SharePoint for Project Management

I am happy to announce that I have achieved a high level of performance in managing projects. I had the pleasure of attending a brown bag (in which nobody actually ate lunch) at the PMI Skyline Luncheon series this past Thursday. The presenter was a gentleman named Dux Sy. He is the author of a new O'Reilly book SharePoint for Project Management. His presentation went through several areas in which SharePoint could be used to effectively manage projects.

The reason for my happiness is that in my big project I was already doing each of these. The first area he covered was the overuse of email. We never include attachments on email messages. We load the attachments into SharePoint and send links to the stakeholders. We use the discussions to allow people a time and place to hammer out different views on requirements. We have the development team check products in to the site as the official delivery and stakeholders review and make comments to artifacts on the sharepoint. We use the Announcements web part to alert people to news and events. I use the Links webpart to get people to the regulations and other pieces of program content that may be valuable to our work.

The only thing we aren't currently doing that Dux demonstrated was to creation of a Chron file. This is essentially an email address that is an alias for the SharePoint site. I inquired about that as a feature since last Thursday and I have been told that it may take some work to make it happen, but I will be using that too.

If you have a chance to see Dux I recommend taking the time. He is a good educator in this area.

There is one thing that I found to be kind of funny from Dux's presentation. He talked about the virtues of SharePoint because before it PMs were at the mercy of the IT shop to get a website built for a project. His story made it seem like it was a very onerous task to make that happen. I don't remember it like that. Of course I was a web guy before I was a PM, so maybe I had a leg up on the competition. But I remember making project-specific websites at my previous agency and that was equally effective. There I had discussions (bulletin boards) and I had files that could be downloaded. There was work in maintaining it, but no moreso than what I have to maintain SharePoint. Just an observation, but do you know how Plato said that only philosophers should be kings, well, maybe only Web Developers should be Project Managers.