Collaborative Project Management Services

Project Management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while adhering to classic project constraints—usually scope, quality, time and budget. The secondary—and more ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives.

Project management is inevitably a social effort involving not only the project manager, but all the actors involved. This social aspect will only be emphasized when considering Collaborative Project Management (c-PM), where already the management itself is a social effort. Collaborative Project Management can be interpreted in two ways: Management of Collaborative Projects, or Collaborative Management of Projects.

In COIN c-PM services apply:

• Project Alignment Booster: Project alignment is the process of ensuring that key stakeholders share a common understanding of the work processes, project mission, goals, objectives and plans. Alignment is not just a matter of agreement of certain project working habits, norms and styles. Often achieving a good level of alignments requires participation in learning processes. To build and increase the project alignment level there is a need to analyse and measure the working experience and status at project partners. Based on the alignment capabilities a suitable learning environment can be established. Consequently the measurement of partner’s alignment status and an iterative learning environment are the two building blocks in boosting project alignment. The aim is to provide a service that in the first iteration provides a structure for and measures the alignment status (human competencies and project work practices) and in later state also provides a learning environment for boosting alignment.

• Project Collaboration and Communication (also presented as On-line presence): In a distributed engineering project it is not always possible to ask for information or help from the “next” door or cubicle, the resources have been distributed across the globe on different locations and time zones. There is a need for a facility that allows a actor in a project to see who is online, on what he/she is working on an with which tool, how long he has been “logged in”, and to initiate e.g. instant messaging, chat, or video/voice-call with that person. The tool should be openly constructed in a way that adding software to be traced is possible.