Project Management Tips: How To Keep Your Project On Track Using SharePoint

how do you keep your project on track using SharePoint I'm Tony Zink and this is the project guide hi folks Tony Zink here project management author and trainer and creator of the project manifesto I show people how to use tools and techniques to get better results faster on their projects whether that means saving time saving money reducing risks or providing a more stress-free and pleasant experience for everyone involved in your project so if you're new here please consider subscribing or following me on your favorite social media channel and if you're not tuning in directly on my website Tony's inc.com then you can go there to find this video and others like it you can see the links to my social media channels whether your favorite is Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram or Twitter or so forth so you can subscribe there or follow me there for updates on upcoming webinars newly published training videos and you can find other good stuff there too so when you're managing a project or working on a project there's there's a lot of things that you have to deal with and there's a lot of juggling that takes place you typically have a number of people working on your project you typically have a number of things going on people working on different activities and so forth and you know your job as the project manager is to coordinate everything and make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible but with all of these things going on it's really easy to lose track of what's going on sometimes it's easy to lose track of documents that people are working on and passing around it's easy to lose track of you know issues that have occurred and you know changes that your customer has asked for and so forth I'm a believer in putting tools and systems in place in order to in order to help me keep organized and and you know make sure that I don't forget things as much as possible you know in my in my professional life or in my personal life I have to rely on systems and tools to do key me on track at all times so today I'm gonna show you one of those you know many tools that are available out there one that's offered by Microsoft called Microsoft SharePoint or just SharePoint for short now if you were to ask people you know five different people what is a SharePoint you're probably gonna get five different answers or even more you're gonna have people say you know the SharePoint is an online collaboration tool or SharePoint is our company intranet or it's a business information system or what have you I mean I could go on and on here but and all these answers are correct essentially the way I like to look at it is SharePoint is like a giant box of Lego's that don't come with any instructions so it's up to you to learn how to use it and to figure out you know different some some interesting ways that you can use it to make your life easier now today I'm going to show you one application of SharePoint where you can use it to help yourself you know keep organized on your projects so as we go through here if if you have any questions or comments you can enter them into the into the live chat and I'll try to address those a little bit further down the line here and if you're not watching this live today you can still enter your thoughts into the comments section so I'll check back periodically in the in the comments section and see if any of you have asked any questions or made any comments and I'll address them as they come in so let me switch over to my computer screen here and I'll get started so what you should see here is SharePoint or to be more specific this is a website that I've created using SharePoint to to help me get organized around managing my project so I'm a project manager and I'm working on this project where we're you know my company is installing some electric vehicle charging equipment at the Beachcomber resort and so this project the Beachcomber evie charging equipment installation jack'd I've created a project what I call a project site for for to keep my team and myself organized you can call this a project hub you can call this a project portal but this is where we can you know keep everybody focused and keep everything in one central repository for the project in order to kind of keep ourselves organized what we're looking at here is the homepage or the main landing page of this project site and so you can see here that I've I've configured this to show a few different things right here on the home page so that when people visit this site they have some some of important information right here at their fingertips so right across the top of the page here I've got a project summary basically shows a an overall timeline for the project if I go down here a little bit further below that I see that I have the hottest issues and risks for this project I have the the newest change requests for this project and below that even I have the latest document updates for this particular project now I've configured this project site to show these particular pieces of information now SharePoint as a as a as a tool is very very configurable now it's it's it's not not exactly intuitive to set up and configure but once you learn the basic building blocks of SharePoint then you can set it up basically however you want you can show whatever information you want in in your project site now let me just explain what I've put into my project site and and why obviously I have tasks and a timeline in my project site yes it's sort of like project management 101 to you know plan out the tasks that need to be performed and assign people to those tasks so you can track the work plan and track the work but I've also chosen to put documents in my project site and issues and risks and change requests now documents is often a big pain point for some project teams because it's you know the the de-facto method of collaborating on a project or even not on a project within a company is by attaching documents to emails and then sending out sending them out to people or something about them out to groups of people and so if you're if you're looking for a document and this document starts getting passed around between between people and your project team via email it's it can be difficult to determine who which which version of the document is the latest version maybe maybe you created a document you sent it out and somebody else maybe made updates to it and then they sent it up send it back out to the team maybe they copied you on it maybe they didn't so you end up going through this exercise of basically asking people you know did you make updates to this document or who has the latest version you you end up digging through your email inbox and and maybe finding multiple versions of a document and trying to figure out which one is the latest it just becomes a nightmare so if