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As a project manager, you rely on your team to help create all kinds of important project documents. Your team produces project plans, risk management plans, presentations, reports, and a host of other documents. You present this material to customers. You send it for approval to upper management. Often, you maintain it as valuable project data.

Whatever you plan to do with your document, you want to make sure that it benefits from all the facts and expertise your team has to offer.

Collaboration and reviewing tools in Office 2003

Successful team collaboration means everyone has the opportunity and the tools to add insight and ideas to team documents. With the reviewing tools in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, this part of your job is easier. You can easily send your work to reviewers, keep track of your document's progress, and integrate comments into one cohesive document

Preparing the document — use what you've got

For example, you might be managing a five-person team that is developing a new product. Your team has been meeting to create the overall project plan, including design requirements, key risks, and major milestones. Using all the data collected so far, you want to put together a draft project plan. You’ve created similar project plans before, so you open one of those plans to use as a basis for your new one.

Begin by reviewing the previous project plan and deciding which parts to eliminate or update and which to keep. Next, incorporate additional project information from other files and sources.

Adding information from Excel or PowerPoint

Your team has been keeping cost-estimate data in a Microsoft Office Excel worksheet, and you'd like to include this information in your project plan. You also found a good description of the project scope in a preliminary presentation that a team member put together using Microsoft Office PowerPoint®, and you want to use that information, too. You can easily copy and paste information from Excel or PowerPoint into Word.

Copy information from Excel or PowerPoint into Word

Working with information from e-mail messages

You've kept up with your team's research and input on various aspects of the project plan through e-mail. One of your team members pulled together a list of all the identified risks, and you kept her message in your e-mail archive. You know that with a little editing, you can use this message almost verbatim. Because you are using Word as your e-mail editor for Microsoft Outlook®, you can copy and paste from one document to another. With the Paste Special features in Word, it's easy to maintain the unique formatting and style of your project plan.

Copy and paste using the Paste Special feature

Inserting questions and comments

As you work, you have a few questions about the information you are reviewing. For example, you want to verify that no other risks have been identified or that the key milestones have been agreed upon. To draw your team members' attention to these issues, you decide to insert these questions as comments.

Add comments to your document

Sending the document for review

You've made the preliminary changes and saved the draft on your own computer. Your next step is to prepare an e-mail message to your team members asking them to review the project plan. Without leaving the project plan document, you can use the Send to command to generate an e-mail message in Outlook with your document automatically prepared for collaboration.

Distribute your document for review

Routing a document

You can select the order in which you'd like your team members to review the document by using the Routing features of the Send To command. You create a routing slip that lists the order in which team members will receive the document. Each person suggests changes, answers questions, or makes revisions and then sends the document to the next person on the routing slip.

Create a review route

Send a document to the next reviewer

Pulling it all together

When your team members receive your e-mail message, they find the project plan attached. The reviewing tools are displayed automatically when the plan is opened, and reviewers can add comments and suggest revisions to the text. After the whole team has reviewed the project plan and the document is returned to you, you can pull everyone's comments together into one document by comparing and merging the changes and suggestions.