New Book – SharePoint for Project Management by Dux Raymond Sy: How to get a free copy
I had lunch last week with Dux Raymond Sy, author of O’Reilly’s SharePoint for Project Management. It was an interesting hour since we have a lot in common when it comes to our goals of helping the SharePoint End User Community.
When I asked if he had a chapter of his new book in .pdf format I could distribute on my Weekly Newsletter, he said he’d do me one better… how about a couple of books! I’m not one to turn down gifts, that would be impolite. So sure, I took some.
I was trying to figure out the best way to distribute them, and came up with what I think is a fair idea. It’s not exactly the $10,000,000 Google is giving away for world changing ideas, but will sure help expose common problems where SharePoint can be used as a solution for project management. Here’s how to get your free, autographed copy of SharePoint for Project Management.
How to Enter
Use the comments box to describe a problem you are having (or have had) managing a project. Only one problem per post, but you can enter more than one post. You’ll have to give your email address, but it is NOT exposed on the site. It’s just for me to be able to contact you, if necessary.
Your entry must be completed by 12:01 mid-night, November 1st, 2008. So that there’s no confusion, here’s how much time is left:
How to Vote
Dux and I will evaluate the list of entries. The most interesting posts will be put in a survey form. Voting will be done by you, the reader. Vote for the problems you would most like to see a SharePoint solution developed.
You do not have to register to place a vote, and you can vote for more than one problem. However, you can not vote for the same problem more than once. The five people with the highest votes will receive a copy of SharePoint for Project Management, autographed by Dux.
So “Start Your Engines!” What problems are you having managing your project?
My problem has always been to demonstrate to people the benefits of using a virtual project office for better managing the information and communication in a project.
These slides show the benefit.
http://www.slideshare.net/mcatteeuw/project-spaces-presentation
Here’s a problem I faced when implementing a project for Dell a few years ago.
I had a team of upto 55 people working on the project at any one time. As you might imagine the project plan was huge (… and we didn’t have SP back then or ‘project publisher’ either!)
My problem was in distributing tasks and gaining meaningful progress back on them in an efficient manner. At that time my general modus operandii was was running around from one group to the with a heartrate like a hummingbird who had just been told the price of nectar was going up.
What I could have done with was this….
Team member logs is and sees a vast array of things to work with….
PROJECT STATUS:
- Access to PM reports to steering group
- Visibility of % complete, issues logs etc
UPDATE THE PM:
- Team member reviews ‘last weeks tasks’ (very much like the dashboard from last weeks webcasts)
- Update all %completes for personal tasks, est finish dates are up to date.
- updates issues log
- send in feedback that that PM should know
ORGANIZE MYSELF:
- Review personal tasks coming up (could be a calendar or time buckets like ‘next week’s tasks’)
ADMIN
- Request some time off
- let everybody know I’m going to be late someday or going off early
I don’t know if that is good enough to win a book (postage to Ireland probably negates that anyway!) but I wanted to give you some feedback on what would have worked well for me back then.
I’m happy to say I’m working with small businesses these days and they provide a completely different set of challenges!
Regards,
Mick
This might not be the response you’re looking for. But my problem, as someone who has to “wing it” long before there is any training, is the lack of books with concise and quality information. That’s why I have always liked the O’Reilly books. They provide enough information to get started without having to use snippets of numerous books on the same subject.
I’d have to say the biggest problem I’ve had on my Project Mgmt sites is that they are not organized. I’ve created templates with all the libraries and lists that the project team needs and still the documentation has to be combed to get find a certain file. I think that it’s a training issue for the team, but who has time and money to train everyone in the team on how to organize files?
I use SharePoint extensively to act as the Project Repository for my projects, and have toyed with both MOSS 2.0 and 3.0. With 2.0, I used a custom template for projects developed by our company. With 3.0, I converted the template to be more 3.0-friendly. I also implemented MS Project Server 2007, which runs on MOSS 3.0. It comes with its own SP template for managing projects that is surprisingly similar to the custom template created by someone in our company.