we can put all of our project related documents in one place then it's easier to see you know you know where is the latest version of this document because it sits in our central repository and so anybody who should be making updates to a document should go to that central repository and make their updates there so I like to keep documents centrally stored in a project site I also like to track issues and risks in a project site so you know issues happen all the time on projects and they're you know of course their problems in and of themselves but if you lose track of them if you allow them to linger and in drag out for a long time without getting resolved they can cause other problems may sometimes even bigger problems on your projects they can cause delays they can cause cost overruns and so forth just because you've lost track of all the issues or you've lost track of some of the issues so I like to create a an issues and risks tracker also so that all the issues and risks are tracked in one place you can assign somebody's name to those issues for follow-up you can see the status of an issue if you want to know what the status of an issue is you can you can just look and see who's assigned to that issue and you can contact them and ask them if they haven't updated it in your in your project site so issues risks are a great thing to store in your project site in a central location and I like to lump issues and risks together in a central tracker or central list because risks are just basically issues that haven't happened yet and but then at some point if a risk does turn into an issue then you've already got it in the right place versus some some some people like to track risks and issues separately from one another and when a risk turns into an issue now you have extra steps that you have to take in order to close out the risk and then go and open up an issue over in the issues tracker or the issues log so I like to keep them together and then the third thing that I'll point out here that I that I really like to keep track of in a project site is change requests customers ask for changes all the time on projects and so it's it's really important for you to keep track of those changes or those those requests for change because first of all if you if you don't if you don't give them all their changes they're not going to be happy with the end product so you want to make sure that you've tracked them and that you're gonna be delivering them but also if you're not tracking them then it's it's more difficult for you to assess the the impact of those changes on your project so some changes are pretty minor and they don't really have an effect on your timeline or your costs or which people you need to have involved in your project but some bigger changes do have an effect on those things and so if you're not tracking them and managing them properly then your your project can go off the rails and even if you do deliver those changes to your customer chances are you're not going to deliver in the timeframe that you originally agreed to chances are you're not going to deliver for the same cost that you originally agreed to and so if you surprise your customer at the end with with with a delayed delivery date oh and or a higher price tag then they're not going to be happy with you you may have delivered what exactly what they want but it was late and it cost more than they wanted and that might have been fine had you actually told them about it ahead of time rather than waiting till the end so that's another reason why I like to chart track customer change requests in in a central location like a project site so I've rambled enough about that let me go back and resume my regularly scheduled program already in progress so here we are back in the project site and so let me point out here I mean I'm gonna start with documents because documents are fairly straightforward and easy to understand these now these these these boxes on my home page here are just showing sort of like a like a view into the issues and risks and the change requests and the documents but those are actually all stored in their own separate repositories so I can go over here to the navigation menu on the left go to the documents library and this is where all of my documents are stored that that I've that I've been working on from my project and if I have a new document that I want to share with people and I want to add this to the repository I can just simply upload it I can find it on my desktop and it'll upload it and there it is now there's my new project charter document now if I want to view this I can just simply click on it and either evil it'll either open up in my web browser like I'm showing here or it'll you can or it'll depending on what web browser your web browser you're using and what your security settings are and what your SharePoint settings are and so forth it might just download it to your desktop and then you can open it up with with a program like Microsoft Word or Excel or whatever whatever The Associated program is that goes with this type of file so I can view this I can also edit this right from here so I can edit this right in the browser if I have my if I have the the appropriate browser that's capable of doing this or I can edit it in Microsoft Word and so what it'll do here is it'll it will be able to download this to my desktop you can see that there's now a notification there saying that it's been downloaded and there it is so I can I can start working on this document put in for example the name of the project which is Beachcomber Evy charging equipment installation and I just hit save here and it saves those changes right back out to the the the SharePoint site the SharePoint project site and then when I'm done I just close this and I go back to the document repository and I can see here now that I have version 2 that it's tracked and if I if I click on it to just open it up and view it again it'll show my changes that I made to that document so anybody on the project team could could do this one one great thing about document repositories in SharePoint like this one here is that you can turn on version tracking and it'll tell you what version of this document is currently out there in the repository you can go back and look at previous versions you can revert back to a previous version and so forth if I go back to the project site home page that that panel on the home page that showed me a view into the documents for this project if I scroll down here it'll show me there it is at the top of the list of the latest document updates it said it tells me that it was updated about a minute ago and who updated it how big the file size is the version and so forth so a real easy way to get some to get some quick wins using SharePoint is to create a document repository for all your team members to use to store all their documents in one place and update them all