As defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI), a Project Management Information System (PMIS) is a standardized set of automated project management tools available within an organization that are integrated into a system. In a perfect world, this means that a PMIS will solve every project manager's nightmare: scattered project information. Who hasn’t dealt with status reports in e-mail, project schedules on a USB drive, forms and templates in the network share and the worst part: non-existent traceability? In addition, a PMIS should support most, if not all, of the communication and collaboration needs of a project environment.
Today, multiple PMIS solutions are available. However, in addition to being costly, they can also require specialized skills to implement, customize, and maintain. That’s why a lot of these initiatives have failed or only achieved limited adoption. This is how SharePoint sets itself apart. Here are some reasons why SharePoint is such a great PMIS:
Empowers the project manager
Prior to SharePoint, if a Project Manager (PM) wanted to create a PMIS (typically a web site), the IT department would have to be involved. Depending on the priority of the project at an organizational level, it may or may not be created in a timely manner. IT becomes a bottleneck. Don't get me wrong here, I am not bashing the IT department, it's just that they have a lot on their plate. Another issue would be defining access privileges, again, this is a major challenge, especially if project stakeholders external to the organization (such as contractors or customers) have to be a part of the PMIS.
Wouldn't it be nice if the PM could easily define and manage all aspects of a PMIS without IT's intervention? More importantly, what I mean by "easily" is that the technical skill set requirement is minimal. SharePoint allows just that.
Seamlessly integrates with existing project management tools
As I have described in a previous blog posting "5 Essential Tools for Project Management", project managers today rely on not so high-tech tools such as e-mail, network shares, Microsoft Word, Excel, Project, and even PowerPoint as their project management tools of choice. The good news is that you don’t have to give them up! You can continue to reap the benefits of using these tools on your projects and complement their use with your SharePoint PMIS.
You can synchronize a project calendar in SharePoint with Microsoft Outlook and you can also synchronize it with Excel. In a project environment, you can use SharePoint to gather project expenses from the project team and have the financial information synchronize with an Excel file sitting on the project manager's computer. Perhaps within that Excel file you can link the information to other spreadsheets to do further number crunching.
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Dux Sy is the author of “SharePoint for Project Management,” and the resident expert for project management at Bamboo.