Some projects are directly affected by external factors such as political elections, economic trends, corporate mergers, technological or scientific breakthroughs, or weather. To keep informed about these factors, you can subscribe to online news sources. A method that facilitates this process is Really Simple Syndication (RSS). To use an RSS feed, team members download a free news reader on the Internet. Web pages with RSS news feeds have labeled links, as shown in Figure 6.7.
If the user clicks on the RSS feed, news from the Web site is automatically sent to the user’s news reader. The news reader can be set to filter the news for key words to limit the stories to those that are relevant to the project.
The following are examples of asynchronous communications:
- Mail and package delivery. Transfer of objects and contracts that need signatures.
- Fax. Document transmittal over telephone. Facsimiles are accepted for some documents.
- Electronic mail (e-mail). Text messages with attachments can be distributed and managed by computer programs.
- Web log (blog). An online journal may be used to record events, thoughts, and lessons learned.
- Really Simple Syndication (RSS). News feeds that push relevant content to a reader to keep the manager informed of new events that could affect the project.
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