*This post and its content is sponsored by BrightWork
Many organizations rely on project and portfolio management to reach their strategic goals. However, just as many project teams struggle to deliver successful projects because they don’t have the tools and guidelines to collaborate successfully.
At BrightWork, we have created software to help organizations achieve successful project and portfolio management using SharePoint in a consistent, scalable way.
We offer a range of configurable project templates, cross-project reports, portfolio dashboards, and collaborative project sites to help teams initiate, plan, track, and report on projects and portfolios with SharePoint.
With BrightWork project and portfolio management software for SharePoint, you can:
- Manage Projects with standardized templates, so you can collaborate effectively with your team and track project progress.
- Manage Portfolios with cross-project visibility, approve the right projects with project request management, and manage resources.
- Leverage SharePoint to start quickly and evolve project management at an organizational scale.
Manage Projects
Plan and Manage with Standardized Project Management Templates
One of the most common reasons for project failure within an organization is that teams do not have any project management templates or guidelines in place. A lot of the time, different project teams will be using multiple tools to manage their work, making it difficult to track work and leading to inaccurate project reporting.
BrightWork comes with a suite of project management templates for SharePoint that are pre-configured to manage a project.
Using templates ensures that projects are started the right way every time, and that the entire organization is using the same repeatable project management processes.
The benefit of using a template on SharePoint is that it will bring all the project information together in a centralized project site and guide the project team through the steps of managing a project.
Collaborate with a Team-Focused Project Site
A lack of organizational templates and project guidelines can lead to poor collaboration and competing priorities for team members. Without a single tool to see what’s happening across all the projects they are working on, team members can be unclear about the projects’ goals, who’s involved in the project, and even what their own responsibilities are.
By bringing project management into one cohesive SharePoint project management site, team members will be able to get the project “big picture.” Checking the project site in SharePoint will give them everything they need to see the progress of a project at any time.
Further, using ‘My Work’ reports, team members can easily manage their work assignments across all the projects they are working on and quickly updated the tasks a status.
By having all the information in one place, team members only need to update their progress in one place (the SharePoint site) and all reports will be updated accordingly.
Track and Share Progress with Automated Reports
If project teams are using a multitude of tools and apps to manage a project, then reporting can become way too time consuming. Sending emails, checking different tools, and calling or chatting team members to get an update leaves the project manager spending too much time on administrative tasks, rather than managing the project. By using BrightWork on SharePoint, all the project information is housed in one centralized project site.
The sites are pre-configured with the project reports and dashboards, which can be found out of the box across the report tabs on the site and also down the Quick Launch. Having all the project information saved in the BrightWork makes it easier for project managers to track and re-plan the project and provide updates to senior management.
Manage Portfolios
Approve with Scalable Project Request Management
One of the keys to successful project management is ensuring that the right projects are started at the right time and with the right resources. To aid this, BrightWork includes a templates called the Project Request Manager. The PRM Template follows a simple “submit, rank, review” process for the managing the new project pipeline. Requests can be logged and sent through various levels of review and approval before being approved or rejected by the decision maker.
PRM even facilitates the creation of new BrightWork sites to manage that project. Having a process to manage new project requests improves project governance, so that the projects that are approved and resourced are the projects that will support strategic goals.
Track with Real-time Portfolio Dashboards
Senior executives don’t necessarily need to see all of the detail of every single project all the time. What they need is real-time visibility across the entire portfolio of projects, where they can quickly identify which projects are in trouble and take action before it is too late.
One of the key templates that comes in BrightWork is the Project Office Template. The Project Office Template provides a high-level summary of multiple projects, including metric tiles, traffic light indicators, charts, KPIs, and scorecards. While stakeholders can get a snapshot of how projects are progressing, they also have the ability to drill down into any project for more information if necessary.
Allocate with High Visibility Resource Management
When projects are started for the wrong reasons, or you have too many projects competing for a limited number of resources, all the projects will begin to slip. Those team members with special expertise or skills are always in demand, causing delays on important projects.
BrightWork includes a few simple methods for tracking resources on a project. First, during the planning and execution of a project it’s very easy to understand the distribution of work across a team to ensure the workloads are balanced. High-level resource reports in BrightWork will highlight when a team member is over-allocated in a particular period, allowing the Project Manager to adjust work assignments and balance workloads across the team.
Back in the PRM, you can compare and report on resource allocation for proposed and current projects to make informed decisions on which projects get the green light.
Leverage SharePoint
Leverage Your Existing SharePoint Infrastructure and Expertise
Microsoft SharePoint is a popular and practical solution for project management. Leveraging your existing SharePoint infrastructure and expertise with a tool like BrightWork can help reduce the learning curve and accelerate user adoption by introducing a new tool with a familiar interface.
BrightWork templates and reporting dashboards leverage native SharePoint capabilities like document management, search, and workflows to create a complete PPM solution.
SharePoint and BrightWork can also be integrated with other systems and bring report on that data alongside project information, as well as automating project management processes with tools like Nintex.
Start with Local Best-Practice Project Management Templates
BrightWork brings a unique approach to deployment of project management software. Differing project management needs and experience means that introducing standardized project processes is a challenge.
With BrightWork, you can start quickly with a project management template that is suitable for your project or local requirements. Taking a template-based approach to project management makes it easy to deploy and subsequently improve project standards.
Evolve with Configurable Templates, Scalable Performance
Once you are up and running successfully with project management, BrightWork helps you to expand project management at an organizational scale. With the Template Design Sync, you can make changes to a project template and push/pull those changes into sites created from that template already in flight. The reporting engine in BrightWork is also built to scale up to hundreds of project sites without any impact on the performance of project reporting.
Start Evolve
Many organizations struggle to introduce new software successfully. For various reasons, users don’t make the switch from their existing tools and ways of working to the new solution.
Poor user adoption and wasted resources can make organizations hesitant about bringing in new solutions, even for a such a critical business process like project management. At BrightWork, we help our customers to deploy our software successfully and to experience positive results quickly.
We also want to avoid a lengthy deployment process and aim for a quicker implementation that will start delivering more successful outcomes faster.
To do this, we use the BrightWork philosophy of ‘Start – Evolve’:
- We START by focusing on the immediate needs of our customers so they can get visibility and bring projects under control quickly with BrightWork.
- When customers are ready to EVOLVE their processes, they have a fast path to the level of project management maturity they desire with BrightWork.
