After spending the first 15 or so years of my career largely in
Project Management roles, I’m sort of a PM junkie when it comes to
books and tools and methodologies of how to move something from
ideation (PM wonk term for idea creation, or initiation phase) to
delivery and, ultimately, support. When Arpan Shah moved from the
SharePoint product team at Microsoft over to Project Server (he’s
now working on Office365), I shared some advice with him (which I’m
sure he doesn’t remember): don’t try to solve too many problems at
once, but simplify the tool. As I got to know Christophe Fiessinger
on Arpan’s team over the past couple years, I told him the same
thing. So when I met with members of the revamped Project team a
couple weeks back to talk about SharePoint 2013 and roadmap for
SharePoint Online and Office365, I expected to have much the same
conversation.

As they started to outline their strategy for SP2013, it quickly
became apparent that they understood the need for simplicity as a
way to improve participation in project management activities. For
example, they talked about how people’s eyes generally glazed over
when you refer to “projects” or “Gantt charts” or various project
analytics. However, ask some whether they have “deadlines” and
tasks, and they pay attention, they understand that language. As
information workers, we all drive projects, we all – to some degree
or another – keep task lists and try to juggle different deadlines.
That simple view of project management was a key requirement, or
theme, for the Project team going into SharePoint 2013. They wanted
to be able to “baby-step” people into project management, giving
formal Project Managers the tools they need, but also giving
non-PMs easy-to-use capability, as well.

Anyone can create a task. From your personal view in SharePoint
2013, you can open a task list ands build a simple collection of
activities and deadlines, viewing them by default as a list, or you
can also organize them and assign more granular attributes, such as
predecessors, percentage complete, assign additional owners, or
capture other critical project management data. You can also change
your view of these tasks to examine the work breakdown structure,
look at the critical path via the Gant chart, see how the project
flows across the calendar view, and create other customized views,
as needed. SP2013 also provides a simple timeline view that is much
easier to read than the Gantt, and can be configured to show only
those tasks which pertain to you.

SP2013 provides powerful new features to aggregate or roll-up
content from within a site, across a site collection, or across one
or more farms. As part of this, end users can see all tasks
assigned to them from across SharePoint – all from within their
personal view. Plus, they can aggregate tasks from Outlook (as well
as contacts and calendars), and link tasks to MS Project schedules,
further automating task management – and giving PMs more tools to
provide people with visibility (and accountability) into the
project.

Two more features I’d like to mention: for portfolio management,
you can also build into your view several project timelines,
allowing you to see upcoming tasks, at a high level, from within a
single view. This is a great utility for site collections or team
sites where PMs may want to provide an aggregated or portfolio view
to the team.

I’m just beginning to explore additional scenarios so that I can
understand the scale and limitations of what can be done with
minimal configuration or customization. But out-of-the-box,
SharePoint 2013 is proving to be a powerful project management
solution for teams that will help you to further improve SharePoint
adoption.

This article was first published on BuckleyPlanet. Check out our resource centre for more
SharePoint content from Christian and other SharePoint
specialists!