Here’s the problem:
It doesn’t matter how much technology, or how many policies, templates and procedures you set up, team members have to break through several paradigms to use the SharePoint site effectively. I’ll submit the top three items I find cause the most trouble in three separate posts, since that is what was requested. Here is the first one:
1) People do not understand SharePoint file versioning. They insist on putting version numbers, initials, dates, and all sorts of codes into file names so that they will know (they think) what version of the file they are dealing with.
The solution, of course, is to never put these things in the file name, make sure SharePoint versioning is turned on for the library, and use Version History as the mechanism to track file versions. One can also use the File Properties Title field and the cover page of the file (if it is a document) to put other stuff that they feel they must place there about the tile.
I must add, however, that MOSS 3.0 is much better at versioning with its major/minor versions and automated prompts about what is about to happen with the file you are saving or editing. Kudos to MS for the changes in this area.
However, the problem remains regardless of which version one is using.
How does one crush the stick-versioning-in-the-file-name paradigm?
Here is the second one:
2) Attaching files to emails
This is the second paradigm that we all need to working at grinding into the dirt. When working with files on SharePoint, we still have people who absolutely insist on sending files around in emails, instead of posting it to the project site, and sending a link around in an email. OR better still, setting up the team rules such that all team members set Alerts at whatever frequency they are comfortable with, so that an email does not even have to be sent around at all!
Attaching a file to an email suddenly creates a redundant version of the file that can be circulated far and wide without the author’s knowledge, only to come back to the author modified beyond recognition.
It’s all about collaboration, people! We cannot collaborate with multiple copies of the same file! The key is calling the file with the same, and storing it in ONLY ONE PLACE. One the SharePoint site!
Here is the third one:
3) Creating Email Hades
This is the third top 3 paradigm shift people seem to be unable to make when using SharePoint – not using the features of SharePoint that substantially reduce the millions of emails flying around this planet.
Have you ever gotten an email from one person copied to ten people, who all do a Reply All when they receive it? That might be manageable when it first happens, but just try to fit that conversation together a few months later when you are lucky to even remember the name or email of the originator, let alone the date it occurred. Team members need to realize that there are at least two tools in SharePoint that can stop us all from being suffocated under the weight of our email in-boxes. These tools are discussion groups and surveys.
If you need to gather opinions from many people, create a discussion group, then send out an email with a link to the discussion group asking that each person post their opinion, if they have one, and comment if they wish on the opinions of other people. Set a deadline for response. Once the deadline is past, correlate the responses into something meaningful that works for whatever it is you are trying to accomplish.
If a formal decision is required from the group, create a SharePoint survey that summarizes the opinions you received in a “rating” type of question that let’s people vote. This assumes, of course, that you are looking for a team consensus on an issue. If you are simply looking for opinions, and will make up your own mind, you won’t need to do the survey part.
Our company just started using SharePoint 2007 in the last year and, because our customer highly recommended that we use it, management has decided to use it as a way to collaborate with and deliver all our documentation to our customer on the current project I am working on. My job is to design and architect the SharePoint sites for the project.
My biggest project management problem is I have guys with 20-30 years of experience and they are used to doing things in a folder directory structure on a file share and they are unwilling to give that up. They have dragged 10 nested folders into a document library and of course the URL is broken to the lower level files because the URL would need to be longer than 255 characters. They are not buying into the metadata idea to replace some of their precious folders. They also have other bad habits of having multiple copies of the same file, just renaming it and adding a date or a version number. I know if I do not get the top management to buy into the paradigm shift that needs to be made if we are going to use SharePoint; the project is not going to run very smoothly.
I think one the major problem is the difficulty to make graphs and indicators in Windows Sharepoint Services 3. This is a very important feature for project control. I am trying to use Reporting Services add in, but I would like something like de old Office Web Components.
Another important difficult is how to create a time sheet to collect hours reports from a lot of projects. Every project has its own site, but you need a time sheet solution to collect and analyze the time information from all the project ‘s sites.
