Project Management

Managing a project can be broken down into phases.  Our experience has shown that really successful projects are ones where everyone has 'buy in' and everyone knows the up-to-date plan.

Using SharePoint to manage projects can be done alongside PRINCE or Agile methods and really lends its easy-to-use dashboards to DevOps.

The Project

One of the biggest issues on a long project is exactly what the project is delivering. Over time the scope changes and extra items may have been added. The latest drawings or plans need to be available to all, as well as the various change requests, RAID logs and project documentation. Add the various workstreams or delivery channels and a few delivery phases and you have a communications nightmare. 

A well designed SharePoint site will bring the right information to the right people at the right time.

Project documentation

Over the life of a project, a huge number of documents can be produced and need to be stored. Our first objective would be to weed out the information that would be better off in other formats than the traditional MS Office formats. Once we are sure we have the right mix, the next step is to add metadata which allow more defined storage, sorting and make them available to the people that need access. SharePoint does a great job on version control, which means saving files with the date in the file name, reducing the amount of storage required.

Project Meetings

Face-to-face or via online/video conference, meetings always generate actions and these are normally sent out to attendees in a Word format and via email. If you are in the position of attending more than one meeting per week, managing your actions can be a logistical problem.

We advocate the use of SharePoint to plan and manage meetings. Minutes are recorded online, and the resulting actions are sent out as tasks, which can even be set to alert the assignee via email (if they don't get enough emails already). This way tasks can be managed in MS Outlook if required, and as soon as they are updated, the results are immediately available to the project team. 

Gone will be the days of having to listen to all around the table (real or virtual) letting you know what they have or haven't done (you will all see this as the tasks will be updated) and the meeting can concentrate on more important things like managing exceptions or issues.