Next weekend I will be presenting Google Wave to the Project Management Institute of Ottawa Valley Outaouais Chapter. If you are in the Ottawa area and are interested in Project Management or your a member of the PMI OVOC and want to earn some PDU’s, please visit the website and register for the event. I hope to meet many Project Management and Google Wave enthusiasts next weekend.

If you are wondering what Google Wave brings to the Project Management world you may want to first start by reading a Wave that has been ongoing now for quite a while (I have been following & contributing to it for at least the last 6 weeks) titled Google Wave for Project Management.

The wish list from the PM’s in this Wave has been summed up to include:

Gmail integration or at least notification (with potential to notify outside Gmail confines)

Gmail style Labels instead of folders or private tags.

Calendar integration and shared calendars

Google Docs integration/export/import/link/auto-invite

To-do/Tasks

Timeline extension

Brainstorm/Mind mapping extension

Issue Tracking

What is available and has been used in the Wave and would be useful to PM’s are the following:

• Planny – Permit you to plan an event with the participants of your wave and to propose them different possible times. Then each member of the wave can indicate whether he/she is free for each proposed time or not. Works exactly the same way as doodle.com.
• Mindmap – A Mindmap gadget which allows for collaborative editing of hierarchical data and ideas, including icons, import and export to freemind, voting and drag & drop.
• Napkin – Adds the ability to do quick “back of a napkin” sketches to a wave – collaborative doodling!

Some others that could have some applicability would be:

• Brainstorming – A simple brainstorming tool to collaborate on an idea tree. Participants can add, edit and move nodes.
• Taskboardy – This gadget allows to maintain a taskboard, as used in XP or Scrum. It provides all its basic operations, such as Create a User Story, a task, delete them, change the statuses of the tasks and assign the tasks.
• Google Calendar Robot - Robot recognizes date pattern in form YYYY-MM-DD (‘.’ or ‘/’ can be used for separator also) and updates it to link to add an event to user’s Google Calendar.

Both of the above lists are not meant to exhaustive. In fact, I know there are many other gadgets or robots that could be used for PM depending on the project itself. I would love to hear your thoughts on which robots or gadgets would help your particular project.

Another development for PMs interested in seeing a viable PM tool-set that is integrated with Google Wave is the announcement that ThoughtWorks will be developing a Google Wave Mingle gadget; go to their website to watch the video. It is an excellent example that will have PMs excited about their future inside Google Wave.

Related posts:

1. Gravity – The Best Business Example of Google Wave, Period! I watched this video of Gravity and was simply blown...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.