Best Practices

Many organizations are interested in building project schedules in Project Server but fail to use all the benefits of what the WSS features provide. Use the project workspace as much as possible for important projects to draw team members and all stakeholders into the website for status and other project information. Learn how to use the WSS site permissions to allow others besides Project Server users to use the workspace.

One item to consider is that if you use the Public Documents library as the main area for your Project Management Office templates, you might want to remove the permission for project managers and team members to be able to delete documents. As a project manager, you might want to change the permissions for team members so that they can't delete a document.

Instead of using the default risk fields when you implement, you should analyze your own issues and risk management processes and customize the default issues and risks fields. At the very least, you should remove values from or add meaningful values to the Category field, which does not contain meaningful default values.

Also, you may want to consider changing the Issues and Risks templates to enhance the fields that show in the lists. This is because when you export to an Excel spreadsheet, you export only those fields that show on the list (refer to the example earlier in Figure 18.31 to understand the fields that would be exported).

Many organizations implement the Issues and Risk functions as an optional feature for project managers to use. Chances are it won't be used if it is optional. Yet all projects have issues and risks that should be managed. Consider implementing these features with processes and standards to start helping your project managers manage their issues.

Unless you have an existing documents management system, your organization should seriously consider setting standards for using the Documents function.