Virtual Project Rooms Streamline Project Management
In today's business environment, project teams are made up of the best people available, regardless of location. These teams may be made up of employees, outside vendors and consultants, who may be working together for days, weeks or even years. In this setting, project-related content is typically stored in the location in which it is created, and is then sent to the other team members via e-mail, overnight mail or by fax. The result is that multiple copies of a given document are floating around, and no one knows which version is the most up-to-date. In addition, geographically distributed teams have to deal with time zone issues that can delay a response, and often must search multiple repositories and shared folders to locate information.
Project Management
Although multi-geographic practice groups are nothing new, the lack of effective collaborative technology has prevented them from functioning as unified organizations. Organizations need a project management solution that enables them to collaborate, streamline processes, control document versions and easily store, locate and reuse information. The system should be capable of storing all project related information, whether electronic files, scanned documents, e-mail or rich media.
However, the key to the success of any system is user adoption. As a result, the project management solution must enable users to access the repository from within the productivity tools they already use, such as e-mail clients, word processing programs, spreadsheet applications or a Web browser. In addition, the solution should provide a portal view that enables users to view the status of the entire project at-a-glance. To further streamline processes, look for a solution that has integrated workflow for document routing and approval.
Virtual Project Rooms
A good project management solution will provide "virtual project rooms" that retain the intuitive aspects of the traditional paper filing system to ensure ease of adoption and use, providing a repository that makes all the content pertaining to a project available to authorized users at any time, from anywhere. All project-related files, including scanned documents, faxes and e-mail, are made available alongside other project-related content and protected against loss—even if individual team members leave the project.
More than simply organizing information, a virtual project room presents content in context and enables teams to create collaborative objects such as tasks, calendar items, discussion threads, notes and links. In addition, by retaining complete, organized content after a project has been concluded, the project management system lays the foundation for electronic records management.
E-mail Management
E-mail has evolved into the de facto standard for business communication, and it is through this medium that many substantial business discussions are held and decisions are made. Ironically, although e-mail serves as the default collaborative platform for many companies, it can actually inhibit collaboration. Designed for one-to-one communication, use of e-mail for many-to-many discussions quickly splinters into overlapping threads, round-robin decision-making and other inefficiencies.
Loss of productivity is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface, countless hours of lost employee productivity are accompanied by loss of business data. If the Outlook Personal folder stored on an individuals' computer is lost, whether due to hard drive failure or employee turnover, many valuable messages and attachments may be lost forever. Most e-mail management solutions today focus largely on logging e-mails and archiving them in a dedicated repository that is separate from the e-mail server. Although effective in terms of reducing the load on e-mail servers, this partial solution does nothing to improve worker productivity, by far the largest cost element. The logging and storage solutions may address some problems, but they undermine much of the value of these messages by maintaining e-mail separate from other project-related content.
A good project management solution should include the ability to manage e-mail as part of the project file. The solution should enable a user to move (via drag-and-drop) personal folder structures from the Outlook inbox or PST files into the document management repository, and should provide smart prompting that can remind the user when they forget to file an e-mail. Look for a solution that provides automatic indexing of both the messages and embedded attachments, allowing users to full-text search documents, e-mails and attachments simultaneously.
Summary
A project management and collaboration solution gives firms an important competitive edge by enabling them to do more work in less time, protect intellectual capital and deliver a higher level of service at a lower cost. Similarly, the transition to a centralized online repository reduces overhead by eliminating the costs and liabilities associated with paper files. Team members can easily access all of the information about a project from any location, so that mail, messenger and other costs associated with shipping physical files are eliminated. In addition, keeping e-mail in the same repository with other project-related files will preserve the original context that helps users understand and make full use of the information contained in the messages and attachments.
For additional information, or to obtain a free IDC White Paper: The Hidden Cost of Information Work, follow this link.
Shannon McMahon is the product marketing manager for collaborative document management solutions at Interwoven. She has over 17 years experience in product and solution marketing. She can be reached at smcmahon@interwoven.com.
Interwoven, Inc., provider of enterprise content management solutions for business, enables organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total cost of ownership. Interwoven delivers deep industry-specific solutions which reduce business process cycle time from initial collaboration through design, production, sales, marketing, legal review, IT and service. Today, more than 3,300 enterprises, law firms and professional services organizations worldwide are Interwoven customers, including British Telecom, Ford, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, General Motors, Jones Day, Motorola and Yamaha. Interwoven is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., with offices around the world. For more information visit Interwoven.