in one place so now let's talk about issues and risks I've got this this panel right here on my home page it shows me the hottest ones if I go into the issues and risks list it'll show me of all of the issues and risks that are that have currently been logged that are being tracked for this project and it looks like I have two issues so far in this project the charging equipment hardware is backordered and the customer is having difficulty preparing the installation site I can click on any one of these and it'll open it up and it'll give me more Dee tales about that particular issue or risk it shows me the title the description who is the owner probability impact exposure and so forth these are attributes that you can specify to for tracking issues and risks for your project these are the these are the kinds of things that are important for me to track on my project you might have different things that you want to track for the issues and risks on your project I can also make changes to this issue right here by clicking edit item so I don't agree that this is a low priority so I'm going to change this to a high priority and save that and it's as easy as that to update issues and risks if I have a new issue or a new risk that that we're encountering then I can just simply add this by filling out a form in this case here maybe we're encountering a new risk where tropical storms may cause installation delays so the the weather forecasters are telling us that there are tropical storms coming and so that may have an effect on our equipment installation that we have scheduled I can I can assign an owner to this I can I can assign this to somebody for actual follow-up I have attributes here where I can specify the the probability of this happening I'm not gonna give it a high probability because I don't really trust weather forecasters so I'll leave that to medium for the impact that'll be probably a medium impact if not even a high impact I could always come back in here later and change this if it turns out that it's going to be a really powerful tropical storm and it's gonna have a big impact on our project it's an active status for category that will probably be a timeline type of a type of a risk and then priority is medium for right now I can I can assign a due date to this I can put in some information about here about mitigation or contingency planning and then when the issue or risk is resolved I can put a statement about that here and put a date when the the issue or risk was closed so it'll add that to the list and I'll go back to my home page and it'll show up in there as a as a hot you know issue or risk moving on here change requests let me just spend a couple of moments on this so change requests like I've liked it like I've mentioned already are really important to track because you know your customers are going to come to you and they're gonna ask you for changes it's inevitable so this is a great place for you to track those the the newest ones are displayed here on the home page but if you have more than just the three or five that might be displayed here then you can go straight to the change requests list and manage them or view them from here now again same basic type of type of behaviors here this list is set up a little bit differently it just has a slightly different interface so this is just demonstrating that you not only have control over the information that's stored in a SharePoint you know project site but you even have control over how that information is displayed and what that experience feels like so in the in the issues and risks list when I clicked on on an individual item it opened it up in like a pop-up box and in the change requests list when I clicked on a change request it just takes you to another webpage that that shows you the details of that information I can I can always edit it just like I could over in the other list but this is just showing a different kind of experience that you that you have control over and you know in SharePoint so again you know maybe maybe we've got a new change request that we want to track the the customer has come to us than they've said that they want to install the charging stations in a different location other than what we originally designed for so I'll just click the new item there it'll open up a form here that I can that I can fill in and let me just paste in here the information rather than sitting here and you know you watching me type the whole time so the title of this is you know move charging stations closer to the guest buildings I'll assign myself is the owner to the I'll assign myself to this to follow up with us on a customer with the customer rather this is an active status this has a relatively high I'm going to call us a medium priority because we haven't scheduled the actual installation yet but we've started planning so it is kind of a medium priority that we have the customer may you know make a decision on this and I can even assign a due date to this maybe I want to I want them to make a decision by the end of next week I'll put a description in here and I can even specify what kind of an impact is this going to have on the project and so again a really important thing to think about when you're when you're managing change requests for a project is not only you know what does the customer want what are they asking for but also what kind of an effect is that going to have on the project you want it you want to think about is this gonna have an effect on the timeline of the project is this gonna have an effect on the costs of the project or or you know which people you're going to need to have involved in the project and so forth so by adding that to the to the form here it it's reminding you that you should think about this in this case I'm thinking that we need to evaluate the new equipment installation location and recalculate installation timing and costs I've got a place here where I can specify or supply that the outcome of this change and I can specify the date that it was closed it is it's still open so we don't have an outcome yet we don't have a closed date yet so I'll just go ahead and save it and then we'll add it to the list and once I like I showed you before if I go back to the home page of my project site we can see that on the home page as well as far as you know the newest change requests it's right there at the top move charging stations closer to the guest buildings I'm gonna leave you with with with a few things here first of all you might be wondering how do i how do I get SharePoint if I don't if I don't have it already so there's a there's there's a couple different options here if you don't already have access to SharePoint now what I say it that way because if you work for a medium or larger sized company you may already have SharePoint available to you and maybe you just aren't aware of it a lot of companies you sharepoint for for