At today’s Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects conference, I facilitated a session on Collaboration and Management in Cross-Departmental Web Projects.  We focused on techniques to implement successful projects which involve staff from multiple areas within an organization, most who don’t directly report to the project manager.

Some major points:

• Although many projects involve web sites or other technology implementations, project management is more about ‘soft’ skills in winning cooperation from team members who are often assigned to a project while having to manage their already overburdened task list
• Nonprofit organizations rarely embrace project management principles as set forth by the Project Management Institute, nor do they develop internal structures such as a project management office.
• Assigning a team or task force across department lines can be utilized as a way to give team members an identity separate from their usual work responsibilities.
• The basic definition of project management should include an informal toolkit of ‘soft’ tools such as finding evangelists to help drive project progress, ways to win stakeholder cooperation and addressing organizational culture challenges.

More details on this session and other discussions held at the conference can be found at this wiki.  Thanks to Allen Gunn of Aspiration and Laura Quinn of Idealware for organizing this event.