't help. Yes, maybe project manager articulates some problems, but when discussion turns into details, there is a lack of information.
This problem especially important for remote teams.

One solution is using a blog. Project manager or team lead may post all interesting events in project flow on a daily basis. Solved problems with brief solution description, new problems, feelings about progress and possible risks, personal thoughts about overall project status and so on. Blog is informal, and I like it. This is a project diary with comments that holds all project's history.
During a "lessons learned" phase blog will help a lot. Such blog definitely should have RSS feed and comments as a minimum. Sometimes RSS feed is even more usable than email notifications (depends on personality). The other useful feature might be an integration with project management system to insert direct links on user stories, bugs or documents.

Also consider integrating Wiki and use it in some sort of a bug control in a project or version changes. In the bottom line, take Blog + Wiki and give an RSS to everyone who needs to know all the changes in the project and you got a pretty nice project management tool :)

Guy Levin
CVO & Co-Founder
Commerix LTD.
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