Project Management Templates - Business Project Manager

Business Project Manager

Manage business projects with SharePoint 2007

Business Challenge

With information on business projects spread so wide across and between organizations, it is next to impossible to have visibility into what is late, early, overdue, etc. Business project managers are no longer able to manage projects by walking about and getting status updates as they once were. Knowledge transfer between projects is not as effective as it needs to be.
This means that the various stakeholders on the extended business project team have to take more responsibility for project management, but in many cases they do not have the processes or infrastructure to do so. Many organizations are using Microsoft Outlook and Excel to manage business projects but these products were not purpose built for this challenge.

Solution Description

The Business Project Manager template delivered in pmPoint is designed to empower organizations to manage business projects effectively. BrightWork is the first SharePoint template based on a formal project management model – the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), which in turn was influenced by the PMI PMBOK – Project Management Institute Project Management Body of Knowledge. Since it is based on SharePoint it is fast to deploy and easy to customize.

BrightWork extends the functionality of Windows SharePoint Services through the addition of a pre-built template for business project management, with customized site definitions, forms, views, lists, and interconnected web parts which can be utilized in any SharePoint site.

The customizable Business Project Manager template empowers organizations with usable and repeatable mechanisms for managing business projects. Projects are customizable to match specific project requirements and can be saved as templates for creating future projects so that best practices and lessons learned are retained.

Partly based on MSF – the Microsoft Solutions Framework, an eleven year old standard for managing business and IT projects, the Business Project Manager template from BrightWork provides the right environment and toolset for business managers who want to use SharePoint to manage business projects today.

This template is useful for a range of business departments to run their projects including sales, marketing, engineering, etc. It provides a well-defined structure that can be easily customized to meet the specific process and taxonomy for each department and project.