"Wicked" Project Management: Automating Activity Reports

We have been exploring ways to use traditional technologies (e.g., spreadsheets, databases, word processing) to provide automated assistance to the collection and persistence of staff activity metadata, which we call "activity bullets." While our near-term goal is at least semi-automated report generation, our longer-term goals include knowledge management and reuse. This effort quickly proved to be a "wicked" problem characterized by ambiguous requirements, uncertain solutions and risky returns on investment. In this paper, we substantiate the "wicked" qualities of the problem, and share successes, shortfalls and lessons-learned from our current solution approaches. We also suggest alternative, state-of-the-art mechanisms such as semantic wikis and markup-aware mashups that are worth exploring as lightweight solutions to automated activity reporting and to persisting derived metadata for employment in knowledge sharing initiatives.