Manage Projects on SharePoint

Project Management on SharePoint - the new pmPoint release - my top 10

Eamonn McGuinness — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:35:00 GMT

We released a new version of pmPoint to our customers last week. You can see the official press release on our website, but I though it good to give the down and dirty about the release in the blog - or at least some aspects of it! I will rely on the "picture painting 1,000 words" and run with partial screen shots. These are my top 10 highlights of the new release.

New Gantt Chart - List Level
New Gantt Chart - Across Multiple Projects and Sites
Report Customizations - Even Easier!
Templates - now covering 4 Work and Project Management workloads
Watch my lips - no more XML - brand new Report Editor
Filters that allows you to more flexibly report across projects
Greater Control over Scheduling Rules
Ability to Hide or Show Columns
Recalculate Project Schedule now automatically recalculates order numbers
New and Greatly Improved User Assistance (Documentation, Movies, Forum, etc.)

By the way - we have been showing early beta of pmPoint on SharePoint 2010 integrating with Project 2010. You should check it out if you are 2010 focused!

1. New Gantt Chart - List Level

2. New Gantt Chart - Across Multiple Projects and Sites

3. Report Customizations - Even Easier!

4. Templates - for four workloads (Work Management; Project Management; Program Management; New Project Request Management)

5. Watch my lips - no more XML - brand new Report Editor

6. Project and Site Level Filters

Filters that allows you to easily filter projects against the Project Statement list, for example you could create a cross-site and cross-list work report that filtered by a custom field (e.g. Business Unit).

7. Greater Control over Scheduling Rules

8. Ability to Hide or Show Columns

9. Recalculate Project Schedule now automatically recalculates and assigns Order numbers

10. New and Improved User Assistance (Documentation, Movies, Forum, etc.)

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 – What’s Coming

Donal McCarthy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:12:00 GMT

For three years now the Microsoft SharePoint team in Redmond have been developing new and very exciting functionality for the SharePoint platform. SharePoint 2010 will essentially be the fourth major version of the platform since the first version shipped in 2001. SharePoint Server is the fastest growing server product Microsoft has ever developed, with over $1Bn in revenue and over 100 million users and growing! Last week in Las Vegas at the SharePoint conference over 7,400 delegates showed up - almost double on the last conference - and that in a down economy. I think that statistic speaks volumes about SharePoint and it's meteoric rise.

Our webcast attracted close to 1,000 registrants and we had 327 attend on the day, which is pretty darn good for a webcast! At the webcast we asked the following question and got these results:

Will your organization move to SharePoint 2010 in the calendar year 2010?

No – we always wait for SP1 19%
No – the move to 64 bit hardware is too much for us next year 5%
No – we just do not have the budget 18%
Yes – we always go with the latest version 8%
Yes – we need some of the new capabilities 15%
Yes – we are already planning for SharePoint 2010 32%

That is 55% in the "Yes" camp. I am sure our stats are skewed as the people who showed up had some interest in SharePoint 2010 - but still 55% - Wow!

What are the coolest new capabilities? What are the most exciting developments? What are the biggest changes? What does this all mean for your SharePoint plans? What will the new 2010 platform enable you to do with ease that you can not do today?

Watch this webcast and find out the answers to these and more questions.

Watch webcast in IE on original Blog posting

PMI Global Congress slides - "Opening SharePoint to Project (2007 and 2010)"

Eamonn McGuinness — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:11:00 GMT

I was kindly invited by Microsoft to join them this week at the PMI Global Congress in Orlando. I spoke on Monday and many folks asked me for a copy of the slides. Must have been something good in them or maybe they were just being kind to me! Either way here is a copy of same.

The presentation topic was "Opening SharePoint to Project (2007 and 2010)".

You can find the slides here.

A Sample Team Member Guide

Eamonn McGuinness — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:17:00 GMT

As I explained in the last post ...

I had the pleasure of working with a really great team recently - a team that were dealing with a very dynamic situation - a new team that never met each other before the project started - a team that were working on a very challenging project.

Overall Project's Process

We worked together to develop this simple but practical process for each Team Member for step 4 of the Project's approach (which is copied here again).

