Chapter 20: Understanding the Project Workgroup and Enterprise Model

Overview

Through the use of Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003, Microsoft Office Project Server 2003, and Microsoft Office Project Web Access 2003, your organization has the capacity to set up dynamic project workgroup collaboration and refined enterprise project management functionality.

Microsoft Office Project 2003 workgroup collaboration is designed to facilitate communication of task assignments and actual progress among members of a project team, using Project Web Access 2003 as the Web-based interface. In addition, team leads and resource managers can delegate tasks and manage resources as needed to accomplish the goals of the project and keep the project manager well-informed. Other stakeholders can also use Project Web Access to view various aspects of the project.

If your organization is set up with Windows SharePoint Services, you can integrate it with Project Web Access to add document check-in and checkout, issues tracking, and risk management to the workgroup collaboration features.

With enterprise project management, hundreds of projects and thousands of resources can be managed in a consistent manner throughout an organization. Project elements such as views, toolbars , fields, and macros can be customized for the organization and standardized across all projects. Resources and their associated skill, cost, and availability information can be built into a common and interactive enterprise resource pool from which all project managers can build their project teams . Executives and other managing stakeholders can do high-level modeling and analyses of tasks, resources, and costs across multiple projects.