Components of a PMO - Part 3 - Collaboration Platform

This is part 3 of a series of blog posts in which I look at the components of a PMO and give you a pragmatic way to increase your PMO success and improve your PM maturity.

It is quite important that your Project Management Office has a policy about how your project teams collaborate with each other and where project documents go.

Imagine a situation where you have no rules about document management and collaboration: Team A creates a public folder in Outlook and all documents go here. Team B creates a SharePoint team site for each of their projects. Team C stores all their documents in a folder on the network and Team D subscribes to an online service where all the information about the most confidential company projects are stored. There is no way that an interested executive will be able to access all of these project docs. While this situation sounds crazy it is really not uncommon to find a similar setup in companies starting out on the journey to improve their PM maturity.

So where should you store your finished project documents? Well... this depends on the available company infrastructure. All of the collaboration platforms that I have already mentioned have their merit:

• Public Outlook Folders: We all have our email client open most of the time anyway
• SharePoint: Easy navigation & management
• Network Folder: Everyone knows how to do this
• Online Services: Enables distributed teams to access the documents and removes the headache of having to build your own secure online site.

And yes, this is not a complete list of collaboration platforms - Lotus Notes and the Rational Tools can also be considered collaboration platforms. The important message is that you need to have clear governance about how documentation collaboration is managed in your PMO, this has to be defined in a policy and the policy has to be distributed and enforced.