Keeping Teams on Track

Though terminology changes over time, the central tenets of project management are broadly agreed. To achieve the target outcome, project managers create an overall plan, allocate tasks, monitor activity and communicate progress. However, the tools used by project managers to guide those processes are rapidly evolving to address changes in working practice and the composition of project teams. Project managers deliver projects more effectively when they increase the ability of their team to collaborate by adopting solutions that take account of these developments and make the best use of the most appropriate technology.

Increasingly, project teams are made up of members who rarely sit at a company-owned desk. Through the rolling out of decentralized working practices, members may chose to work from their home-office or on the road, with only infrequent visits to the company headquarters or a regional office. Project work may require that members of the team be embedded on the project site for long periods of time. In addition, either through choice, planning or simply as a result of the geographic spread of team members, working hours are unlikely to exactly coincide. Project management in the modern, decentralized working environment is further complicated by the inclusion of members who are not directly employed by the lead company but by a third party, contracted to carry out a specific task.

Due to the security concerns associated with allowing remote and non-employee access into a corporate network to share project documentation, IT managers have been wary of allowing VPN access to decentralized teams. The result has been a reliance on e-mail to communicate and disseminate project related information. E-mail has changed the way we work. Its main advantages – speed of delivery and quick carbon copying – have made us more productive, with important information getting to those who need to use it quickly. However, the initial productivity gain may now be turning into a productivity drain as we spend more and more time sorting through our inboxes for important information. The low cost of delivery means that our inboxes can become electronic dumping bins.

As a project management tool, e-mail has significant drawbacks. An all too frequent e-mail scenario, highlighting these drawbacks, is when e-mails related to a project task arrive in the team members’ inboxes out of the order in which they were sent. As a result, the e-mails contain conflicting information as other team members have contributed without the full picture and quite possibly attached different versions of the same project documentation. The level of confusion can only grow as the scenario is repeated until no one, not even the project manager, truly knows what is happening. The main stumbling blocks with e-mail communication are the lack of integration with task management and the absence of any document management capability (version control and ‘check in/out’ procedures).

Fortunately, project management tools have been developed that make use of another highly popular and ubiquitous desktop application. Using basic web-navigation skills, team members can create, edit and respond to project information in a secure online collaboration portal, accessed through their web browser.

From anywhere in the world and at anytime that is required, a team member is able to securely login to their portal and get up to speed quickly on project information, without chasing the files and e-mail trails of other members. Within the portal, all tasks can be tracked, comments and discussions can take place and, importantly, project documentation can be stored, accessed and saved with full audit trail. Members can connect in real time using instant messaging and web-conferencing tools such as screen sharing, whiteboards and polling, far beyond the capabilities of e-mail. Members use the tools within the portal to collaborate with more efficiency than communicating via lengthy and often complicated e-mail threads.

To get work underway, project managers issue their team with a login to the portal, which is hosted and accessed separately to the corporate network (to the relief of IT managers). Project managers choose exactly what each team members can see and contribute to. It may be that sub-contractors do not need access to all areas, in which case the project manager restricts their access to only the parts that they need. Members can post information, revisions to it or responses that begin a discussion, using response forms to create ‘discussion threads’. Responses and revisions are grouped under the original information, so that a discussion’s progression can easily be tracked by any team member.

More and more project managers are recognizing that e-mail is not the best tool for project management. Teamwork is more effective with everyone involved having instant access to current information, documents and an up-to-the-minute snapshot of the project. Online collaboration maintains the productivity advantages of e-mail – the quick dissemination of information outside organizational firewalls to multiple recipients – but lessens the productivity pitfalls. Working instead with all information organized, saved and updated in one location significantly increases team efficiency.

For more information on online workplaces, please contact ProjectLounge. Tel: (714) 239 3875. E-mail: sales@projectlounge.com.