After spending time wandering around my BrightWork sandbox, I’m now going to take a step back and look at what the BrightWork tool has taught me about project management. As you recall, when I began this exercise, I knew very little of either SharePoint or project management, so my first step was to learn the basics. I read a project management guide to get my footing, and it seemed so easy I thought I’d have to test it out for myself. So now I’ve been spending more and more time poking around my sandbox, and I can see that the PM principles that I learned are actually baked right in to the SharePoint.

But what does it mean to be a team member? In a project management context, it really comes down to three things: understanding the work you have to do; doing your work; and updating the team so that the project manager knows the status of the project and can make the right decisions. To be a meaningful member of project team, you have a responsibility to do your assigned work, track it and communicate that with the team. But as we know, most team members will have lots of other work to do that falls outside the realm of the actual project. So, the key to being a successful and productive member of the team is to manage both effectively. A lot of this comes down to having the right amount of structure for the project and the tools to make this happen. Project management using SharePoint a great solution for that.

The BrightWork tool is set up to mimic the structure of project management and help each member of the team fulfill their role. It has, built in, the right amount of structure to formally track whatever it is that needs to be tracked, and provides one single line of communication for the team. The mere nature of SharePoint provides the collaboration needed to effectively communicate risks, issues, documents and other related materials to the team in one place, promoting guidance, collaboration and visibility, resulting in a successful project.