Using SharePoint as a Project Management Tool
As consultants or IT providers to end user organizations, it sometimes seems that the old adage about the cobbler’s children having no shoes applies to the way that we manage our own application needs. Informal or ad-hoc methods of managing projects are no longer acceptable to project sponsors and management. Qualitative and measurable expectations for measuring systems development have become popular, using industry standard estimating and software quality methodologies. If you are a software development project manager, the key to managing your projects better is to review your current PMIS capabilities and assess the ability of a collaborative tool, like Microsoft's SharePoint, to address the technical aspects of managing projects.
As defined by the Project Management Institute, a PMIS is a standardized set of automated project management tools available within an organization and integrated into a system. In a perfect world, a PMIS will solve every project manager's nightmare: project information distributed in multiple locations and versions; status reports in e-mail; project schedules in a USB drive; forms and templates in the network share without traceability, audit trail or version control. In addition, a PMIS should support most, if not all, of the communication and collaboration needs of a project environment. Though the PMI does not specify which tools to use, SharePoint can be customized to meet the communication and collaboration needs of a project environment.
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