Tips to Successfully Manage Across Multiple Projects with SharePoint

You can use SharePoint to improve your project management success rate by delivering organization-wide dashboards that deliver cross-project visibility and control.

Here are some tips to ensure your project office on SharePoint is successful.

PMO Overview

First, let’s look at some best practices for setting up your PMO in SharePoint:

1. Provide a summary of the most important information first. There is a lot of information that could be rolled up, so front and center, you want a dashboard with KPIs and timelines, etc.
2. Use charting and another graphical indicator when summarizing reports across multiple projects to provide immediate visibility.
3. Add easy-to-find links to connect to other dashboards. The main dashboard should show the frequently used, high-level information, but use hyperlinks to direct users to detailed information if they need it.
4. Always ask for feedback from users. As if there is any more information or reports that they need in a continuous effort to improve organizational project management.

Set Up a Hierarchy

You want to establish an organized project structure within your SharePoint environment. For example, here we see the project hierarchy of a fictional company called Ace Power Visionaries. You can see that underneath the company are departments, subprograms, and individual projects.

Users can drill down from the top level summary in the organization all the way down through to the programs, departments and individual projects.

Organization-Wide Dashboards

When using roll-up reports across numerous projects or programs, it is important to target the most important data. Provide summaries of programs and departments so that high-level information can be easily interpreted and users are not bogged down in the detail (but the detail should always be just a click away in case an item needs further investigation!).

Here we can see some possible dashboards and charts. For example, a pie to look at overall project status, bar charts to look at work or cost summaries, or PO scorecards tracking the overall program KPI performance over time.

Program-Level Dashboards

Finally, use program/department-specific roll-up dashboards for a series of related projects. At the top level, you will see an overall status, with the ability to drill down into a particular department or project.

For example, provide a timeline for the overall program, or drill down to see the overall status of the projects rolling up to that program. Here we see the start/finish dates, timelines, and KPIs for all the individual projects rolling up to the program.

Finally, provide links to more dashboards. For example, a scorecard for the program showing how the KPIs themselves are tracking and trending over time.

Set up your SharePoint PMO in a structured way, with dashboards that offer a high-level summary of project or program information, with the ability to drill down into the detail if needed.

Image credit

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