Make Your Project Management More Efficient with SharePoint Online

Project management is a vital business activity to create new products and services to secure the future of the business of companies, but also to execute large maintenance activities doing reorganizations or accusations.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines project management as “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.” The purpose of effective project management is delivering a positive change for your organization or customers. Read on to find out what good project management means and how SharePoint can support it.

The Main Causes of Project Failure

Project Management is not getting any easier! Projects are becoming more and more complex; requirements are changing faster and faster and collaboration and information management in projects is more needed than ever. Projects fail every day with serious consequences for the financial stability and reputation of organizations. The causes of project failure are numerous. Here are the main reasons:

• No clear business goals
• Unclear defined and not approved requirements
• Often neglected or even non-existent risk management
• Poor project planning
• Poor user involvement
• Ineffective task tracking and information management
• Insufficient cost monitoring & control
• Lack of project data visibility
• No tool or process for managing projects information
• Poor communication

With SharePoint, you can’t save your project from failure, but good collaboration and information management has its essential contribution to make your project more successful—and here is SharePoint a great help.

Recently I read an article with the title” How to manage your project with SharePoint”. I had to think about that for a moment. My conclusion: you can’t manage your project with SharePoint Online. SharePoint is just a tool like Microsoft Project. The project manager is still the leader. For this challenging task, he needs above all good leadership skills but also tools that make the team’s work easier and more efficient.

Find the Right Project Information Fast

During an average eight-hour workday, project team members spend about 45 minutes looking for information on the network share, in the email inbox, in project folders—or the information is stored in a colleague’s computer or the file cabinet. This search for information could have been spent better for more productive project work. More time is lost by project team members due to poor document management practices, inefficient project communication standards and ineffective project collaboration tools.

Because of this dissatisfied situation, many companies implemented SharePoint as an essential tool to fight this inefficiency, to be more productive in teams in the line business and in projects.

SharePoint is an essential tool for managing information in projects, this might be in the simplest case project documents in document libraries as well as risks, issues, project calendars, etc. in SharePoint lists. If you work for example with Microsoft Project Server, you can edit task lists in SharePoint and maintain SharePoint and Microsoft Project in sync and you can also add different attributes to task lists.

Create and Manage Your Own Collaborative Solutions

SharePoint allows individuals, teams, and projects in an organization to easily create and manage their own collaborative solutions. According to the dictionary, collaboration means: the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing. In the business world, these can be various activities, projects or line activities. Without structured, quickly retrievable information, no business activity is possible and here SharePoint supports, especially when it comes to teamwork. But it also offers the possibility to create an intranet in the company.

SharePoint, in connection with other Office 365 programs, manages and presents the information of a project in a structured and intelligent way and ensures that users can find and edit information quickly. This includes not only documents, but also lists such as risk logs, address lists, task lists, calendars, news, etc.

Abandoning Shared Drives

SharePoint is supposed to replace shared drives, i.e. known as a Network File Share, especially in the collaborative environment. Shared drives have a rigid structure with many folders and sub-folders, which only gives one view of the data and is often only understood by the creator. Many long-time users of such shared drives understandably have problems to get rid of them—until after a few weeks they don’t want to do without SharePoint anymore. It was the same for me!

SharePoint came on the market in 2001 and has changed a lot in the last few years, on the one hand in the visual appearance, but also the functionalities have become more comprehensive and easier to use. The further development of web content management systems (such as WordPress) also had an essential influence on the design and usability of the latest SharePoint version. These are e.g. responsive design (the page content can be displayed ideally on different devices, e.g. on PC, tablet or mobile phone) or websites can be created more easily and intuitively. SharePoint has changed dramatically over the last 20 years and is now better than ever.

What SharePoint offers for Project Management

As a project is a highly collaborative activity, it’s a no-brainer to use SharePoint for project management. Think about common project management challenges—no process, lack of visibility, multiple versions of the same document, documents difficult to find, poor communication and so on.
Using SharePoint to bring all project information and tasks into one central place can resolve many of these problems. The SharePoint project site can be structured to match your project approach, helping to standardize project delivery and improve visibility.

SharePoint has a number of elements suited to effective project management, e.g.: document libraries, lists, workflows, webpages, calendars sites and site collections. A SharePoint site acts as a home for your project information and documents. A SharePoint site collection collates multiple projects sites into a program or a portfolio.

A SharePoint site brings all project information into one central location, making collaboration, communicating information, analyzing data and reporting much easier.

More Interesting SharePoint Topics:

How to Use SharePoint Groups and Microsoft 365 Groups in Your Project Site

How Many Document Libraries and Lists Do I Need in My SharePoint Project Site?

Here You Can Find Even More Knowledge