you know for doing things like this you can use it for for collaborating on projects you can use it for tracking customer and sales information you can use it for for tracking you know engineering and maintenance information you can use it for a lot of different things so a lot of companies use it and your company may already have it so at that point it would be a matter of just asking around and finding out who do I talk to to to get my own project site created now if your company doesn't use SharePoint yet then you've got a couple of different options to get it option number one is to set it up and manage it and maintain it in-house what that means is SharePoint is an application it's a business application that runs on servers and so that would basically involve getting servers set up and you know purchasing the software and installing it and configuring that software on those servers in order for you to have SharePoint available and ready to use if you don't have those kinds of resources or you just don't want to bother with all that you know you know geekiness then another option is you can purchase it as a hosted service from a third party for example Microsoft they make the software and they sell it and they also have a hosting option for you through through their office 365 service so you can look at if you're not already in office 365 subscriber of theirs you can look through their different office 365 subscription plans pick one that includes SharePoint and then they'll just send you the credentials and the login information and you can log in and start setting it up and start using it now it's a little bit easier said than done because you have to know a thing or two about SharePoint in order to be able to set it up and use it you just don't have to know nearly as much of the the you know the technical you know mumbo-jumbo in order to get it getting it up and running like you still if you've never used SharePoint before if you've never set up a SharePoint you know collaboration websites or what-have-you you're still going to have a learning curve to overcome but those are basically your two options to get SharePoint so once you've got SharePoint then you need to do a couple different things one is set up think about your data structure and and naming conventions for things and what I mean by data structure is start by thinking about what are the different kinds of information I'm going to want to store and track and manage for my project so in this example here that I showed you I'm I'm storing and organizing and sharing project related documents I'm storing and organizing and sharing and collaborating on risks and issues I've got change requests I've also got tasks that's that's where that timeline came from that was at the top of my project project site homepage so think about the different types of information that you're gonna want to keep track of using your new SharePoint site once you've done that then you're gonna need to do a little bit of learning on how do you actually set that stuff up in SharePoint in your new site and so you're gonna to get started you're gonna need to understand a few different building blocks of SharePoint you're going to need to understand how lists libraries pages and webparts work a list is basically a structured repository for for information that you can think of it as something that you can you can store like in a spreadsheet in rows and columns that's typically the type of thing that you can store in a list in SharePoint if it's unstructured data so it's not necessarily something that you can organize into rows and columns then it's probably some sort of a document or a file so if you have if you have those types of things that you're gonna want to share and collaborate on then that's done with libraries lists are for structured data libraries are for unstructured data like files and then the pages and web parts those two building blocks are what you what you're going to need to understand how to use to to build the the experience the interface that people are going to go through when they visit your new project site so pages are just simply web pages that people would visit like that home page was a pages I set up and then I put those different things on that page the timeline the the hot issues and risks the the latest change requests the the the latest document updates those were done those were added to that page using what are called web parts so if you understand how these four building blocks work and how how to set them up and use them in SharePoint lists libraries pages and web parts you're you're gonna be well on your way to being able to set up your new project site and get it ready for your team to use finally what I'll leave you with here is don't assume once you've got it set up don't assume that people are just gonna come and they're gonna know how to use it train them even if it's only a thirty minute short training session take some time to train your project team members on how to use your new project site or project hub or project portal whatever you choose to call it show them how to find the information in the in the in your documents repository in your issues and risks list and your change request lists and your tasks list that you've set up and so forth show them how to find that information show them how to add and update information and do everything you can to promote that they that they that they use it regularly rather than you know resorting back to handling everything by attaching things to emails thanks for tuning in and joining me today I hope that you found this information useful and it was worth your time before I leave you let me just give you a quick reminder that if you're if you're not tuning in directly on my website Tony's ENCOM then you can go there to find the video for this episode and others like it you can find links to my social media profiles so if you'd like to follow me and get updates on upcoming webinars and new training videos I published and so forth then you can get those updates by following me on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and and LinkedIn and so forth so thanks for again for spending this time with me today and until next time go back out there and keep building great things [Music]

Channel: Tony Zink

Views: 19,534

Rating: 4.6363635 out of 5

Keywords: project manager, project managers, project management, project management basics, project management for beginners, project management fundamentals, introduction to project management, project management tips, project management training, project management tutorial, project management professional, project management software, project management tools, it project management, construction project management, software project management, manage projects, project planning

Id: QdebI__J6TI

Length: 29min 5sec (1745 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2017