[Friday] Project planning and re-planning
[Saturday] Communication of the latest plan to the team (via an automated email from pmPoint)
[Everyday!] Everyone does lots of work and the team makes great progress
[Late Wednesday] Everyone makes a personal progress update on tasks and issues
[Thursday at 2pm] Weekly Team Meeting with the following agenda:
1. Review, discuss and resolve (in so far as possible) issues
2. Look at upcoming tasks for next week
3. (time permitting) Look at tasks achieved last week or the highlight tasks

Team Member Update Process

Update My Tasks for the past week by updating values in the simple grid
- Perhaps change the status field to say "In Progress" or "Completed"
- If you have started a task, then enter the "Actual Start Date"
- If you have completed a task, then enter the "Actual Finish Date"
- If the task in question is problematic you may select the "Issue Indicator" field and provide details in the "Issue Description" fields
- Also feel free to add comments and other details in the "Description field"
Optionally:
- Check your work for the coming week - My Work Due Soon or My Gantt
  - This is in as an optional task as you will be getting an email reminder about your upcoming work!
- Add a project document to the Documents folder
- Add non-critical project To Dos
- Check the overall status of the project by looking at the Weekly Status Report

A Sample Project Manager Guide

Eamonn McGuinness — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:05:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of working with a really great team recently - a team that were dealing with a very dynamic situation - a new team where not even one member of the team had met one other before this project started - a team that were working on a very, very challenging project and under extreme time pressure.

Overall Project's Process

We worked to develop a very simple but pragmatic Project Management process for the team.

[Friday] Project planning and re-planning
[Saturday] Communication of the latest plan to the team (via an automated email from pmPoint)
[Everyday!] Everyone does lots of work and the team makes great progress
[Late Wednesday] Everyone makes a personal progress update on tasks and issues
[Thursday at 2pm] Weekly Team Meeting with the following agenda:
1. Review, discuss and resolve (in so far as possible) issues
2. Look at upcoming tasks for next week
3. (time permitting) Look at tasks achieved last week or the highlight tasks

Project Manger's Process

We then worked together to develop this simple but practical process for Step 1 above. Each underline below represents an option in pmPoint.

Check and understand the project's progress
1. Virtual Check - Examine the various (project, issue, work) reports on the project site, e.g.
  - Start with the Home Page for a project overview
  - Look at Overdue Work
  - Look at Work by Assigned To
  - Look at the full Task List (in a Gantt view)
  - Optionally check your own work!!!
    - My Work Due Soon
    - My Gantt
1. Individual Check - Talk to the Team Members
2. Team Check - Find out at the weekly project meetings
Identify and Resolve (in so far as is possible) Issues
- Check Open Issues
Re-Plan the project
- Update the task plan in the datasheet (for small to medium sized change sets)
  - Optionally start with!
    - Update My Tasks
  - Update Tasks
  - Run Recalculate Project Schedule
  - Look at the Weekly Status Report
  - Optionally
    - Add new Documents
    - Add non-critical To Dos
- Update tasks using Microsoft Project (for very large change sets)
Go back to Step 1 !!! … (assuming you are happy with the way you are managing the project, otherwise go to step 5)
[Periodically] Change the way you work

Project Managers should "Blink" more often

Eamonn McGuinness — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:08:00 GMT

I had been putting off reading "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell for no known reason. You know how that goes. As it happens my procrastination was not such a bad thing! When I did pick up my copy it had an "afterword" by the author that reflected on his thoughts since publishing the book and talking to so many people about it and reflecting on it post-event so to speak. If you do not know Malcolm Gladwell he is the author who also gave us the Tipping Point. I guess the first thing to say is that this is a very enjoyable read. Gladwell is a great story teller. And he writes this book as a series of stories that you just have to keep reading. Gladwell explains:

It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

I wonder as project managers can we jump to a series of conclusions about our projects in the blink of an eye. Nope - that can not be - what about all that project reporting and analysis we need to do and we are trained to do. Gladwell gives a different perspective:

Certainly that's what we've always been told. We live in a society dedicated to the idea that we're always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. As children, this lesson is drummed into us again and again: haste makes waste, look before you leap, stop and think. But I don't think this is true. There are lots of situations--particularly at times of high pressure and stress--when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world.

But some project managers seem expert at knowing what is going on really quickly. We might call that experience. Perhaps it is wisdom. Maybe they have a natural talent. But maybe they are assessing the right data very quickly. Maybe they are "thin-slicing" as Gladwell calls it:

One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain.

There are some other great stories and insights in the book into areas such as divorce rates, recruitment practices that discriminate, police violence, racism, modern military training, to name but a few. Some of the lessons for project managers might be:

set your self up right to make a decision
slow yourself to get to the right place to make a good decision
too much information can be very bad for good decision making
less information - if it is the essential information is better for decision making
overload of information is very harmful
do not confuse knowledge with understanding
"blink" more often!

I guess this is why project management dashboards like the one from BrightWork below are so important. So - please - go forth and "blink" - and if not - do at least read and enjoy the book!

Microsoft Project Desktop 2010 and Microsoft Project Server 2010 – What’s New!

Donal McCarthy — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:08:00 GMT

The Microsoft Project teams have been busy developing new and very exciting versions of their flagship products, Project Desktop 2010 and Project Server 2010. Some of the pre-announced key investment areas include: (i) Enhance user experience and appeal; (ii) Improve execution with effective collaboration; (iii) Unify project and portfolio management; (iv) Simplify deployment and extend interoperability.

