Teamwork isn’t an easy sport: the bigger the team the harder it gets. If the goals/milestones are set clear, one person will probably complete the project just fine. If it’s a team of two they’ll probably split up the work, track each other progress and finish in time. If its one of three, four or five they’ll probably start calling meetings, send emails, update their progress. If it’s a team of over 20, there’ll probably be people working full time just managing the communication between teams.
As the team grows the overhead of coordinating work just increases. I’m sure everyone has realized at some point that emails and Excel sheets are quite limited at managing things as the project grows and sticky notes work good, but not with distributed teams.
Of course lots of others have realized this problem before and created software to aid this process: these tools are usually referred to as project management tools or (virtual) workspace solutions. The idea of these is to have users store and update documents in the workspace, be able to constantly track their and others’ progress and make collaboration easy in this space. There are lots of promising workspace solutions: when first searching I came across at least two dozen seemingly good products/services.
One of the most efficient and popular way to help manage comlpex projects is by providing workspaces to users – a common shared storage area related to a specific task. Users can upload and share documents related to the project to the workplace, collaborate with other users involved in the project and track what is going on in the workspace.
Back in September 2009 while I took up the task to test the major players in workspace management fields so that the company would have a picture of where their workspace module was on the market. This study never got published however while doing the research I didn’t find any useful comparisons that were not funded by some vendor. I’ve left Sense/Net in October 2009 and decided to publish my research as it might be a good guideline for someone looking for a short list of project management tools.
The products evaluated in this comparison are Central Desktop, Huddle, Office Live Workspaces, O3Spaces, ProjectPlace, ProjectSpaces, Sense/Net 6.0 and Sharepoint 2007. Evaluation criteria is detailed and is grouped into general overview, document management, collaboration and content publishing categories.
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