Project Management Best Practices With Microsoft SharePoint

Project managers face the challenging task of establishing and overseeing the time, budget, resources, and scope of a project from its planning stages through completion. These requirements tend to scatter intimidating amounts of information. Project Management Information Systems (PMIS) such as Microsoft SharePoint attempt to organize this information into a comprehensible format.

Wise project managers produce a specific timeline of milestones, training sessions, and meetings at the project's inception and revise it throughout. SharePoint gives PMs a way to create a project calendar and will also seamlessly integrate with Microsoft Outlook. The calendar function also allows PMs to schedule items on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis, thus keeping all team members up to date on all critical events and deadlines. PMs can also attach documents such as meeting agendas and Excel budget data to these calendar entries, thus keeping all team members aware of critical dates and information.

Successful projects unilaterally work to keep the team working together in a coherent and unified manner. Teams working in different locales can present an additional challenge; one way to overcome this obstacle involves setting up alerts within SharePoint. These alerts will generate an automatic email whenever the PM makes a change to the SharePoint site, and PMs can subscribe users to the relevant list so as to avoid irrelevant information. In addition, if PMs assign every user to a list at project onset, then they will avoid the tedium and stress of cherry-picking which team members need to know about each alteration to the project. PMs may configure the alerts to notify the team members only when something is added or to trigger whenever an element is modified or deleted. PMs can also set up alerts to update in real-time or on a daily or weekly basis; the decision will depend on the scope of the individual project.

With dozens or perhaps hundreds of workers, most PMs will want to prevent a situation in which multiple team members are editing the same document. SharePoint allows users to "check out" a document, after which other users may read it, but may not make any changes until the document is checked back in. Moreover, SharePoint uses a document library for automatic version control. If the PM changes SharePoint's default overwrite setting, then the software will store and organize all older document versions in the library.

PMs need contact information for everyone on the team, and SharePoint's contact list will store all critical contact information and team member photos. Team photos provide an easy way for individuals to become acquainted with each other and contribute to a sense of recognition and teamwork.

The above suggestions are by no means the only way in which project managers can use SharePoint's features to their advantage, but they form a good start. SharePoint has not cornered the market on project management, but its relatively widespread throughout many companies and will usually allow familiarity to flatten the team's learning curve.

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Article Source: EzineArticles