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I admit I get hundreds of e-mails every day and I spend at least an hour each day dealing with them (reading them, sorting them, deleting them, responding to them, etc.). I have e-mail forwarded to my PDA, so when I am out and about I don’t miss any of them. But e-mail has been around for the last 30 years, why is it still so popular? Why do people use it for all types of collaboration?

9X better than e-Mail

If e-mail is such ancient technologies (in Internet time) why does everyone use them? John Gourville, in HBS's Marketing department, did research investigating why so many new consumer products fail to catch on with their intended audiences despite the clear advantages they offer over what's currently on the market. He talks about the '9X problem' -- "a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want." The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what's currently out there.

According to Andrew McAffee, a professor at Harvard, and a keynote speaker at the Enterprsie 2.0 Conference in June 2007, “Email is virtually everyone's current endowment of collaboration software.” Gourville's research suggests that the average person will underweight the prospective benefits of a replacement technology for it by about a factor of three, and overweight by the same factor everything they are being asked to give up by not using email. This is the 9X problem developers of new collaboration technologies will have to overcome.”

E-mail Inertia

I use Microsoft Outlook for my e-mail (a love/hate relationship). Outlook is the predominant player for not only e-mail but as a PIM (personal information manager) as I keep my calendar in it as well as tasks and track my time for client work, etc. Because Outlook is the leader in this area there are lots of software that hook into Outlook, to either put data in, pull data out, or use my Outlook data for some other reason. A good example is TimeBridge, a tool, in Beta that I am currently testing to help in the process of setting up meetings. There are many collaboration tools and project management tools that also hook into Outlook, which makes me less inclined to get rid of it because there are lots of tools that hook to it that I can get additional functionality from.

The Medium is the Message

It is important to use the right medium to communicate and collaborate within a project team. For example, e-mail is great to let people know of status or give an update on a project, but it is the wrong tool for an extended discussion on a complex project issue. It is even more the wrong tool to use to discuss emotional or personal issues the project team may be having because e-mail does not convey any of the emotional tone or information, and a delicate situation can be made worse if misread because of lack of cues provided in the e-mail. IM/chat is a bit better, you get immediate feedback, and you can clip in emoticons, but even so it is the wrong medium to discuss complex or personal issues that always arise on projects.

But IM is not persistent, by that I mean that when the conversation is over it goes away. Often in projects you want to look back at these conversations and decisions, so it is important for these interactions to be persistent. If the project is in a regulated industry you may be required to keep IM messages for up to 3 years. This brings us to Virtual Team Spaces (VTS) like;

- Huddle
- Near-time
- Jive’s Clearspace
- Collanos

Many of the VTS tools have a variety of collaborative functions that can be adapted for project work. Blogs, wikis and threaded discussions are often part of these applications. They all support group and role-based security and all offer storage for documents of all types. They are frequently used as a team project space, where a calendar, document storage, IM/chat, and other functions are used by the team to facilitate collaboration and coordination within the project. However many of these tools don’t offer real project management functionality, but rather do light weight task tracking.

If you want to focus on some of the Web 2.0 project tools that recognize the need for collaboration and have built this functionality right into a tool that already has rich project functionality I offer a short list below:

Clarizen
eProject (Summer 2007 edition)
Copper Project
Projity

Most of these tools are offered through a “Hosted” model or are SaaS (software as a service) where you pay a monthly subscription fee for use of the application. Some of these tools like Projity try to emulate Microsoft Project, but is only available through a browser on the web. Other tools like eProject, Copper Project and Clarizen integrate additional collaborative functionality into the tool and are better suited to support a virtual project team.

Why Move?

So what would make me abandon e-mail, which is quick, easy to use and I have customized with filters, etc. and already has over 2GB of data in the (pst) file.
- E-mail is becoming increasingly a noisy communications medium (i.e. spam), so I have to mine it for the important nuggets of information in all that spam noise. I heard one 20-something call it [e-mail] "is the ghetto of the Internet."
- Second it is not secure. Not that I imagine someone will pluck a critical e-mail of mine out of the ether, but rather e-mail is fraught with viruses, and so less safe than other options.
- E-mail does not always get through, it is not always a reliable means of communication
- E-mail often does not allow large attachments (gnat charts, CAD diagrams)
- E-mail does not allow me to hold a conversation with more than one person
- E-mail does not provide a convenient record (but an inconvenient one where I would have to search for all the appropriate e-mails to the project)
- E-mail is not integrated with project content and calendar

Although e-mail, IM or SMS are all good for notification or alerts for a change in status or a project related event, and they are a good way to alert one team member or the whole team, they tend to fractionalize my collaboration, requiring that I use different tools for different functions or different types of interactions.

So am I in enough pain to abandon e-mail for a Web 2.0 PM tool? Probably not, but I am getting there. The first step is to start using one of these tools for a small project with a few people and see if you have to radically modify your behaviors and how uncomfortable this might be. If it is not too bad you might want to switch over to one of these tools because of the advantages in functionality it provides. However, to get over the 9x problem, it will have to be low cost, easy to use, try-before-you buy, secure, and very easy to invite colleagues or project team members into. It should provide a persistent space for project team documents and discussions and ideally it would provide me with the “presence” and status of all the project team members.

You can probably get all but the last item from Clarizen Copper Project and eProject, and a variety of other tools, but the ability to see presence and status of team members has not yet been integrated into most Web 2.0 project tools. Neither has location (GPS tracking), which could be very useful for large and distributed project teams.

Maybe if the spam quotient gets higher, or I get more sick of dealing with my inbox, or the project tools move more into the Web 2.0 space and start providing functions (like presence and location) that I can’t get from any e-mail tools, then I will start to move over to these tools and use my e-mail less!