As most of you know, my favourite course to teach is SharePoint. But you may not know that I have a Graduate Certificate in Project Management from Royal Roads University (RRU).
As the number of SharePoint projects I am working on increases, I am noticing an intersection between my real world experiences and my classroom teaching.
When starting a project, naturally, the first thing I do is build a SharePoint site to improve collaboration and communication.
(Keep in mind that the Gartner Group consistently reports poor communication as the number one reason, statistically speaking, that projects fail. Therefore I emphasize the importance of streamlined collaboration and clear communication in my SharePoint classes and apply it in my projects.)
One of the SharePoint projects I'm doing is for a large client in northern BC. We are holding meetings via Live Meeting (web conferencing) and using email, but most importantly we are using SharePoint to assist with up-to-date collection and dissemination of project information.
In about an hour I built a project site with shared documents, contacts, calendars, and the meat of the site set up as a simple SharePoint wiki. Every meeting is documented (starting with an agenda that is filled in with notes during the meeting) in the wiki, and stored alongside the project work plan (originally built in Word, but pasted into wiki pages once signed off) and a paperless, collaborative requirements document forever (and easily) accessible on SharePoint, in real time.
The following is an overview of some SharePoint concepts and constructs and how they relate to Projects and Project Management:
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One Stop Shop: SharePoint is designed to be a central repository of a variety of information. If your project team can call one place "home" then they are able, and more likely, to find the information they need, quickly when they need it.
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One Version of the Truth: SharePoint is much more than a document management tool, yet it serves this basic purpose well. If used properly, there is one current version of the document stored in a place that everyone can access. The key is to not have different versions of documents stored in different places, such as on different servers, in your email box, on your desktop. The confusion and wasted effort of finding the most current version or accidentally using an outdated version is a royal pain. One way to prevent this is from occurring is to send a link to the SharePoint document rather than sending the actual document via email.
Document Management Tools: SharePoint also provides document versioning to automatically capture changes, including who made them and when. It also provides a simple "check-out/check-in" capability that allows documents to be flagged when in use, which helps team members maintain that one version of the truth (see above).
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Microsoft Office Integration: The 2007 and 2010 versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, Visio, and Outlook are all "SharePoint aware" and contain a bunch of timesaving features. For example, in Word 2007 you can easily compare two versions of a file stored on SharePoint, or post to a SharePoint Blog (like this one!).
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Shared Calendars: Keeping track of schedules can be a challenge, especially if your team is not using the same Exchange server. SharePoint allows everyone on your team to read and edit shared calendars that can be sync'ed with Outlook.
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Task Lists: The task list in SharePoint has the ability to email a person when a task is assigned to them, along with a link back to the specific task for quick detail referencing and edits. Straight out of the box, the tasks lists have several categories including priority, owner, start date, due date, status, comments, etc., and, like all lists in SharePoint, are completely customizable, which makes creating a field to track costs associated with tasks as easy as a click of the mouse.
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Issues Log: Similar to the task list, the issues log is used for tracking issues and risks. Items can be "associated" or linked as related issues.
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Contact lists: Successful projects are all about good communication. SharePoint can be used to capture contact information for every member of your team in a list that can be easily updated by every team member. This list is easily connected to Outlook so contact information is always accessible 
and automatically synchronized.
- Alerts: Any and all of the above can be quickly configured to email you (and your team members) when changes occur such as a document is updated, a task completed, an issue assigned to you, or whatever.
This is just a glimpse of how SharePoint can be used for project management, and there's a lot more that I will cover in a future post. Keep in mind that there are several hosted SharePoint solutions, and if you own a Microsoft Server product, you can download and install the 'foundations' version of SharePoint for free.
I hope these comments incite and excite you to try SharePoint, or start using it more fully. If you do, here is a "best practices" document that Sean Wallbridge and I put together for SharePoint use in general.
Share with you soon!
Gerry Brimacombe
gerry@sectorlearning.com