Issue Management is an important process in project management and many project managers use issue logs, also known as issue registers, to manage problems that arise throughout the lifecycle of a project.
It’s a fact of life in project management that problems will arise that will block the progression of a project and they therefore need to be actioned and resolved quickly. I have even come across some project managers who have successfully delivered projects on-time, on-budget and on-schedule but focusing on issue management alone! SharePoint’s inherent collaboration capabilities make it an ideal platform for project issue management and this article describes the steps required to achieve successful issue management on SharePoint.
Issue Management Process:
Any stakeholder in a project can identity issues as they arise in a project. Consider a team member who is charged with completing a task by a certain deadline. In the middle of working the task, they find that they cannot complete it due to an unforeseen problem with a contractor. In order to continue with their task, they need to get this issue resolved. If the project team are using SharePoint to manage their projects, the team member would use a SharePoint App to log the issue and it would then get processed by the project team.
SharePoint Form:
The SharePoint form designed to track project issues would be modelled around a typical work item and contain may the following columns:
- Issue #
- Issue Title
- Date Added
- Raised By
- Assigned To
- Resolution Due Date
- Status
- Date Resolved
- Resolution
The layout of the form would be designed as follows:
Calculations & Reporting:
As issues are logged and processed by the project team, certain calculations and reports could be built to assist the team to identify the critical issues that are hampering the project or overdue issues. Using SharePoint views and web parts, these reports could easily be modelled into dashboards and here are just some examples of reports that can be built using SharePoint web parts and the calculations behind them:
- Top Open Issues
As issues are logged, you can also capture a Priority or Rank for the relevant issue. This metadata could then be use to filter on the issues list and only return issues where is Priority = High.
- My Open Issues
As open issues are assigned to team members to be worked upon, it is useful if all team members can get a summary of their open issues and deadlines. Filtering on the Assigned To column would achieve this, e.g. Assigned To = [Me].
- Overdue Issues
Every issue needs a deadline so filtering on Open Issues where the Date Due has passed would give both the visibility and urgency to ensure all Issues are resolved on time and therefore lower the risk of the project’s schedule itself slipping, Due Date <= [Today].
Want to see a live demo of all of this and more? Here is a webinar recording of “Using SharePoint for Project Issue Management!”