2009 01 09 Plexus Planning Wins Social Plexus Grant from SWRDA

Bristol, UK, Friday January 09, 2009

Plexus Planning’s application for a SWRDA Research and Development grant was approved, to investigate the application of social networking to collaborative planning, through a new PLEXUS PLANNING product called SocialPlexus.

The project will research how best to develop a complementary product that facilitates capturing the project logic across multiple users, facilitating true bottom-up planning. The definition of Social networking from Wikipedia is:

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade. The resulting structures are often very complex.

This is almost a definition of a project, so to use social networking ideas in project planning seems a natural fit.

Social Networking is already receiving attention in some project management tools, but these tools have stuck to the Gantt chart paradigm, adding little real innovation that is well-informed about the real problems of project management. It is easy for a project manager to produce a Gantt chart or a to-do list, with some key milestones, etc, but is this an accurate plan, capturing the real knowledge flows in the project, or is it partial documentation of pre-conceived notions about sequence?

Plexus Planning’s experience with massive, real-world project management indicates that we already have a powerful tool that shifts the current paradigm. Just as some tools have added social networking functionality to the antiquated PM paradigm, SocialPlexus will add these functionalities to the Plexus paradigm, to create an innovative, power house set of tools.

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