How SharePoint Can Deliver Project Transparency

By Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux) Jan 14, 2010

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Transparency in projects is becoming a requirement for many organizations today. SharePoint provides a number of out of the box features and integrations with third party tools to support the transparency required. But even before you go about designing the solution, make sure you have your transparency objectives and processes in place.

Editor's Note: Read more about the importance of SharePoint in the organization in Dux's two-part series "5 Reasons Why Executive SharePoint Ignorance is Not Bliss".

Back in my early days of being a project manager, my biggest frustration was not being able to get timely project status information whenever I needed it. I had to track down key resources and extract relevant project information (I sound like Jack Bauer interrogating people). Often times, it was too late when I found out that the project was drastically behind schedule, over budget or multiple issues had come up.

Even worse, on a weekly basis, I would manually create visual reports showing the high-level status of the project schedule and budget to keep the customer in the loop as to what’s going on. Certainly this is not a wise use of my time as a project manager. I’m quite confident that other project managers never had to suffer the same fate as I did (at this point you realize that I’m being sarcastic), right?

The Need for Project Transparency

In today’s economic climate, organizations and their leaders are put under a microscope and are being scrutinized further. Since a large part of organizational activities involve project related initiatives, they are held under higher standards of accountability, responsibility and transparency.

Take for example projects that are being funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 (aka US Federal Stimulus Package), the general public has visibility on the status of these projects through Recovery.gov. (Click here to learn more about ARRA)

Not only this is true for the government, but being able to “provide relevant and timely information to key decision makers and stakeholders so the decision makers have the opportunity to take corrective action and the stakeholders have the information necessary to hold them accountable if they do not” is critical for private enterprises too as pointed out by my colleague Mike Taylor. Read his informative blog series about Project Transparency.

With this pressing need, how can organizations today carry on with their unstructured and inconsistent ways of delivering relevant project information?

People then Process then Tools

From the outset, providing project transparency sounds simple enough. All you need to do is put together a website with colorful charts and everybody will live happily ever after. NOT! That’s the biggest mistake an organization can make — trying to throw tools at it right away thinking that it will solve the problem of delivering project transparency.

The first step is to make sure that you have a clear understanding of the project transparency objectives and the right people who have the authority to set standards and identify key project metrics that need to be measured. For example, what constitutes late in a project? 5 weeks behind? 10% behind baseline schedule?

Second, the process of providing timely project status has to be defined and enforced. Would project status be updated daily? Bi-weekly? At the end of the day, no matter how much automation we enable, someone would still need to provide the information about project status like schedule and budget which means that a process has to be in place.

Lastly, once you have well defined key performance indicators (KPI) AND related project processes in place, identify the tool or set of tools that can support your project transparency needs.