But what does all that mean in practice?! What are the coolest new capabilities? What are the most exciting developments? What are the biggest changes? What does this all mean for your work and project management plans? What will the new 2010 platform enable you to do with ease that you can not do today?

Watch this webcast and find out the answers to these and more questions!

Watch webcast with Internet Explorer at Blog

Architecting and Deploying a SharePoint Solution for Work and Project Management

Eamonn McGuinness — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:09:00 GMT

It is really easy to spin up a project site to manage a project on SharePoint. With solutions like pmPoint it is now also very easy to spin up a Project Office site to manage across many projects. If you think that SharePoint has been with us 10 years (if you start counting at the start of the Exchange (webstore) project when we at BrightWork started working with the platform, then it is very possible to imagine SharePoint being around for another 20 years. Scary, huh! With that in mind it makes most sense to treat SharePoint as a strategic platform and properly architect work and project management. Measure twice and cut once, like your Granny kept telling you. Certainly seems like wise advice in these tougher times.

We had a very interesting webcast this week past on this very topic.

It is clear that SharePoint as a platform is really suitable for the collaborative management of work and projects – but there are some challenges!

How do you balance the conflicting needs for structure and flexibility?

How can a solution be architected to meet the differing needs of work and project management in one overall solution?

How can the resulting solution be deployed successfully, so people adapt to new practices?

This webcast will:

Detail a six-phase plan that will help you to architect and deploy a SharePoint solution from the ground up for work and project management.

Provide you with good practice guidelines.

Give you links to further materials for each phase.

You can see this and other BrightWork webcasts at http://www.brightwork.com/webcasts/recorded_webcasts.htm.

You can also watch this webcast on the player below and find out how your organization can architect and deploy a SharePoint solution for work and project management.

Visit blog with IE to watch webcast

On the way!

Eamonn McGuinness — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:57:00 GMT

I am in NY en route to Phoenix for Microsoft's Project Conference. We are exhibiting and we were invited to speak this year. Always nice to be asked to speak! Our topic is "Opening SharePoint to Project 2010". We have been working with Project 2010 for some time now but have been under NDA, so not able to talk about the cool new stuff on the way - and how pmPoint will be enhanced by the 2010 wave from Microsoft. The NDA ends on Wednesday - be great to be able to talk about 2010 finally! Should be a great week. http://www.msprojectconference.com/

New Project Request (Portfolio Management) Spectrum and Templates

Eamonn McGuinness — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 10:49:00 GMT

This is the fifth in a series of five short posts on the work and project management spectrum.

Organizations sometimes end up with too many projects running. Sometimes they have inadvertently invested in the the wrong projects. Or the right projects at the wrong time. Or the right projects with the wrong resources. Or maybe the right projects with the wrong scope. You get the idea! So how do organizations get it right? This by the way is sometimes simply called, "New Request Project Management" and sometimes it is called, "Portfolio Management". In this blog article let's call it "Portfolio Management", as it is a shorter title.

Much of the Portfolio Management in organizations today is quite informal and "unstructured". Requests for new projects are 'evaluated' through meetings, emails, phone calls and through many conversations. There is no formal defined approach to Portfolio Management in this case. It is not to say mistakes are made - or that the wrong projects are invested in - but there is unlikely to be any audit trail to figure if this is the case or not.
At the next level of formality you still find that the new project requests are not tracked in any common or transparent manner. There is no common approach defined or in use. At this level however the problems / exceptions will be logged and tracked. So at this "management by exception" level only the new projects requests that get through 'wrongly' are tracked in any formal way. It is about trying to catch the horse now that the horse was let out.
At the next level, "loosely structured", you typically find that each of the new project requests is being captured in a simple list in some central location, so that it is possible to investigate where new project requests are at. The requests can be work-flowed from there to a set of reviewers and approvers - but at a minimum there is a central list.
At the next "semi structured" level you will typically find that a more robust process being put in place. For example new project requests are evaluated against the current set of organization objectives.
And at the "fully structured" level you will find that the process is evolving. For example a more formal examination of resource unitization takes place before new projects are approved.
At the "Enterprise Structured" level you will find that all new projects are very formally reviewed against budgets, resource availability, group objectives and other competing requests.

Which is the correct approach to use? How much formality is needed? It of course as before depends on the amount of portfolio management you believe you need. Indeed in many organizations they use more than one level for different types of investment. pmPoint has built enhanced SharePoint templates that mimics these differing levels as can be seen in the diagram below and as can be seen on this page: http://www.brightwork.com/pmpoint/project_request_management_templates.htm