Educating project managers in the 21st-century economy: a field study on the adoption of social and collaborative tools as low-cost alternatives for project communication

Social and collaborative tools such as instant messaging, e-mail, Facebook and the myriad of other social technology tools that support the 21st-century economies and their business communities, particularly the project teams, are redefining ways how they communicate today. Social media, for example, has not only broadened communication scope but has also helped to intensify global business development and competition. The paper reports the research experience of project managers in training on their field research into project teams that adopted collaborative and social media tools for project communication. The teams that were investigated represented organisations in consumer services, real estate and banking and finance. Two of the organisations are located in North Carolina (USA) and the other two organisations are located in Asia (Vietnam/Cambodia) and Mexico (South America). In the study, it was found that technology innovations such as collaborative and social media tools such as Skype, NetMeeting, SharePoint, Yammer and Twitter enabled the project teams to effectively communicate as well as support their development initiatives and information sharing. The banking organisation in Asia (Vietnam and Cambodia) in particular significantly deployed Skype, Yammer and SharePoint as low-cost alternatives and more economically effective tools for project communication and team work.