As one of our industry’s leading SharePoint consultants, Abel Solutions accelerates our clients’ efficiencies and collaboration with SharePoint project management solutions.

We do, however, believe that you should first assess the efficiency of your organization’s current project management system before making any decisions about project management platforms.

SharePoint Project Management

Is Your Current Project Management Process Efficient?

In project management, there’s always a tension between your ideal system and your actual system.

And there’s a good chance that, if your organization has ever used a project retrospective (and it should), a lot of inefficiencies have come to light. Task assignments, task completion time, document retrieval, departmental bottlenecks—the opportunities for project issues are endless. 

When trying to evaluate how you can optimize your current approach to project management, rather than focusing on individual components of your process, you should begin by evaluating the entire process itself.

Questions to ask about your project management process:

  • How much of your process is digitized and how much of it is paper?
  • How much of your process is automated and how much of it is manual?
  • As different components of the project get handed off between team members and between departments, how smooth is that transition?
  • How often does a component of a project merely require approval, yet it’s held in limbo much longer than it should be?
  • How often do project bottlenecks occur and where do they occur most?

Successful projects rely on automating as much of the process as possible so that your team can focus on creative and high-level tasks that humans do best—not manual slog that can be handled by SharePoint’s powerful automation capabilities.

Why Choose SharePoint Project Management Software?

It’s likely your organization is already using SharePoint for some component of project management. But how well are you leveraging all of its capabilities? Implementing a comprehensive SharePoint strategy provides you with an efficient, easy-to-use solution that can be scaled and iterated across multiple projects now and in the future.
 
Here are more reasons for your organization to use SharePoint project management:
 

  1. SharePoint is a central hub that’s already likely familiar to your organization

  2. Dashboards and reporting keep stakeholders in the loop

  3. Timelines and budgeting are solely based on data, not assumptions

  4. Ease of us for resource management and inventory tracking will be simple

  5. Progress updates and deadlines are clear across all stakeholders

  6. Milestones are automatically recorded

  7. Collaborate anytime, from anywhere, on desktop or mobile

  8. The efficiencies created by automation will save your company 

  9. Project financials are very clear

SharePoint Project Management Capabilities

Whether you’re using SharePoint Online or SharePoint on-premises, your organization has a powerful project management tool at its fingertips. With the proper know-how, SharePoint can be leveraged to create a self-sufficient machine that handles all your task management, workflows, document and asset management, intranets, dashboards, and more.

The core function of any project management tool is of course task management, and SharePoint’s task management capabilities can be as simple or as complex as your project requires.

Via task lists, you can create efficiency and accountability from start to finish by assigning tasks and sub-tasks to the appropriate people, while also attaching dependencies to each task so that there is a specific order of operations for your project.

Task tracking is also made easy with the Task Status, Priority, Due Dates, and Completion %. And you can integrate SharePoint with Outlook in order to see tasks in your Outlook calendar view.

As with any project, multiple people might engage with each document, and SharePoint offers a means for storing, organizing, and locating these documents in an efficient system that enables quick and easy collaboration.

Document management integrates with your task lists in that you can link certain documents within a task, ensuring that the correct user has appropriate access permissions and cutting down on project inefficiencies.

SharePoint document management also allows for real-time collaboration within documents, eliminating multiple iterations across different platforms. Version history allows you to restore a past version of a document if necessary. 

SharePoint project automation allows you to create macro and micro processes that free up your workforce from repetitive tasks to do the complex work that only they can do.

Identify your project goals and challenges, then create your automation map to optimize your project execution. Not only will individual tasks be completed at a faster rate—you’ll also eliminate project stalling between stages.

Project automation includes:

  • document approval
  • contract management
  • project stage notifications
  • task status notifications
  • automatic task assignment
  • task templates for specific project stages
  • recurring tasks based on specific conditions

With SharePoint’s customizable project dashboards, project managers can compile the exact metrics they and other stakeholders need in order to get tasks done and keep the project on-time and on-budget.

Here’s where automations play a major role in optimizing project management:

  • Project and task status notifications
  • KPIs
  • Timesheet data
  • Standardized reports

By having project and task tracking always a click away, your organization will cut down on unnecessary back and forth between project managers and other stakeholders about task status. Dashboards not only promote efficiency, they measure it for you.

With SharePoint project intranet, you can house every aspect of your project in an easy-to-use site that grants 360º visibility to project managers.

Project intranets house the following in one place:

  • tasks
  • documents
  • dashboards
  • collaboration portals
  • alerts and notifications
  • quick links

And every intranet you build can be customized to your exact security and compliance needs.

SharePoint’s project governance offers a score of user permissions and processes that will help your organization’s business divisions and IT teams work together seamlessly.

Every organization has unique needs and goals that influence its approach to governance. No matter your unique needs and goals, SharePoint’s project governance will help:

  • Streamline your organization’s deployment of products and technologies

  • Help keep your organization’s system secure and compliant

  • Help ensure the best return on your investment in technology

  • Optimize and scale your governance strategy for future projects

Collaborative SharePoint Project Management with SharePoint Sites

One major remedy for project inefficiencies is to leverage SharePoint Sites and SharePoint Site Collections as dashboards for singular projects or even dashboards for interdepartmental collaboration.

SharePoint Site

How To Leverage A SharePoint Site

A SharePoint site is a website that houses SharePoint Web Parts, such as a Document Library, Calendar, Task Lists, and more.

A SharePoint site can have one or more pages on which content may be presented to the user, and the overall purpose of the site is to keep everyone on your team up-to-date about overall project status and individual task needs.

SharePoint Site Collection

How To Leverage A SharePoint Site Collection

Much like its name suggests a SharePoint Site Collection is a collection of SharePoint Sites that allows project managers to cluster multiple teams or departments under a single umbrella.

While there is a top-level site within the Site Collection that serves as Central Command, each team or department will be assigned its own website in order to promote collaboration.

Get A SharePoint Project Management Solution Exactly As Your Business Needs It

When we build out custom SharePoint project management solutions, we first listen to your project needs and business goals. Then we map out the entire solution build, from ideation to implementation to company-wide adoption. With out-of-the-box solutions, there’s always a disparity between the functionality your business needs and the functionality the solution offers. But with our SharePoint project management solutions, you’ll get exactly what your business needs, along with consistent ease-of-use and scalability.

Define Your Recurring Objectives for SharePoint Project Management

How will your project management system meet needs that exist for every project into your business strategy and drive business performance? What are your KPIs for project management?

Define Your Scope for a SharePoint Project Management System

What project management components are needed and how does it interface with your existing systems and/or content?

Define Key Project Management Criteria for SharePoint Platform

What are the must-have sets of functionality within and across departments? What must-haves are unique to your organization?

Develop Proof of Concept for SharePoint Project Management System

Is a proof of concept feasible in terms of both operational and financial resources? Could a proof of concept save you time and money in the long run?

Deploy & Roll Out SharePoint Project Management System

How will you deploy the project management system across departments? What are the phases from build-out through roll-out that will ensure proper adoption of the project management system?

Talk To A SharePoint Project Management Expert

Schedule a free consultation with one of our SharePoint experts today.