Leveraging the power of project team collaboration - Project

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The Impact of Team Collaboration

Many project managers have used the basic capabilities of Microsoft Project — tasks, resource assignments, predecessor task dependencies, etc. — to predict finish dates, display Gantt charts, and print time sheets. To be truly successful with a demanding project, a project manager needs to track a lot of information, including estimates of work hours and duration, resource usage and availability information, issues, risks, measures of progress, and schedule variance data. Besides tracking the schedule- and resource-related data, a project manager needs to support knowledge sharing and team collaboration or suffer risks like these:

Under the typical urgency to begin building a solution, an important requirement goes unrecognized until the customer acceptance test. Correcting the problem so late in the product development cycle takes a factor of 20 or more times the duration and/or cost of designing for that requirement from the beginning — and at the most visible and costly time to miss the expected delivery schedule.
Two developers begin inventing in incompatible directions.
The customer's priorities are not well understood by one of the business analysts.
Under time pressure, a software developer misses an important specification.
A program manager assumes that a key new member of the team will know what information he'll need at each step in the process, and that he will ask for it then.

In each case above, the Gantt chart won't tell you that there's a serious problem fulfilling the customer's requirements until it's too late to recover. A gap in communication or understanding or agreement can contribute to the failure of a project more easily than a late milestone can.

Success Is Unlikely

The Standish Group research shows that a staggering 31.1 percent of projects are canceled before they are completed. Further results indicate 52.7 percent of projects will cost at least 189 percent of their original estimates. On the success side, the average is that only 16.2 percent of software projects are completed on-time and on-budget. In larger companies, the news is even worse: only 9 percent of their projects come in on-time and on-budget. And, even when these projects are completed, many are no more than a mere shadow of their original specification requirements. Projects completed by the largest American companies have only approximately 42 percent of the originally proposed features and functions. Smaller companies do much better. A total of 78.4 percent of their software projects will be deployed with at least 74.2 percent of their original features and functions.

Knowledge and Consensus

Ineffective team collaboration is one of the primary contributors to costly rework and delivery failure in IT projects. Team collaboration is about sharing knowledge and reaching consensus within the team. Consensus results from effectively detecting and resolving conflicts in data, perceptions, interpretations, and actions.

A key human-factors challenge for project managers is to make sure that all crucial information related to the project has been validated by at least two team members who agree about the validation, and that the information has been effectively integrated by the stakeholders whose successful performance depends upon it. Team members need access to crucial information, and they need support for communicating clearly and reaching agreement easily. Clear communication and ease of agreement can never be assumed without some appropriate test for that condition.

Communication Skills

Project Management Institute's (PMI's) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines communication skills and responsibilities this way:

10.2.2.1 Communications skills. Communications skills are used to exchange information. The sender is responsible for making the information clear, unambiguous, and complete, so that the receiver can receive it correctly, and for confirming that it is properly understood. The receiver is responsible for making sure that the information is received in its entirety and understood correctly. [Emphasis added.]

Simply making information available to stakeholders does not ensure that communication has occurred. For example, publishing a list of tasks assigned to a developer does not ensure that the developer has understood the work to be done or that the developer is committed to completing the work according to a particular schedule.

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution provides a rich environment for knowledge sharing and consensus building, whether it's used enterprise-wide or to support one mission-critical project. Later in this article, we'll look at the capabilities of the EPM solution that are ready-made to support team collaboration.

An Information-Rich Environment That Promotes Team Collaboration

The information about a project that the project manager maintains can come from a variety of sources, including individual team members, customers, other stakeholders, external resources, accounting systems, and other enterprise data sources. One of the technical challenges for project managers today is creating an information-rich environment that promotes team collaboration, whereby all project management data can be collected easily and shared with appropriate filtration and security, using a highly automated solution that provides feedback to the stakeholders about the quality of communications.

For instance, how many times have you, as a project manager, re-entered task performance data that you received from team members because there was no other way to update the project plan? The time spent on re-entering data distracts you from being more vigilant in higher-risk areas. And how many times have you heard from team members that if they could get e-mail notifications about upcoming tasks and delivery dates, they would be better able to multi-task effectively and keep on schedule? If your project management solution doesn't provide that kind of precision and timing in the transmission of the right data to each team member at the right time, you've missed an important opportunity for driving risk out of the project.

Supporting Quality and Best Practices

High-quality management methodologies focus on specifications, processes, standards, best practices, and performance metrics to improve precision in fulfilling customers' requirements. If your project management solution doesn't facilitate the definition and presentation of relevant specifications, processes, and performance metrics in a way that's easily accessible by each team member at just the right time, there are still unnecessary risks in the project. The Microsoft EPM Solution goes a long way toward providing a ready-made, information-rich collaboration environment that raises the quality of project outcomes.

