Managing Projects - Teams or SharePoint Team Sites Dilemma

Iron Contributor

 

All,

 

Our PMO function is looking to make use of Office 365 to manage projects.  We are currently using SharePoint document libraries and (ahem) sub-sites to do this in essentially file share manner.

 

We are currently rolling out Teams and there is a good response to the collaborative activity this promotes within the self-contained groups that are using it.  Our PMO function has three key needs:

 

1) Manage the documents generated throughout the life-cycle of a project and align to our delivery methodology

 

2) Support collaborative working - audio/video calls, conversations, task assignment, light workflow for  internal project employees as well as external suppliers/consultants

3) Surface best practice documents, final outputs and any other project learnings so that we don't re-invent the wheel.

So our thinking is split - 

(i) We love the combination of collaboration features offered by Teams - but what about managed meta data and information architecture. 
(ii) We like the ability to create a custom site template for a SharePoint Teamsite that would help adoption and governance but the collaboration experience is  not quite Teams. 
(iii) We wanted to use Skype for Business with our external consultants working on a project -  but this is being subsumed into Teams so where does that leave a SharePoint Team Site with say a Yammer feed.
(iv) We want the abililty to do simple roll up or aggregation of project artefacts (risks, issues, status) etc at a programme or portfolio level plus other typical reporting.
(v) We want all our project delivery teams to be able to have read access to all projects (although we may need to lock down certain types of financial information for our external consultants) even if they are not members of those projects.
(vi) We want to be able to easily search across all projects - we like how Enterprise Search presents results.
(vii) An added complication is we want some of the reporting capability available in the Project online and the PPM tools in the future but feel that those products might be overkill.
(viii) Our I.S. function prefers buy before build - particularly around ongoing support. 

So we have short/medium term needs which need to grow as we mature our thinking.  We feel we are in a dilemma as the various products in the Office 365 suite have overalapping features as well as pros and cons.  The Office 365 roadmap also offers challenges to which combination we chose and the ease of extensibility once our needs mature.

Are we the only ones facing these questions?  Can anyone offer some real-world advice?

Thx.

Garry
@Selfridges

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