Primavera Facilitates Collaboration of Team Members
By Jason R. Ames, PMP
Improving the collaboration on a project can significantly raise the probability of project success. The question is how can you improve team collaboration and ensure every team member is on the proverbial same page. Primavera features a number of tools to aid the collaboration process. This article includes screenshots to facilitate your understanding of these tools.
The first step in collaboration is ensuring all team members are on the same page of the playbook. Imagine an (American style) football team where half the offense thinks they are going to pass and the other half thinks they are going to run (for non-football fans, take our word on this, it is bad). The same holds true with your projects. When team members don’t know what they should be working on, the only likely outcome is someone getting sacked. With Primavera’s P6 v7 Web Project, team members can easily see what tasks they are assigned per project and when those tasks are scheduled to be completed.
Primavera P6 Team Member Screenshot
Once team members know what they are supposed to be working on, understanding exactly what is expected becomes critical. Just like in football, knowing that the play is a pass is one thing, knowing what route to run is even more important. Of key importance is that Primavera not only offers its own collaboration strengths, it also enables integration with Microsoft Sharepoint or Oracle’s UCM. You also have the ability to save document templates as well as route documents for review through Primavera’s workflow engine.
Document Review Screenshot
It’s not enough that everyone starts out on the same page. It is important for project team members to continue communicating throughout the project, and Primavera makes that easy. Primavera provides project workspaces to allow project teams to communicate as well as identify issues and risks as they arise.
Screenshot of Primavera Workspace
Lastly, project teams must regularly update their activity status to ensure progress towards project completion. Primavera provides an easy to use application called Progress Reporter that allows team members to update the activities that they are assigned to as a resource. Once progress has been submitted the hours can still be approved by the project manager or functional manager.
Primavera P6 Progress Reporter
Good team collaboration takes time but with some practice and a few tools from Primavera your team can be winning Super Bowls or completing projects on time and on schedule. If you would like to know more about Primavera tools contact Project Partners at sales@projectp.com.
This is a great post – thank you for highlighting a very useful aspect of the new primavera software. It looks very user friendly. My current company has invested too much in enterprise advantage and JD Edwards to make any change to this system, but if I were to work for an organization that was looking at setting up systems from scratch I would be the first to recommend p6. To keep everything within one system just makes sense.