Demistifying Collaboration in Project Management Software
by Mark Phillips - September 20th, 2006Collaboration is a word that is thrown around a lot when it comes to web-based project management. Understanding the types of collaboration out there and knowing what you are looking for, can help you make a better selection when it comes to buying project management software.
Since projects are about people working together to get things done, its natural that web-based project management software facilitates people working together- collaborating. This is one of the most significant innovations of web-based project management software. It is also one of the most casually used buzzwords. Here is a quick guide to help de-code what people are talking about when they say collaboration in project management software.
There are two main categories of collaboration you’ll generally find in project management software:
1) Information Sharing
2) Working on Deliverables
Information Sharing
Information sharing is collaboration on the status of the project. Its information on the project itself. Project management software facilitates this by all the project information consolidated and collected in one central, online information portal. Then, having this portal be accessible by team members, managers or clients (as a client project portal), any time from any where.
Different project management software programs will vary on what information is collected. This can range for simple project information such as a task list and whether people are complete or not, to budget information, estimated costs and resource utilization on a project or task. More advanced project management tools such as budget variance, baselining or earned value may also be calculated and stored in a central project portal.
The project information can be collected and accessed in several different ways.
One place is the area where that part of the project is planned, managed or controlled. For example, you may be able to get schedule status or up-to-the minute task information by looking at the live project schedule. Or, if you want to get resource availability you would look at the project list, what?s on the plate of individual team members.
Some project management software tools give you the ability to see this information in pre-formatted project reports. These reports may be about single items like a single project or a single resource or a single period of time. Or, they may be cross-project or total company views. It depends on the capabilities of the project management software and what kind of project views you are looking for in a project management tool. Higher-end project management software will also allow you to run these same reports across projects and even graphically represent them.
In addition to pre-formatted project reports, some software tools may offer customizable project reports which let you pick what aspects of a project you’d like to see or monitor. For example, you may want to see a project report on the overall schedule and budget health of projects for a specific client which are managed by the Bozeman, Montana office during the last month. Most higher-end project management products will allow you to run these type of reports. Some will also give you the ability to save them as templates, share the reports with others, show the information in Gantt charts, project graphs or pie-charts and even export the data to MS Excel.
A fourth way of receiving this kind of project status information is via email. The status of deliverables, budgets or timeline can be sent out with auto email notification. These are items which you can define in most project management software tools that will trigger an email notification to go out to specific people when a specific event happens (for example when a deliverable is completed) or before or after something happens on the project (for example, prior to reaching a budget milestone or a task being late).
Working on Deliverables
The other aspect of collaboration is working on an actual deliverable or task. Some project management software packages allow for people to work together on documents through a document management system or digital asset management system.
Project management software tools may also allow people to work together on a specific project issue through an issue tracking system. These issues can be help desk type trouble tickets or general issues surround a project which are best resolved through threaded message-board type functionality. In the right environment, this kind of collaboration on project deliverables can increase the productivity and creativity of your process.
Collaborating in this way, using an online or web-based project management tool, has the added benefit of leaving tracks.
A good project management tool keeps a record of the revisions to documents so that a document history or revision history can be pulled up in the document management component of the project management software.
Likewise in an issue tracking system, the status of issues can be searched in the issue section of the project management software. The resolution, outcome and history of the discussion thread will be stored in a knowledge based of the project management software.
Working on deliverables, collaborating, online makes it easy for a company to build up an institutional memory. All the data, the process and the knowledge invovled with that work will be associated with a project or the knowledge base within the tool, making the project management software a well organized, easy to access, easy-to-use repository of company knowledge and past project activities.
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