We have multiple SharePoint initiatives, all of which feel compelled to have their “own” dedicated server environment. I can see the need in one case, a remote site with an already overburdened link, but not in the others. Trying to get people to understand that a properly designed environment is secure and can keep secure data isolated into the appropriate containers is my biggest, and so far least successful challenge. Thank goodness for VMware making it much less expensive to accommodate these folks, Now it’s just multiple SharePoint and SQL server licenses needed to make them happy.
As a Software Analyst, aka SharePoint Administrator, I’ve pushed using SharePoint’s built in collaboration features to manage projects. While I and a few others use my approach, the project templates are weak; not rolling up key components of each to the CIO and Managers.
I would like to develop a systematic template which ALL departments could use, manage, and roll up to appropriate managers as summary data, contain workflows for approvals, contain common easy to use forms, tie into Exchange to track resources, and alerts for approaching deadlines.
Adding in a component at the BA level to ‘translate’ from user requirements to functional specs is also greatly needed. It’s the missing piece in most project plans.
Time is money, and I believe the MS Project Suite is capable but too robust for most users.
Hi,
I am an SharePoint architect. The client for whom I work in, they have an Enterprise Architect who knows very little about SharePoint and its capabilities. So, whenever we design something he goes database / data modeling rather then SharePoint listing approach. They treat SharePoint as normal .NET/SQL Server application which I think is completely wrong while designing.
A Book on SharePoint Project management will also help them how to create the items in project.
Hi, another…
Suppose you have a Software Development Project. And you want to use wikis to store the product specification a detailed design. It is difficult because you must use an application to create a diagram, and then export it as a picture. Then you link the picture from the wiki. It is very difficult to maintain. I would like something more agile.
Bye!
Building a single place (one-stop shopping/PMO Toolkit) to deliver templates, tools and training, then giving users a single SP site for each project which uses web part links to web-based tools (bug tracking, etc.) used in delivery is a great and lofty goal, one which senior management often thinks should be a quick and easy fix. Tips on how to set these up with usability in mind are needed for all successful project management efforts!
My problem is to get a dashboard set up to show the status of many contracts related to a particular regulatory deadline. I have not created dashboards in Sharepoint, so this is new to me.
My issue revolved around Functional Specification documentation that needed to have the latest version number (minor/major) included in the Document Information Panel (DIP), as an available Document Property (DP) that could be inserted as a field on a document’s cover page while automatically updating upon check-in. Sounds like something SharePoint ought to do out of the box, but it doesn’t. After reading the suggestions on these pages: http://blogs.msdn.com/joerg_sinemus/archive/2007/01/26/wss-version-number-in-the-word-2003-document.aspx and http://www.sharepointblogs.com/agoodwin/archive/2007/07/23/connecting-moss-version-number-in-word-documents.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage and lots of research/learning what Developers really do, I am happy to say I have this working in my environment with Office 2007. I sincerely hope Microsoft adds this as a default option to the next version of MOSS.
We know that metadata is important to ensure items can be easily found. However, when you upload a change request document into a change request library for Client XYZ, you really don’t expect the user to set metadata that for these values. After all, every document in the library is a Change Request.
However, when you are using Search or the Content By Query web part to display items, these “implicit” metadata values are not defined, so can’t be used
I’d love SharePoint to have the ability to auto-tag items in particular areas with particular values. If I move the item into another area, the auto-tag values will change. This way, I won’t have to ask users to apply tags that they think are too obvious
Hi,
The problem I’m having is 2 staged:
- How to convice PM’s that one way to manage a project is better for the company.
- How to automaticly measure the state a project is in.
It’s also very hard to convice the top management…
The biggest problem I run into is the lack of “full” integration between Microsoft Project and Sharepoint. While calendaring is integrated and tasks and other things can be set up, I’ve yet to find a good way to visually display project progress in a site and have yet to find a way to dynamically update a project plan so that SharePoint can serve as the single point of reference for all updates to the project plan.
