Using Sharepoint 2007 for project management

We have trialled Sharepoint 2007 as a project management tool for this project. At the Gordon, our Staff Portal is built on Sharepoint 2007, so trialling the use of a project site in the Staff Portal has been a useful side-benefit.

Sharepoint provides a group of web parts for project sites:

For managing a project and to improve communication between team members, Tracking web parts should be useful :

• Calendar (Event List)
• Project Tasks List
  (which allows a graphical Gantt view)
• Issue Tracking

For sharing files the Document Library web part should work:
We were hoping to have a shared repository and only 1 copy of any file. Everyone in the team could upload & access files from this single repository.

We could add links, have a discussion board & announcements —all seemed like great ideas!

SO WHY HASN’T IT WORKED?

It’s a bit hard to pinpoint – because all of us in the project team work in different areas in the institute, this shared point of call should work.

But feedback from the team indicates it added more work — yet another place to go to find information. It was ‘easier’ to use email & contact people that way, instead of going to check for announcements or whatever on the Project Portal site. Outlook (& email) have become everyone’s 1st port of call, so if we’re to use a project Sharepoint site like this, we need to put effort into connecting these sites to Outlook, then getting all project team members to set up these connections.

There are some built-in synchronisation tools (but these seem to work web part by web part) – but perhaps RSS feeds can work on the whole site?

Investigating other options & finding a good solution will be a great outcome from this project (for project work at the Gordon)