Thanks to the Best Practices Conference organizers, we were able to present some best practices with project management today right after the awesome Fat Tuesday Mardi Gras lunch. The main discussions were centered around: Why projects are challenged or doomed to fail? What are the five common causes of project failure? What SharePoint tool you can use to help your organization and project move from a state of failure to success?
Definitions:
“Failed” – The project was either given up or cancelled.
“Challenged” – The project was over budget, or it took longer than expected, or the scope, goals, and objectives were somehow compromised.
“Success” – The project was finished on time, within the budget, and met all the specified feature requirements.
Source: http://www.umsl.edu/~sauterv/analysis/6840_f03_papers/frese/
Five common causes:
- Lack of buy-in and engagement from the executives and team members
- Inefficient communication
- Objectives and deliverables are not defined
- Inadequate planning or no planning
- Don’t have effective resources
What can we do about it?
- Adequate communication channels
- Cooperate and collaborate as a team
- Obtain executive review and support
- Utilize effective resource management
- Enforce control mechanisms
- Seek regular updates and feedback
- Use a tool that can help you with the above challenges
What is the worst practice?
For the project managers to update the status on their project with tasks, risks, issues …etc. using a shared spreadsheet. I’ve done that in the past. It’s a lesson learned for me.
We presented how users can leverage SharePoint and PM Central for project management.
Angela did a fabulous job of showing how the tool can help users in many processes. There were several great questions and discussions from our audience, including:
1. From the view of the tasks from multiple projects, can we group them Priority, Assigned To….etc.?
Yes, we use Data-Viewer Web Part for this and users can create either dynamic view or static view based on specific column.
2. Can Calendar Plus, which is used at the project site, consume more than 10 Lists?
Yes, you can use List Rollup Web Part with Calendar Plus to display items from many lists.
3. We like your demo on Alert Plus and Task Master. Can we buy just those Web Parts?
Yes, with PM Central the business process is already built in. However, you can purchase the individual Web Parts as well.
4. Can the resource information in the Enterprise Resource Pool (ERP) sync with the user profile in AD?
Not at this time, but we are working on this feature.
5. Did you travel all the way from Vietnam to be here as a speaker?
No, I have lived in the US for over 30 years. 
But many of our engineers are living in Vietnam.
We will be here at the Best Practices Conference for another day. If you would like to see a demo of PM Central or one of our Web Parts, please stop our booth.
Read our complete coverage of the SharePoint Best Practices Conference 2011:
- Checking in from Best Practices 2011
- Keynote with Bill English and Owen Allen
- Please Save the Pandas
- Questions from the Bamboo Booth “Do You Offer Installation, Configuration or Training Services?”
- To Social or Not to Social
- Keynote with Ben Curry – SP Server 2010 Best Practices – You Can’t Fix Stupid!
- Why Projects Fail? How to Leverage SharePoint and Bamboo PM Central for Project Management
- Wes Preston Presents ‘SharePoint: When to Crawl, Walk or Run’
- Final Day – Ask the Experts Panel