I inherited a Sharepoint Mess. It’s custom code, lots of object layers, with web services, then pages and web parts are wrapped into web parts. Deployment is apparently manually done through the GAC (no deployment/updating documentation), and the web services are managed manually. The webparts were then each added to custom sharepoint web part pages, so in order to replicate the production site, I’ve had to go through countless steps like capturing sp database, app database, sp file structure (from the 80/bin), modify web.configs everywhere (including the 5 web services that had to be set up manually)….
I’ve finally gotten it into a buildable state (not all source code was checked in, of course). At the moment, I’m not re-architecting, but eventually, the app will be rebuilt the RIGHT way.
Our nonprofit organization has many plans for SharePoint. One of these is to manage a Community Asset Map database for each of the communities we serve. We have several short-term employees who will create asset maps of each community and enter the information to the database, which our permanent staff will keep updated and use to help the familes we serve find resources. We want to use SP to store, filter, and display information on each asset such as location, contact info, types of services provided, conversation notes, rss feeds from the asset partners, flyers and documents they send us, etc. and be able to link the newest info to annoucements and other pieces of the SP site for relevant staff. Looking forward to figuring out how best to do this! Thanks for reading!
I work in the county Sheriff’s Office. We are brand new to Sharepoint but have spent the last month reading EVERYTHING we can get our hands on regarding Sharepoint. We are planning on using Sharepoint to distribute vital information to our officers in the Patrol cars over our intranet. We just put laptops in the patrol cars so they guys will have wireless access to the information being distributed thru Warrants, BOLO’s (be on the look out), Amber alerts, the daily “stolen car”, or Missing Persons, geeze the list goes on and on. Imagine, having at their fingertips, by a link on the intranet, listing of all the imformation that the deputies scratched in their notebooks during the daily roll call. I figure we can save … say 30 officers x 30 minutes x 3 shifts = 45 HOURS a day. They guys can be on the streets instead of in the office. And ……. using infopath for their incident reports will product incredible time savings. Now, the officer writes up an incident report, then he drives it to the office for his Sargent to approve, if Sgt isn’t there and a correction has to be made later, the officer has to drive back to the office to make the changes. Using InfoPath the report can be submitted electonically, Sarg approves or rejects, and the deputy can make changes and resubmit. What about stolen cars that have been recovered, we can post those as soon as they are confirmed recovered. We won’t make the mistake of impounding the recovered car a second time in the same day cause the deputy didn’t get the “cancel stolen report…… Geeze should I go on!!!!! More time to catch the bad guys. Sharing gang intelligence……. So imaging the size of THIS project…… we are SO excited, but sure could use the help!
Hi Scott,
Are you running MS Project Server 2007? It is very well integrated with SharePoint. I would show a Tracking Gantt to show project progress.
Quoting:
——–
“The biggest problem I run into is the lack of “full” integration between Microsoft Project and Sharepoint. While calendaring is integrated and tasks and other things can be set up, I’ve yet to find a good way to visually display project progress in a site and have yet to find a way to dynamically update a project plan so that SharePoint can serve as the single point of reference for all updates to the project plan.”
- Scott Dicks on October 27th, 2008 8:40 am
Unfortunately, we do not have Project Server, however I am using MS Project 2007.
Quoting:
“Are you running MS Project Server 2007? It is very well integrated with SharePoint. I would show a Tracking Gantt to show project progress.”
Scott – Take a look a ‘Project Publisher’. It takes your project files, creates custom lists for SharePoint consumption and then keeps everything in sync. 30 time bomb trial, $150 purchase. Worth taking for a spin. — Mark
Looks interesting….I’ll check it out.
My main problem has been managing project managers to facilitate communication between teams. Creating project/committee portals help, but best practices would definitely help. :)
A project problem I have is how to manage and communicate better with offshore vendors. Given the budget constraints, distance, time difference and language issues, my projects tend to deviate easily.
The biggest problem I face as a SharePoint
person is meeting customer needs for visibility of key project information in a quick and easily digestible format – both at an individual project and aggregate – programme – level.
I generally work for IS directors or Programme Managers that need to know the state of their portfolio of projects is at any given time. They also usually want to compare todays picture with some history so they can monitor trends.
