4 Benefits of Managing Your Project Office on SharePoint

A project management office (PMO) is a group or department within a business responsible for defining and maintaining project management standards throughout the organization. The PMO helps to focus, centralize, and coordinate all projects under its remit.

Best practice templates, dashboards, and a proven deployment approach can get you started fast with a fully working project office on SharePoint. Here are four benefits of putting something like this in place in SharePoint:

1. Quickly get control of all on-going work.
2. Report across portfolios and resources.
3. Connect/collaborate with team members.
4. Increase your overall project success rate.

4 Benefits of Managing Your Project Office on SharePoint

1. Quickly get control of all on-going work

SharePoint provides a collaborative environment to share project and portfolio information. It is configurable and can be tailored to support the information needed to manage and control projects and work.

You can begin by establishing a Project Office site with simple Project Tracking capability in a familiar “Excel” like table interface.

With the Projects Tracker, you get an immediate report on project status and progress.

This type of project management allows you to take control of the project portfolio quickly and can be easily deployed in SharePoint.

2. Report across portfolios and resources

You can then evolve into more detailed project management by introducing Project Sites. This will provide more capability to manage and report on resources and assignments in detail.

Here is an example of how individual project sites might roll up to the Project Office level to report progress and status. If stakeholders looking at this dashboard want more information on a particular project, they can simply click on the link and drill down for more information.

Other dashboards in SharePoint allow Senior Executives to see the project office in graphical charting, by status, etc.

3. Collaborate / Connect with Team Members

You can also set up efficient communications with team members and stakeholders. For example, you can establish daily communication emails to team members on current assignments, or schedule weekly Project Status Report emails to executive groups.

4. Increase your overall project success rate

Deploying a Project Office on SharePoint provides easy access and the ability to share project information on a timely basis will increase project success rate in your Project Portfolio.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in September 2014 and has updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Originally published at https://www.brightwork.com.