I am just finishing some training to upgrade my project management and business analyst skillsets. I am a Systems Engineer/Network Admin with very deep experience, especially in SharePoint.
Having now gone through my classes and training for project management and business analysis, I realize the plethora of documentation and daily todos that are being added to my normally heavy list of IT tasks.I am also training in a class on MS Project 2016 but that app is so focused on scheduling.
I'm have very deep SharePoint skills from my years running Microsoft SharePoint farms and seem to always fall back on SP for trying to get all of this PM stuff organized.
I use OneNote extensively for much of this but now that I will be doing more day-to-day collaboration with people while putting together project documents, meetings and so forth I just want to be sure I am using the best tools in the best ways that I can.
The more organized I am, the more organized my teams with be.
I would be very interested in hearing how others keep organized in their work as PMs.
It has always been one of my biggest areas of focus.
I have also used Jira a bit in my BA classes and it looks interesting for some of this.
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Drew Craig
Sr. Agile & Product Coach| Vanguard
Philadelphia, Pa, United States
Kudos to you, Keith, for having this frame of mind. Believe me, not all PM's, or BA's, think like this You are already one step ahead of many.
To start, you are limited to what the organization has available to use. That said, the next step is to leverage as best you can what is available. Seems as though you have SharePoint and JIRA available - Great.
SharePoint is a great platform for exposing, sharing, and collaborating around a project. Additionally, there are add-ons like BrightWork to implement a more portfolio management system.
This is what I do - For each project I create a Project Site in SharePoint. I saved off a template for myself to allow for simpler implementation of new sites. You can have a document library for all project artifacts, discussion board, risk and issue list, stakeholder register, OneNote. Additionally, you can sync you MS Project schedule with the task list, having a displayed timeline. From there you, or a team member, can update the tasks as needed right from within SP, or can open with MS Project to update.
Permission wise, you can add all project team members as needed, then provide 'visitor' access to 'everyone' in case status needs to be shared across the organization.
If you use Outlook, look up harmon.ie. It has an add-on for Outlook to link a SP site collection to easily share documents as a link, or saving emails to the site. I highly recommend this.
I could go on. The point is, that a project with no visibility, disparate documents, no central 'source of truth', either creates difficulties now, or later. Also, project information should not be stored on an individuals local machine for obvious reasons.
We also use JIRA, but not as extensively. Mainly for agile boards, shared issue tracking with offshore resources, but we may move entirely to TFS.
Good Luck! Hope this was helpful.
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