To ensure the successful outcome of any project, one needs to have good planning, execution, monitoring and control.  Even more critical than these, however, is communication, both internal (intrateam) and external (outward).  In my experience, good communication among team members, vendors and stakeholders is the biggest contributor to project success.  Prior to my arrival as the first project manager at Jenner & Block LLP, the firm used e-mail messages to communicate about projects and a document management system to handle versions of documents.  There was ample opportunity to improve effective collaboration.

Benefits from a Collaboration Tool
The first few projects I led involved multiple office locations which gave me the opportunity to demonstrate the benefit of using a collaboration tool.  The project teams and stakeholders appreciated the fact that all discussions and subsequent outcomes, documents and notes related to the project were available in one place.  They no longer had to wade through their e-mail messages or the document management system to locate the history of a decision or an issue.

As part of the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, we acquired Project Server 2007 earlier this year.  Installing the software and learning the basic setup by stumbling through the sparse product help menu was frustrating at times.  However, this disadvantage was quickly forgotten and outweighed by the consistent and intuitive user interface (UI), a direct benefit of Project Server 2007's tight integration with SharePoint.

Project Workspaces
Each project is allotted its own project workspace with a unique Web address that can be accessed over the intranet with proper security and authorization.  This is invaluable for collaborating with the various team members.  It is especially valuable when working with consultants and vendors that are not in the same office and/or need to access the project content from outside the office.  Access to each project workspace can be controlled at a granular level by defining whether the user can read or contribute as a team member, or modify the overall project plan as a project manager.  The ready-made templates and out-of-the-box Web Parts give each project the same consistent look and feel while the flexibility of SharePoint allows for customization required by individual projects.

Web Parts
Wikipedia defines a Web Part as "an integrated set of controls for creating websites that enables end users to modify the content, appearance and behavior of Web pages directly from a browser."  Until now, we have used only SharePoint's standard Web Parts.  Our most frequently used Web Parts are the Announcements, Project Documents, Team Discussion and others. 

The Announcements Web Part allows anyone with appropriate authorization to post an announcement for the workspace with a set expiration date.  This reduces the clutter of e-mail messages in peoples' inboxes.

The Project Documents Web Part is used to store links to documents related to the project, thus providing the benefit of storing all project-related documents in one place.  In our case, that place is our document management system (DMS).  This lets us abide by the firm's document management policy, as well as minimize the learning curve for the users who are familiar with storing documents in the DMS.

The Team Discussion is a very popular Web Part as it allows the team to post questions for discussion, receive responses and most importantly, store the comments made in one place for future reference.  We no longer have to dig through individual e-mail messages to find the chain of responses and discussion about a topic. 

The Lists section includes such customary lists as Tasks, Deliverables, Issues and Risks.  Each of the lists can be customized to add columns and can be sorted in multiple ways based on logical or calculated criteria.  New lists can also be added very easily.

Almost all of the Web Parts have a standard list of dropdowns and allow the user to set up e-mail alerts when any items are modified or when a specific item (e.g., one created by the user) is modified. These alerts can be set according to the user's preference: receiving immediate e-mail messages, a daily digest or a weekly summary.  An option to subscribe to the RSS feed of any Web Part is also available.

Project Center
The Project Center showcases the project schedules and has a host of views to allow users who do not have MS Project to view the project tasks, their start and end dates, assigned resources and dependencies.  We feel this is not the strongest functionality of the Project Server and are hoping that the new Microsoft Project Portfolio Server will address the shortcomings.

Project Server 2007 has an Outlook add-in which allows users to periodically import their assigned tasks as Outlook calendar appointments or tasks and then report the status (percent complete or hours worked) of the task back to the Project Server.

Unique Selling Proposition and Some Shortcomings
The biggest value proposition of Project Server 2007 for most users has been the ability to go to one central place for all project information.  The second most important benefit is the application's tight integration with Microsoft Outlook.  However, there are some shortcomings that we encountered:

• The Calendar Web Part does not integrate with Outlook.
• The e-mail alerts are not triggered when a new topic is posted even if the user has chosen the option "All changes."  It is only triggered after a change is made to the post.  Our workaround is to initiate the topic as "Closed" and then change it to "Open."  Certain replies fail to generate e-mail alerts.
• Certain lists on specific machines intermittently failed to export properly to Excel.

The Challenge
The toughest and most important challenge in adopting a collaboration tool is getting the user community to embrace the concept of the project site.  Even though most content can be pulled or subscribed to (as well as pushed forcibly by the administrator), instilling the use of the project site is more useful in the long run.  Doing so, however, requires a lot of perseverance, creativity and top-management buy-in.  If you customize the unique selling proposition, showing the benefits specific to your projects and firm, you can make substantial headway in the acceptance and utilization of a collaboration tool.

About our author . . .

Amol V. Bargaje MBA, PMP is a Senior Project Manager with Jenner & Block LLP.  He is currently managing the firm's datacenter consolidation and collocation project.  Amol has over 10 years of international and diverse industry experience managing strategic initiatives, process improvement projects and software implementations.  Prior to Jenner, he was the Director of Implementation at SuperSolutions Corp., a senior consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and an Assistant Manager with Procter & Gamble.  He can be reached at ABargaje@jenner.com.

The opinions and statements made in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jenner & Block LLP.