Project Management Capabilities
There are a number of very well defined industry project management approaches such as the PMI®, PRINCE2®, MSF (Microsoft Solutions Framework), SCRUM, SEI-CMMI®, etc. These models all define the process of project management in similar and at the same time different ways, however they all bring something valuable to the table.
Rather than map pmPoint to every model this page seeks to describe a common set of project management processes that are covered to varying degrees in most of the formal models and then to map pmPoint to these common processes.
Many of the common project management models break the project management discipline into key areas. Presented here are a set of common project management key areas and the related support they receive from pmPoint on the SharePoint platform.
Project Management
pmPoint comes with a variety of single project management templates covering projects of different types. These templates can optionally have a Microsoft Project style project management schedule with task dependencies and an optional import / export with Microsoft Project.
All pmPoint project management templates come with many project reports (including Gantt reports, My Work reports, Work reports, Resource Usage Tracking reports, Issue reports and all with Charts and graphs). Importantly all of the reports can be distributed in a number of very flexible ways from the web-part user interface (e.g. printed, emailed and exported to Excel or XML or SQL Server).
Program Management
pmPoint comes out of the box with templates that give organizations a very fast starting point for managing across many projects.
As all pmPoint templates are delivered on SharePoint, they are extremely customizable using the normal features inherent in the SharePoint platform for customizing sites, lists, web-parts, etc.
Process Management
Organizations are typically challenged enough when it comes to managing the actual projects that managing the process that is used for project management becomes too much to get to in many cases. pmPoint allows organizations to bake the local processes into usable project management templates thus reducing the need for extensive process documentation, as the process of how to manage the project is largely contained in the template that the project teams use.
Next challenge is figure how to capture the actual project management process improvements that are used on real projects. pmPoint comes with a Templates area and with functionality that allows for the easy capture and subsequent reuse of best practices.
pmPoint also has hooks from the actual project sites to allow teams to point from the project site to process documentation as needed.
Product Management
Each of the lists in the pmPoint templates is composed of Special Columns (e.g. Visual Indicators, Unique Id’s, etc.) and pmPoint comes with enhanced SharePoint lists for the major work products of project management (e.g. Risks, Issues, Teams, Roles, Project Statement, Change Requests, Bugs, Iterations, Phases, Milestones, Goals, Commitments, Deliverables, Requirements, Project Post Mortem, etc.). pmPoint will also work with custom lists your organizations defines for work products that are particular to your own organization.
Portfolio and Priority Management
Organizations have competing demands for limited resources. Customers (whether internal or external) ask for new projects, extra deliverables on existing projects, support requests, minor enhancements, issues to be sorted, etc. pmPoint has lists, reports and templates to facilitate the management of the different types of change requests, including templates to manage the pipeline of new work and project requests.
People Management (incl. Resource Management)
There is a huge variety in the work assigned to people right across any organization.
There is also a multitude of sources from which the work can be assigned. This is not ideal as it is harder to manage but it is the reality of managing work and projects in today’s dynamic organizations.
pmPoint eases the pain by making it easy to assign work or project assignments to individuals.
pmPoint also notifies or reminds people of the upcoming or overdue work on their plates.
pmPoint also delivers reports of who is assigned what work and also can indicate who is over loaded / under loaded.
Partner Management (incl. vendors and suppliers)
Many pmPoint customers use the project management templates to manage projects with external stakeholders like partners and vendors and customers.
Since pmPoint sits on SharePoint it is fully web accessible. pmPoint also has the unique capability to email project update reports from SharePoint to the various stakeholders.
Some pmPoint customers have added their external partners to their own sites while others have elected to use pmPoint Online, the hosted version of pmPoint.
Price, Cost and Budget Management
Most of the pmPoint lists and reports are setup to optionally support the tracking of planned and actual cost information.
Thus teams can elect to track or not track cost in pmPoint. Indeed some teams and templates may track cost and some may elect not to if this is the right decision for the organization.
The pmPoint reports have the unique facility added to SharePoint where they can total and display costs information from multiple lists in many different projects.
pmPoint also has the ability to chart and graph this cost information as needed.
Again pmPoint can be used to manage projects with or without cost information.