Simplify Project Management With SharePoint

We're all project managers! Whether you are an attorney responsible for a matter, a secretary revising a Word template, an IT administrator installing new servers or a full-time project manager of a 10-person team, you must plan, execute and communicate project status to a variety of stakeholders, both inside and outside of the law firm.

But, we don't all come to the task of project management with the same training and tools at our disposal. Some, like the professional project manager, may be comfortable with Gantt charts, network diagrams, CPM, work breakdown structures and the like. For the majority of us, however, these concepts are foreign and confusing. And, because one key purpose of any project management tool is to communicate deliverables and status, it's not enough that we understand the reports output by our project management tool -- our stakeholders must understand them too.

This article shows you how to create a simple yet powerful tool for capturing, tracking and reporting on project deliverables and status using Microsoft SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) –- no programming required. The SharePoint project management tool has proven effective on a wide range of projects at Fenwick & West, and it can be adapted to a wide range of project management approaches, from the traditional "waterfall" to the emerging agile methodologies.

LOGICAL DATA MODEL

Although SharePoint does not perform relational database operations on lists, it is useful to visualize the logical relationships between the three lists I create as part of the project management tool. Two of the lists, "Projects" and "Status," will provide data to populate drop-down fields in the "Project Tasks" list. Figure 1 depicts the relationships between these lists in an entity-relationship diagram.

The diagram indicates that each project may have zero or more associated tasks; and each status code may have zero or more associated projects or tasks.

CREATING THE REQUIRED LISTS

In the steps that follow I will walk you through creating the three required lists to communicate the status of a project. If you have not created a SharePoint list before, you will find this article comprehensive in providing all that you need. If you are already familiar with the process of creating lists in SharePoint, you can simply skim this section for the fields to add to each of the three lists.

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Source: Law.com
By: Mark Gerow