On a project by project basis I have developed a number of project healthcheck / status web parts (all SPD or OOB) that give a nice visual dashboard / snapshot per project with a drill down to view historical data.
My two big challenges are to
1] Roll up information into a central IS programme site from a number of sub sites and aggregate / visualise this information for central management (I envisage a fair bit of CQWP work here!)
2] To ensure that the data collection for Project Managers is as pre-populated as possible. These guys need to find it easy to populate the supporting lists.
An observation – I inherited the site structure of individual project sites and can see that these may be better in a single site – certainly for aggregate display. If your project portfolio is small I’d suggest taking the single site approach. (Our isn’t small and there a permissions requirements per project that mean we need to use a site per project).
One other thing @Scott: there is another product called ‘Intelligant’ that does similar list creation and synching with Project (and Mind Mapper) and may be worth a look.
Last thing. Sorry to MS but the Gannt View is next to useless! If you are organising a picnic this weekend then maybe OK. If your project lasts more than a six weeks no chance. Seriously, as per the 3rd party web parts out there, this needs to scale to day / month / quarter / year / entire project to a page.
If anything it turns off Project Managers who excitedly think it will produce a useful high level view of their project plan.
We evaluated implementing Project Server, but decided instead to manage these projects, in a much more simplified manner, which has become much easier with MOSS. Unfortunately, delivering up a user friendly dashboard of critical content web parts that our executives and stakeholders can gain insight from – at both high summary (Program) levels, as well as drill down capabilities into the individual (Project) details, continues to remain out of reach for us. BUT – we’re gaining on it!
My company is required to use MS Project and I have recommended project publisher also. Only one person is allowed to update the project file so it was a big time waste for people to go around and get inputs. Having everyone make their inputs in SharePoint and then write it back to the project file is way better. We are going to eventually get project server but this is a nice interim solution.
We also bought a really nice charting web part from Dundas. http://www.dundas.com/Products/Chart/SharePoint/index.aspx This replaced the deprecated chart web parts from WSS 2.0. It has a nice Gantt chart (the built-in SharePoint one renders too slow and is huge if your project spans more than 3 months). You can point the web part to a SharePoint list or to a database as your source data.
I’m in state government-higher education.
My biggest project management issue has been (and still is) scope creep and managing expectations.
Example: state of Texas controller department builds a “window on government: where the money goes” site. Our executive sees this, and says “MUST! HAVE!” Our leader promises a similar thing to our governing board in 3 weeks.
Texas project manager tells me they hired a consultant for $300,000, who put 10 people on it. Texas also had 10 business analysts involved, and it took 3-6 months. And they had all the financial data at their fingertips.
Here in Alabama, we do not have the financial data from our colleges, nor any system of gathering it (no common administrative system); we have a budget of $0; and 2 developers, a senior-level contractor and an entry-level fulltime employee.
We have users who use Word for literally everything, including searching for files of any kind (Excel, jpeg, you name it).
If MOSS 2007 will help us extend Office Suite capabilities into content and knowledge management, why… I’ll take back most of the nasty comments, and promises of death and dismemberment, aimed at Bill Gates & Co. products over the years.
The bottom line is this: we need knowledge management; we need training; we need to educate our decision-makers; and we need the user experience to be dead simple.
First of all, thank you Dux!
I attended one of the learntree SPDesigner courses, and was actually able to use it for a change request tracking site for my IT department which should make our life much easyer. During the process I realized I need to learn dotnet and Visual Studio :)
SharePoint Designer is a great tool for a beginner like me – but it made me want to throw my laptop out of the window a couple of times :) Some features just do not work.
Regarding Project Management I can think of a milion of different things…
Right now I would like to find an elegant solution to the following problem: Our project managers want to share information on current projects with the business unit they report to. But they would also like some documents in the same project not to be visible to anyone except people working on the project. How can that be accomplished without breaking the permissions inheritance? (you probably figured out that I’m the sharepoint admin)
I am also looking for the best “free” template to use for the project management site.