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solution includes these components:

Microsoft Project Server 2002, including Microsoft Project Web Access (PWA)
Microsoft Project Professional 2002 or later
Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 with Analysis Services or later
Microsoft Windows Server 2000 or later
Internet Information Services
MIcrosoft SharePoint™ Services
Microsoft Office XP or later

EPM Features That Support Team Collaboration

Here's a table showing elements of best practices in team collaboration as we envision them, with the corresponding supporting feature(s) of the Microsoft EPM Solution:

Team Collaboration Capability	EPM Feature	Benefits
Standardizing project methodology	Project templates specify prototype project plans with prototype deliverable documents already linked to tasks.	Standards and best practices can be built into each project plan from the beginning, so a standard doesn't have to be created from scratch for each project.
Defining and accessing specifications of deliverables Defining and accessing business processes	Microsoft Project Web Access provides Web-based document check-in, check-out, and read-only access (through SharePoint Team Services). Microsoft Project Professional -> Collaborate -> Documents -> Shared Documents	Ensures that there is only one authoritative version of each document. Provides one well-organized, central location for all documents.
Ready access to the most relevant documents at any point in the project	Tasks in the project plan provide hyperlinks to related documents, both in Microsoft Project Professional and in Microsoft Project Web Access (through custom Project Guides). Microsoft SharePoint Services can be configured to generate e-mail notifications when a document is changed.	Every team member knows what deliverable is required to complete each task according to project standards. Team members can by notified whenever significant documents change. They can subscribe to e-mail notifications sent when a document to which they have subscribed has changed.
Sharing all Microsoft Office documents	Microsoft SharePoint Services — accessed through the Documents tab in Microsoft Project Web Access	Team members can check in and check out Office documents, ensuring there is only one authoritative copy.
Issues management	Microsoft SharePoint Services — accessed through the Issues tab in Microsoft Project Web Access	Enables all stakeholders to raise and/or follow up on issues — i.e., constraints related to resources and processes. Provides visibility to those most affected by an issue that it is being tracked, by whom, by when, etc.
Risk management	Tasks in the project plan can provide hyperlinks to risk-management-related documents, both in Microsoft Project Professional and in Microsoft Project Web Access (through custom Project Guides).	Information about risks and risk mitigation can be connected to tasks in the project plan to provide quick and easy access to project stakeholders.
Managing resource assignments	Enterprise Resource Pool Resource Substitution Wizard	The Enterprise Resource Pool tracks all project assignments to prevent over-allocation of shared resources. The Resource Substitution Wizard makes it easy to locate available resources who have required experience or certification (identified in Enterprise Custom Fields).
Publishing task assignments	Microsoft Project Professional -> Collaborate -> Publish -> New and Changed Assignments	Confirmation of new task assignments can be listed on the resources home page in Microsoft Project Web Access to reduce the chance of miscommunication or skipped tasks.
Tracking task assignments	Task views in Microsoft Project Web Access All the customary features in Microsoft Project Professional for scheduling and tracking tasks in the project plan	Team members can be given access to task-related views within Microsoft Project Web Access. Project managers can track schedule and progress data for each task in the project plan.
Updating the project schedule with new progress data reported by resources	Microsoft Project Professional -> Collaborate -> Request Progress Information (After receiving update e-mail messages) Microsoft Project Professional -> Collaborate -> Update Project Progress The Updates tab in Microsoft Project Web Access enables communication about changes to tasks.	The project manager can generate an e-mail message to selected team members asking for updated work estimates and actual work hours for selected tasks. The team member simply enters the new amounts, which are automatically sent to the project manager's updates list. The project manager can then initiate an automatic schedule update using the new progress information provided by the polled team members.
Requesting and preparing status reports	The Status Reports tab in Microsoft Project Web Access	Using Microsoft Project Web Access, team members can request status reports. Using Microsoft Project Web Access, team members can generate status reports, either in response to status report requests they receive or by their own initiative.
Supporting consensus building	Custom Project Guides in Microsoft Project Professional Custom Web applications	EPM provides an infrastructure that can be customized at relatively low cost to promote visibility of decisions or issues where the team is either in or out of consensus, so an open question can be shown as closed, or so the need for escalation or intervention can be made visible to the whole team.

Summary

An alarming percentage of IT projects do not deliver expected functionality on schedule and within budget, and many projects are canceled before they are completed. Team collaboration issues are very often the reason why projects fail, especially in high-tech environments, but this is the most neglected source of variability in results. The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution goes a long way toward providing a ready-made infrastructure that facilitates effective knowledge sharing, and it provides an adaptable platform for adding customized features to support consensus building within a project team.

About the Author

Dan Web is a principal consultant for Team Analytics LLC. Team Analytics delivers the matrix and metrics of enterprise effectiveness, including implementation of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution. Team Analytics consultants focus on corporate performance management (CPM) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and tools for team effectiveness. Team Analytics provides proprietary, Web-based software solutions to support consensus building through structured team communications, such as requests for commitment, change requests, problem reports, requests for resolution of issues, and requests for refined specifications.

For more than twenty-five years, Dan Webb has managed software development projects based on the practices of process improvement, collaborative process management, success metrics, and high-performance teamwork. Dan has provided professional consulting services in project management, relational database application development, Web application development, strategic planning, and effective teamwork for enterprises such as Microsoft Corp., The Boeing Company, 3M Corp., Washington Mutual Bank, as well as for many small to medium-sized businesses. Dan can be reached at Dan@TeamAnalytics.com.

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