Dux Raymond Sy - SharePoint 2010 for Project Management, 2nd Edition

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Do you find yourself asking for more time whenever you work on a project? Do you ever get the extra time you asked for? Well, if youre like me, you rarely get the extra time you need from your customers. This got me thinking about how I can buy more time for my projects.

I decided to find out if I could gain more time by reducing inefficiencies within the project team (which also includes myself). In a recent project, I monitored and analyzed a few individuals for a week and was amazed at what I discovered.

During an average eight-hour workday, each individual spent about 45 minutes looking for information. For example, when asked by a client to retrieve a specific status report, the project coordinator had to look for it on the network share, in her email inbox, in the project folder of her computer, and she even had to call up another colleague to help her find it. This typical mode of searching took up time that could have been spent on something more productive. In addition, project resources were unproductive due to poor document management practices, inefficient project communication standards, and ineffective project collaboration tools. According to a May 31, 2007, New York Times article, Time Wasted? Perhaps Its Well Spent (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/fashion/31work.html), a Microsoft study found that American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, with 16 of these hours described as unproductive.

Although 45 minutes may not sound like a lot, when you look at the bigger picture, it essentially means that a team of 20 people wastes 900 minutes a day. In a three-month project, that is 54,000 minutes, or roughly 38 personal daysmore than one-third of the project!

Other than time, how much does this cost the project and the organization? Well, depending on who youre considering, 45 minutes might cost $50 for a project coordinator or $250 for a technical contractor, each day.

Bottom line: time and money are not well spent. What if my team could regain just 20 of those 45 minutes wasted each day?

With SharePoint, we achieved this and more. Apart from increasing productivity, we were able to:

For me, the best part of using SharePoint was that once the IT/IS department performed the installation and initial configuration, I didnt have to burden anybody to set up and further configure this unique Project Management Information System (PMIS)I did it all myself. In addition, I was still able to better use existing tools like Microsoft Office along with SharePoint.

Thats what this book is all about. By clearly mapping the relationships between project management processes and project stakeholders, and by leveraging tools like SharePoint, you will learn how to apply common and practical project management techniques using SharePoint. More importantly, with this book you will quickly master SharePoint so you can build a PMIS that can help you efficiently coordinate communication and collaboration throughout your project team.