Best Practices around what is a project and how to eficiently manage it using MOSS is something I would like to look at.
Joy said: “They have dragged 10 nested folders into a document library and of course the URL is broken to the lower level files because the URL would need to be longer than 255 characters”
It would be nice to have a list of MOSS “no-no”s like this one, for a beginner there is nothing worse than spending a lot of time building something and then realizing that everything you built is a bad practice, and will posibly generate more problems than it solves.
My biggest project management problem is having a scalable set of tools to manage by. We have the full blown set we use on big projects – MS Project, risk and issue logs, financial reporting… But when the burden of these tools outweigh the actual work of the project, there has to be a better way. Obviously some of this is process, but how do you manage small team, short duration projects, and capture enough output to provide a fairly common dashboard or status reporting mechanism?
My biggest project management problem is coordinating all the stand alone applications and training staff on simple process rules… We don’t all us the heavy MS Project because it is too big and difficult to train people, so we opt for lighter solutions and try to then use SharePoint to collaborate. It works sometimes.
We have a standard set of reviews for projects with our customer including a Preliminary Design Review and a Critical Design Review. There are specific tasks that have to be accomplished with each review and a predetermined time that each task has to be accomplished before the review. For example, let’s say that each review has 15 tasks to be completed. The first task must be completed 90 days before the review, the second 80 days, the third 75 days and so on. We would like a way to schedule a review on the calendar and have the pre-defined 15 tasks automatically created with due dates based on the date of the review added to the calendar.
Our small non-profit is plagued by how to better handle our multi-year grants. We need a way to track the fiscal side, on-going research, supporting materials needed, generated data and papers, personnel, etc. Not to mention KPI’s to satisfy both grantors and our Board of Directors. I know how to do bits and piecs, but not how to put it all together.
Main problems we face is in educating our users. since we are doing IT services inhouse, it doesn’t matter how many policies, templates, process in place but the user like to get the results without reading any documentation, training or anything. Since he cannot be techincally strong and not ready for any change with his ongoing process eventhough tedious, its difficult to implement collaboration systems within a company like manufacturing industry. hence we feel the most hardest part as the implementation process of an completed project, as the project output is measured based on the ROI and how it had reached the enduser for benefits.
One of the issues i have with sharepoint is how do we control the proliferation of project and team sites….?
Sharepoint provides the flexibility for the business user to use the functionalities easily but the flip side being that as an sharepoint admin, controllng the proliferation
Any thoughts.?
How do you get 30 IT techs to update a staff computer list from multiple working sites? IT techs need to quickly and easily update the staff/computer inventory list with each new computer they install or service. We have 1400 staff, each with multiple computers. We managers need to know who has what computer, which techs are updating the list, ensure that each field is filled in and the terminology is consistent. Without a program that can make this dummy-proof, the list is a managing nightmare.
What happen if you have one site per Project and you want to consolidate all the information of all the projects in a unified place?
For example you want to view de master plan of a PMO (Project Management Office).
I think is something very difficult to do.
The small organization I work for conducts economic development, disaster response, and health education programs in areas of the world where technology is rudimentary. However, our headquarters is located in a major American city. One of the most vexing projects which resides in my office is to gather and standardize tools (procedures, forms, guides, training) from our 50 or so offices worldwide and to then make them available from centralized location so that all offices have access to this shared knowledge.
The kicker is that our international offices are often located in some of the least developed countries in the world, where internet access (even in capital cities) can be rudimentary at best. Asking staff to simply “check the intranet” is more easily said than done, especially when intranet designers often cater to a “high bandwidth” audience.
Prior to visiting villages where absolutely no internet access is available, our field staff need to somehow be able to download our repository of organizational tools for use at the grassroots level. This means finding a way for staff to keep an off-line copy of our organizational tools which still synchronizes with a bloated intranet which is otherwise inaccessible . . .
Sharepoint as a document managing tool can corrects some inherent challenges in requirements gathering such as version control, storage issues, and content management.
In the age of nformation over load how can PM or BA effect change on stakeholders where email is the uber form of communication.