Use Wiki with MS Project

If you’ve done project management work for any length of time, you are familiar with MS Project, that Microsoft project planning tool for setting up Gantt charts and load balancing your staff, dependencies and deliverables. You are also familiar with the tendency to over-design the project on MS Project and either watch it fall into disuse 1/3 of the way into the project (and replaced by a spreadsheet) OR the tendency of many Project Managers to devote more and more of their time to managing the MS Project graphs than they do managing the actual project.

Here’s a little trick I discovered that links the reality of what is happening on a project with the information maintained on MS Project. Essentially what this does is link a wiki page for each bar on the MS Project graph.

1. First, set up MS Project as you would for any project. I won’t get into ‘Best Practices’ here for MS Project other than to say “K.I.S.S”.

2. Then set up a wiki project space for the project. The Front Page (or home page) of the wiki workspace is an index of all the Pages you will create. These pages should correspond (1 for 1) with each of the bars on your Gantt Chart. You can also set up pages for each of the team members. The format and content of the pages is up to you. I’d suggest though that you adopt a uniform template for all the project phases and steps. Otherwise it gets confusing for the audience.

3. Finally, add a ‘Text’ column to your MS Project chart. For each bar on the Gantt chart, paste the link to the corresponding wiki page into the text column 'cell' for that project phase/step line item.

You’ve now set up a project communications scenario where anyone with a vested interest in the project can collaborate, communicate, and stay connected. Anyone involved with a particular phase of the project has the wiki page to update and communicate with other members of the team. The larger audience of management and 3^rd parties can also have access depending on the individual project. If you have access to the MS Project document, you can easily link to the relevant wiki page and immediately see what is going on.

Set up the wiki pages in any manner that makes sense for the project, the team, and the end product.

• You can attach the MS Project document to the wiki Front Page.

• Participants can toggle back and forth between Gantt chart and wiki pages to get the most current status, issues, suggestions, and tasks.

• Deliverables can be attached to relevant wiki pages instead of ‘losing’ them (and their multiple versions) in yet another piece of technology (email, desktops, share drives, CMS, etc)

• You can reduce the dependency on email; and

• Eliminate the need for status reports.

I could go on and on here about the benefits and improvements to managing projects this way, but hopefully this is enough to motivate some of you to give it a try. I’d like to hear back from you on this one – anyone tried this already?

Comments

[Peter]

Hi! So this solution does not require Microsoft Project Server at all? Could you please show me and example? Thank you very much,

Peter