Microsoft Project Version 2002 Inside Out (Inside Out (Microsoft))

Chapter 20

Suppose you've been chosen to manage a new product launch, from concept to market. You know from experience that new product projects require especially close collaboration and input from everybody on the team. You've selected the best resources to be your team for this project but some of them can't use Microsoft Project Server and Web Access to colla-borate. With Microsoft Project, you can collaborate and keep project communication flowing freely by using e-mail.

E-mail can be a very effective communication medium; it is often the best collaboration solution for a project team. The benefits of using e-mail include:

Universality. It's almost always installed and available. Your team members might use vastly differing software applications, but they all will usually be connected to an e-mail system.

Familiarity. Team members already use and understand e-mail. All the team members will be comfortable using e-mail and they will require no training time.

Speed. A message will be delivered moments after it is sent. The limitation is that e-mail isn't always read right away. As part of the planning process, you can set some expectations for e-mail use; opening and reading all project messages twice daily might be a reasonable requirement. You can make decisions and take action based on that expectation. For example, if you've sent a new assignment through e-mail and haven't received a rejection of it after a full business day, you can proceed on the understanding that it was accepted by the resource.

Flexibility. Distribution lists and attachments add to the range of capabilities. E-mail can transfer many types of information including text, attached documents, and dynamic HTML pages. Microsoft Project takes advantage of this flexibility through the predefined collaboration functions.

Accessibility. Team members can often send and receive e-mail from many locations.

Traceability. A written record will exist of project communications.

Integration with the Communications Plan. Organizations often use e-mail as an official means of communicating many types of information, so it's already integrated with team members' work habits.

Integration with Microsoft Project. Many features are built into Microsoft Project that enable fast, accurate two-way collaboration using e-mail.

Whether your e-mail system is set up through your organization's intranet or the Internet, you can use Microsoft Project to communicate project information with all team members through e-mail. Either way, you need to know how your e-mail setup might affect "outside" team members, such as vendors or contractors.

One often-overlooked benefit of using e-mail as your collaboration method is that it creates a written record of your project communications. This is very helpful when you need to trace the origins of ideas, tasks, and assignments. For example, you can trace the date that you made a new task assignment, and demonstrate that it was timely and avoided work delays. This written record can also contribute to establishing your "lessons learned" file after project completion.

You might have already alluded to using e-mail in your project's communication plan or even in the project scope document. Collaborating using Microsoft Project's unique e-mail capabilities is an excellent way to implement your plan.

The ability to collaborate using e-mail is designed into Microsoft Project. You don't need to leave your project file to use the e-mail collaboration features. This chapter details the e-mail collaboration features you can use to assign tasks, update projects, transmit documents, and send notifications.

The following are a few examples of e-mail collaboration:

• You are the project manager, and you've had to re-plan a portion of the project plan due to the loss of a piece of needed equipment. After the changes are made, you use the project e-mail collaboration solution to send new assignments to the resources who will be doing the work.
• You are a project team member, and you've just completed an important assignment ahead of schedule. You know this should allow other tasks to have an earlier start, though you might not know every other task affected. Using the project e-mail collaboration solution, you send your update to the project manager and it's reflected in the project plan immediately.
• You're a project team member, and you've just found out that you can use a slightly different method for one of your future tasks and thereby achieve cost and schedule savings. You use the e-mail collaboration solution to propose a task change for the project plan. Your message gets to the project manager and the change is implemented directly in the project plan as soon as the project manager accepts your message.