Leveraging SharePoint for Project Management
-by Dux Raymond Sy
As project manager, you know the challenges a project can bring: A key stakeholder wants a special report each week. Project team members are spread out through six different time zones. Nobody knows who has the latest version of important project documents. Burdensome reporting requirements rob your time and distract you from important tasks.
In addition, the success of organizational projects may be compromised by inefficient communication between team members, document management, and storage challenges. Even for successful projects and project managers, there are always opportunities to find new efficiencies.
Previous attempts to address these problems using Microsoft Office Project Server and other similar tools have proven to be quite complex, costly and have met with limited success. SharePoint can be easily adapted to a project management environment and is an economical and more effective alternative.
Many organizations are already adopting SharePoint for a variety of reasons. These organizations wish to maximize the utility of SharePoint by finding new and effective ways to use it throughout the organization, and having their employees master the skills necessary to achieve these ends. The ability of SharePoint to be used to aid project management can be a profitable way to leverage the organizational investment in SharePoint that has already occurred.
When project managers are able to apply SharePoint to the management of their projects successfully, this will result in projects that provide a better return on investment and more positively impact the key measures of the organization.
SharePoint can be used to apply common and practical project management concepts and helps you build a Project Management Information System (PMIS), customized to your project that can efficiently coordinate communication and collaboration among team members. In fact, project managers can implement SharePoint themselves without the IT/IS department's intervention. SharePoint can be easily configured to:
- Provide a Web-based project environment for project stakeholders to collaborate and communicate project information
- Centralize project documents and keep track of document history with version control
- Automate project reporting and generate on demand status reports
- Integrate existing project management tools such as Excel, Microsoft Project, PowerPoint, and Outlook
- Display key project metrics
- Display customized project dashboards for project sponsors
[Editor's Note: Dux's latest feature article, How to Successfully Launch a SharePoint PMIS, a sequel to his 7 Reasons Why SharePoint is a Great PMIS, is now available! Over the coming weeks, we will be presenting a series of original articles spotlighting specific aspects of leveraging SharePoint effectively for project management. In the meantime, we invite you to explore some of the currently available original site content, including: Project Management Using SharePoint: A Case Study; Manage Project, Project Status in SharePoint Anyone?; Meet Dux; and a hand-picked selection of recommended resources. We also encourage you to drop in to our brand new Project Management forum to pose your questions or comments on all things project managment-related in SharePoint.]
Dux Raymond Sy is a certified PMP, SharePoint consultant, and author of the forthcoming book, SharePoint for Project Management, due this fall from O'Reilly Media.