How do you manage a project that spans internal and external
organizations and whose participants reside in multiple locations? What if
the project has evolving specifications, a tight delivery timeframe and
high executive visibility? The management of complex, distributed projects
is an increasingly common challenge in our global and e-business-based
economy. Enabled by Internet technology, virtual corporations, distributed
projects and telecommuting workers have become facts of life, but have our
project management disciplines adapted to this evolution?
I've been fascinated by the challenges of managing complex, distributed
projects since my experiences assisting several major multi-national
companies with their Year 2000 efforts. These projects spanned many
organizations and time zones, and it quickly became apparent that
traditional project management disciplines were too cumbersome, slow and
resource-intensive to handle the demands of these efforts. For example, a
task as simple as assembling a quorum on a project issue involved
nightmarish coordination and scheduling challenges. More often than not,
circumstances forced these challenges to be overcome by brute force rather
than by devising better methods of managing distributed projects.
Conceived before the dawn of the web-enabled world, many traditional IT
project management tools and techniques assume that all project
participants are on the same team and in the same physical location. Under
this assumption, everything the team needs, from files and documents to
management approvals, is close at hand and scheduling a meeting or popping
into a colleague’s office to resolve a nagging issue is no big deal.
Detailed, step-by-step project methodologies with formal hand-offs,
carefully timed meetings and centrally managed deliverables work in a
protected environment where logistics do not demand excessive time and
resource overhead. But when team members are distributed, the overhead
needed to sustain these practices becomes untenable.
Fortunately, a new set of project tools is emerging to allow team
members from different organizations and locations to collaborate as if
they were working at the same site. eRoom by eRoom Technology, Inc. (www.eroom.com)
is an excellent example of a collaborative, web-based work environment
specifically built to facilitate the management of complex, distributed
projects. eRoom provides the digital equivalent of a single location
project environment using a virtual workplace customized to meet the needs
of specific projects and work processes. This virtual workplace offers
project teams:
- Facilities for project communications
Project announcements are posted in a virtual "room" and
team members can communicate through alerts (e-mail or instant
messages), notes, multi-threaded discussions (for asynchronous
communications) and an intercom feature that permits real-time
synchronous conversations with teammates. A polling capability aids
decision-making by allowing team members to vote on issues.
Communications can be captured and saved for archival purposes.
- Facilities for sharing documents
Team members can place project documents and files of all types in
the virtual room for sharing. Tools allow team members to find, route,
share, modify and approve deliverables. Version control and change
notification maintain the integrity of the team’s assets.
- Facilities for project management
eRoom provides a dynamic environment that permits the project team
to define how it is going to work. The team can set up project rules
and workflows from basic templates or custom designs. Tools include
built-in databases for tracking and monitoring project objectives,
milestones and schedules, and a project calendar that can be
synchronized with each team member’s desktop version of Microsoft
Outlook.
These capabilities alleviate many of the technical challenges of
conducting and managing distributed projects. I highly recommend that
project managers take a few minutes to examine eRoom and/or its
competitors (such as Lotus Quickplace and OpenText Livelink) to see if a
collaborative work environment could solve some of their project
challenges. As these tools evolve, let’s see if entirely new project
management methods will appear to take advantage of these capabilities or
if we will simply cling to "web-ified" versions of existing
practices.
