SharePoint for Project Management

In uncertain economic times, many executives are being asked to do more with less. Pressure to reduce or maintain budgets is driving sharper scrutiny of discretionary spending, and increases the importance of effectively identifying, selecting, and delivering project portfolios that best align with an organization’s business strategy and that maximize ROI.

Best-practice portfolio selection techniques provide a handshake between value optimization — that is, alignment with business priorities and maximizing return on investment (ROI) — and resource utilization. Together, they help recommend not only which projects to undertake, but to forecast when projects can be delivered.

1) Gain Visibility & Control 

Consolidate the collection of essential data for all business and IT investments in a central enterprise repository. 

2) Objectively define, communicate, and prioritize business strategy.

3) Score and assess competing requests from multiple dimensions.

4) Run what-if analysis optimization scenarios under budgetary and resource constraints.

5) Assess capacity and adjust project schedules to maximize resource utilization across the planning horizon.

Run and model headcount scenarios.

Plan and control project finances (profitability) effectively with SharePM which provides Consolidatation and the collection of essential data for all business and IT investments in a central enterprise repository. 

1) Define Project Budget during inception and high level planning.

2) Top down planning and tracking against overall budget cost.

3) Baseline Project following detailed planning, prior to delivery.

4) Tracking and monitoring of project cost performance across the business.

5) Manage timephased project costs based on Resource Cost and other adhoc costs.  

6) Manage timephased project revenue based on Resource Charge Rates, adhoc costs plus profit margin.

7) Manage project benefits over time and analyse cost benefit over time. Roll up to program and portfolio level.

In today’s competitive and changing markets, organizations are looking to maximize return on investment (ROI) and drive efficiencies to sustain the business and support future growth. Resources are arguably an organization’s most valuable asset and potentially its biggest expense. Proper management and optimal use of resources is key for an organization to realize its business strategy.

With intelligent resource management, an organization can develop and retain a world-class workforce. SharePM provides a variety of tools to achieve this;

(1) Resource Centre view provides a flexible interface for searching the enterprise resource pool to find the right people with availability to work on each project. Manage inventory of resources, working time & nonworking time.

(2) Resource Assignments view shows allocation of resources across all the projects in the business.

(3) Capacity planning capability compares resource demand to capacity.

Tools such as Resource plans, Project Plans, and Levelling and substitution help capture early requirements in the project life cycle, service skill demands and resolve resource over-allocations.

Team Planner tool in Project Desktop helps project managers visually manage project-level resource assignments. Quickly identify and resolve over allocation, and easily substitute resources to overcome conflicts.

Access Tasks through Microsoft Outlook/Exchange Integration.

Today more than ever, organizations need accurate, up-to-date information to make informed business decisions. Many organizations use time reporting systems to capture work and nonworking time for payroll, invoicing, and other business purposes. Similarly, project managers need to efficiently capture and communicate status on project work to help gauge progress and to anticipate the effect on planned effort, cost, and timeframes. Organizations need a centralized and common approach to time reporting and task management.

SharePM provides the following capabilities;

(1) An easy-to-use simple interface for end-users to capture actual time spent on Project Tasks/ Activities.

(2) Single-source, to report working and nonworking time.

(3) Able to capture all time; projects, operations, and administrative time.

(4) Ability to integrate with other LOB systems.

SharePM provides a comprehensive resource management system to help organizations better manage their most important asset.

SharePM is built on SharePoint and as such you benefit from its core collaborative framework. In addition, SharePM provides structured, simple user interface to access and manage all connected/joined-up project artefacts for enhanced collaboration and system adoption. The core collaboration capabilities include;

1) Central portal for Project Manager/Planner, Program Managers and Portfolio Managers for managing all work/projects within the business. 

2) Central portal for Team Members to manage and track all their work across all projects;

- Tasks/Activities

- Actions (To-do/Reminders)

- Risks

- Issues

- Change 

3) Automated application of task/assignment tracking to project plans. 

4) Integration with Microsoft Project Desktop enables advanced Project Managers/Planners to adopt all the rich planning capabilities of the application while sharing the project plan/schedule details on SharePoint Web Interface with the rest of the Team/Stake Holders.  

5) Integration with Outlook Tasks enables users to plan their day effectively to get the assigned project tasks/activities, actions completed in a timely manner. They can also report back progress updates to the web.

6) Integration with Planner for agile work/task management. 

7) Integration with Microsoft Teams for real-time collaboration, messaging and voice/video call project team meetings.

SharePM offers a unified view of all work in a central location. Its purpose is to quickly help organizations gain visibility into projects and operational activities; standardize and streamline data collection; enhance decision making; and subject initiatives to the appropriate governance controls throughout their life cycles.

1) Effectively communicate and realize business strategy.

Subject varying initiatives and work to the right level of controls.

Drive accountability and traceability.

Better identify and comply with regulatory requirements.

Unify disparate lines of business by using enterprise processes.

Drive governance acceptance and adoption through education and communication.

Refine governance processes to improve business results.

Project Server governance capabilities help PMOs quickly define and automate multiple workflows to manage different types of projects—for example, business projects, as opposed to IT projects— throughout project life cycles, and create event-driven workflows to control other activities: issue and risk management, change management, document approval, and so on.

With an immense amount of data located in a variety of systems, one of the great challenges organizations face is how to collect, categorize, understand, and make decisions about project data.

With SharePM built on SharePoint, Business Intelligence (BI) takes that concept of reporting to the next level by providing visibility and helping organizations with decision support for proactive work management;

1) Drive governance acceptance and adoption through consitent, standard, joined-up project management. Create projects from your best practice standard templates. Refine governance processes to improve business results.

2) Helps Standardize data collection and performance metrics across the enterprise and streamlines status reporting through easy-to-use Web-based tools. Automating and standardizing data collection ensures the availability of up-to-date and accurate information to drive enterprise reporting and controls.

3) PMOs can define consistent KPIs using custom enterprise fields to measure the overall health of initiatives. Performance indicators can be displayed in the project schedule or in the configurable scorecard views for stakeholders.

4) Automates methods of time, task, and status reporting so team members can provide project managers with real-time progress data.

5) Simple yet Powerful BI and Reporting Services to help organizations gain insight. Provides non-technical and technical resources with familiar tools to intuitively create reports and easily configure powerful dashboards.