Transparency in projects is becoming a requirement for many organizations today. SharePoint provides a number of out of the box features and integrations with third party tools to support the transparency required. But even before you go about designing the solution, make sure you have your transparency objectives and processes in place.
Back in my early days of being a project manager, my biggest frustration was not being able to get timely project status information whenever I needed it. I had to track down key resources and extract relevant project information (I sound like
Jack Bauer interrogating people). Often times, it was too late when I found out that the project was drastically behind schedule, over budget or multiple issues had come up.
Even worse, on a weekly basis, I would manually create visual reports showing the high-level status of the project schedule and budget to keep the customer in the loop as to what’s going on. Certainly this is not a wise use of my time as a project manager. I’m quite confident that other project managers never had to suffer the same fate as I did (at this point you realize that I’m being sarcastic), right?