Manage Project, Project Status in SharePoint Anyone?...Dashboard?

As a project manager working on various types of projects at various companies (AOL, Worldcom UUNet/Verizon, Litton PRC ...), I have used a lot of different tools and applications from Microsoft Project, Microsoft Excel, Primavera to JIRA and Confluence to some home grown PMO applications to track my projects and documents. 

I’m somewhat new with SharePoint for project management.  But I think it’s a pretty good PMIS tool since project management is more than just tracking tasks, it's about communication and that's where SharePoint shines.  It’s used as "Project Central" for collaboration on the schedule, report status and update progress against tasks, risks and issues as well as document sharing and discussions.  I think it’s cool that I can store my slides for my presentations in the Slide Library.  And when I need to do a new presentation I can select the ones I want to create a new presentation on the fly.  I also like that from a Microsoft document or spreadsheet I can create a workspace for sharing, brainstorming, discussing and editing a requirement document with a few people prior to publishing it without having to send back and forth the draft amongst ourselves. …I can kill less trees from printing out 8 million papers and less spamming.  I can create my own wikis.  And engineers, if you don’t want to get the Alerts that SharePoint sends to your InBox then hurry and get the tasks done quickly. ;)

But I find that SharePoint out of the box is somewhat lacking in a few things.  For example, there’s no option for creating reports in the form of charts/graphs.  I don’t want to have to export to Excel and create my charts from there.  I don’t know about anyone else but my former upper management/VPs didn’t want to see or hear tedious details of the project.  They just want to see color graphs and charts.  The advantage of being a project manager for a SharePoint solution company like Bamboo is that I can ask our developers if they can create a tool that project managers like me can generate those types of charts in SharePoint without having to use tools like Processes On Demand or having to export data to Excel and create a PIE chart from there. 

So watch out for this new product, in a couple months few days my cool co-workers are going to give me and whoever wants to buy our product a new SharePoint feature or Web Part that allows us to create any type of chart we want at a Portfolio Management level to show stuff  that PMBOK love to talk about and the executives would be excited about like Actual Cost  versus Budget (BAC), Project Health related to Scope, Schedule, Cost…etc., Pie Chart of Projects with Percentage and Color  Yellow, Green, Red and more....

I think I’m going to work on them to build me the next tool after this one where I can create a Project Schedule that gives me true dependencies between tasks and real Gantt View so I don’t have to use Microsoft Project and other tools to sync my tasks between MS Project and SharePoint.

I would love to hear from other PM professionals who have their own SharePoint implementation experiences to share.  What do you think of it?  So, join our Blog and share your experience with us!!! :)

Here is a preliminary look at the Project Portfolio Dashboard:

UPDATE (08/25/2008):

We released the new product Sharepoint Project Portfolio Dashboard. It is available via the Bamboo Project Management Suite.

UPDATE (04/30/2009):

Version 1.5 is coming out soon. View this blog for more info.

(This article originally appeared in The Bamboo Team Blog.)

Do you have questions or comments on this article?  Please visit our Project Management forum and share your thoughts with Bamboo Nation!