Having a project management solution in place will really help you get projects under control in your organization.  And SharePoint is the perfect platform to achieve it!

Set up your next project quickly with a free SharePoint project management template 

With BrightWork, you can extend Microsoft SharePoint to save time and manage projects more efficiently with project management templates, keeping everyone on the same page.

This blog will cover four ways that BrightWork and SharePoint save you time on your projects:

• Project management templates
• Quick and fast project reporting
• Automated project management processes
• BrightWork Template Design Sync.

Four Ways To Save Time On Your Projects With BrightWork and SharePoint

1. Project management templates

In our Collaborative Project Management Handbook, we suggest you decide the project management approach you are going to use during the “Initiate” phase of a project.  We also recommend creating a collaborative project management site to facilitate the process.

This can be daunting for project managers, especially if their organization does not have any “formal” project management practices in place.  If this is the case, the project manager has to decide how they want to manage the project and try to figure the best tools to carry out that approach.

Often, this leads to many different PMs in one organization using several different methods, essentially re-inventing the wheel every time a new project is started!

Wouldn’t it be better if they had local guidance and templates to choose from?

BrightWork is a project management solution for SharePoint that delivers a suite of best-practice project management templates.  The templates are pre-configured to manage a project and they range from dedicated sites to manage a complex project, down to a single site to manage the high-level details of several smaller projects.

With BrightWork, getting started is as simple as selecting the project template that is right for you! They make project planning a breeze.  The templates guide you through project set up and planning, so all you need to do is fill in the blanks and get working on your project.

2. Quick and Fast Project Reporting

One of the most difficult and time-consuming parts of project management can be creating project reports.  Often the information is scattered across email, spreadsheets, files, and post-its, making it impossible to get an accurate picture of the project and provide timely reports.

Project Status Reports

BrightWork project templates include a project status report that is so simple to update.  If a project manager wants to keep a snapshot of the project at a point in time, all they need to do is update health indicators, enter status comments, and track high-level dates at the project level.

With a few clicks and a short status description – the report is done!  Any time this data is updated, that information rolls up to the dashboards at the Project Office level.

Real-time Portfolio Reporting Dashboards

BrightWork also has built-in portfolio reporting dashboards that deliver tailored project information to the people who need it.  The beauty of these reports is that they automatically pull in the high-level project information from the individual project sites below.

This ensures that project stakeholders and customers have the visibility they need into the project to continue to support the project.

Scheduled Email Reports

Some people involved in a project won’t check the project site as regularly as they should.  Perhaps it’s because they don’t have the time, or it simply isn’t high enough on their priority list.  With BrightWork, all project stakeholders can have reports relevant to them emailed on a scheduled basis (maybe the “My Work” report for team members, and the Open Issues list to project sponsors).

Here at BrightWork, we receive an email every morning with our open work for the day.  Having scheduled reports saves team members from having to go looking for what they are supposed to do… when they arrive at their desk in the morning, they know what needs to be done that day.

Likewise, managers and senior executives don’t need to go chasing project updates.  They know that every Friday morning (or whatever the schedule is), they will receive a project update right in their inbox.

3. Automate Project Management Processes

One of the coolest things you can do with BrightWork is to automate and accelerate your project management processes with Nintex workflows. With BrightWork powering your PPM on SharePoint and the automation power of Nintex, you will get faster and better project and portfolio management so you can make decisions faster and move projects forward to success sooner.

Some of these optimizations include:

• Automated status reporting and email alerts
• Automated exception reporting
• Faster project request management and automated site creation
• Rapid deployment of project management best practices.

Check out this recorded webinar Project Management on SharePoint: Better and Faster with BrightWork and Nintex to learn more.

4. Template Design Sync

This last one is not directly related to saving time during the actual management of a project, but it certainly is a big time saver for your organization.  All projects will provide some lessons learned.

For example, you may have opted not to do risk management for a particular project. However, upon reflection, it might have raised some flags earlier in the project, therefore helping to preempt some issues and keep the project on track.

This is an instance where you identify an improvement to the project management process in your organization, and you should tailor the template to meet this evolved way of working.

BrightWork Template Design Sync makes it easy to roll this change out to multiple sites.

Let’s say you have 10 projects created from a Project Lite template in BrightWork.  And you decide that you want to add risk management to your project management process.

The template design sync allows you to make the update to the template and then “sync” those changes out to all project sites that are utilizing that template.  No more having to go to every project site and make the change there.  You can see how cumbersome that would be if you had 10 projects on the go at once!

This facilitates the quick and continuous evolution of project management best practices in your organization.