subject: Managing Projects And Team Selection With Project Management Solution [print this page] PMIS, you are likely to come across this abbreviation quite often these days. The Project Management Information System enables the effective documentation and management of projects and the diverse processes that are usually associated with it. There are a number of solutions available in the market; however, if you have chosen Microsoft SharePoint or plan to implement the same, then you may be rest assured of the fact that you certainly have one of the best in the business.
A large number of organisations across the globe use diverse tools for the better management of their projects. The project manager of the Accounting department may choose to manage the work by using Excel. The product development team may use Microsoft Project extensively. The IT Department, on the other hand, may select an online open source for the management of their internal work. The basic point here is thus quite simple, that majority of the organisations allow the employees to utilise the tools as per their own convenience in order accomplish the task at hand.
The reality of the whole situation is quite apparent, that is a complete lack of centralisation. The documents are all across the length and breadth of the organisation, with some of them being stored on servers to others in local folders of the individual users. The stringent deadlines and the maintenance of quality standards demand that the system be centralised, to make the storage, maintenance and subsequent retrieval of documents easy. It is necessary to implement such solutions and the choice is certainly dependent on the type of document stored in the system and its ability to integrate with other applications. The introduction of such a workflow management system would thus emerge as a big boost to the organisation.
SharePoint Project Management enables all this and much more. By using SharePoint, you can store all your project related details at one centralised location and then collaborate on the workflows and the management associated with it. You can also connect it to relevant websites and applications. There are five major stages associated with the shaping up of a project till its conclusion and these include:
Initiation
Planning
Execution
Monitoring and Control
Closure
It helps to break down the different stages of the project instead with different inputs, outputs and processes instead of considering it to be one big assignment. SharePoint can help the user at different stages of project management.
The initiation stage demands various tasks such as feasibility analysis, goal clarification, schedule estimation and preparing a rough budget, selection of vendors and responsibility assignment. The workflow feature that forms a part of the system can be utilised to conform to the organisational project management guidelines. It is also necessary to get the right members on board and this plays a crucial part in the eventual success of the project. SharePoint can be used to create a team selection site that features the names of the potential team members, their strengths and their availability for a particular project. A complex form of the system can be a custom application that enables request for a resource, its approval and final assignment. After the team members are finalised, they can be added to the site by the project manager so that they can view tasks, read documents and even submit information for processing.
