Project Management is easier for some folks than for others.  The discipline has been around long enough that you'd think it would be more common place by now.  As a related aside I recently saw a nice simple article on the history of project management.  Of course the issue or the difficult aspect of project management lies in the fact that project management is a discipline and discipline is way tougher for some folks than others.  So how then do you make a discipline like project management easier for the non-followers!!?  Like all tough disciplines one way is to break it into very small digestible pieces.    

Most folks who manage projects have some sort of a process whether they know it or not.  And in many cases you can liken this process to a bunch of lists.  For example they might have:

• a task list in Microsoft Project or perhaps Microsoft Excel
• a list of risks on the white board in their office
• a list off issues in an email
• a list of project documents on a shared network drive
• a list of emails that are relevant to the project in question

So folks do manage to some sort of a process or the project would never be delivered!  And you can usually decipher the process once you talk to them.  In most cases you can agree that the process is broken into sub-processes that are contained in a list or a list equivalent.

So what is so interesting about project management being a bunch of lists?  Well for one it is easy to work with non-project-management trained people if you can speak in this very simple language and break the problem of project management into the challenge of managing work in different related lists.  They find it easier to see how their project management approach might not be so unique.  It also has another advantage from a collaboration point of view. 

SharePoint (Microsoft's collaborative platform) is as common as dirt these days!  It is everywhere (thankfully).  And at one level SharePoint is architected very simply as a bunch of lists that are accessible from a browser.  So each piece of the project management process mentioned above naturally fits into a SharePoint list or an enhanced SharePoint list.  Ian Morrish in New Zealand has a nice site where he has each of the elements of SharePoint on public demo if you'd like to see SharePoint in action.  Furthermore the various lists (or project management sub-process to give them a fancy name!) can be grouped into list groups (e.g. Plan Project, Control Project, etc.) and these groupings can be implemented on the QuickLaunch (or menu) feature in SharePoint.  See sample below in the screen-shot.

So if you face the challenge of getting folks on the same project management page then ask them to (i) identify the lists they use to manage their projects and (ii) to consider centralizing the lists into one place - a SharePoint site.  Before long you will have a bunch of sites - each with a project.  So what if they all look different to begin with - you are half way there for now!

It is a simple enough approach - but simple works!