Managing Project Documents in Sharepoint - Step 1 - Setting up a List of Projects

Courtesy of budgetcruncher.com
Last Updated 9-Jun-2014

It is desirable to be able to easily locate all the documents related to a project regardless of how important they are to execution of the project at any point in time.

For example, past status reports may not be very important to the Monitoring and Controlling process group but they are very important to the Closing process group for activities such as developing "Lessons Learned" and investigating when issues were first identified as part of an effort to implement continuous improvement.

There are general search capabilities built into Sharepoint but, like a Google or Bing search, these often bring up many documents that are not really part of the project - things like mentions of the project in department communications or activities or other projects that have a relationship or dependency upon the project of interest.

The more reliable approach is to use Sharepoint's ability to categorize documents so that they are explicitly associated with a particular project.  This in turn requires that a list of projects exists so that Sharepoint users can select from this list when uploading documents.

It is relatively easy to set up a new project list in Sharepoint. 

  • Cick on the "Lists" link that is normally visible in the left pane of the Sharepoint display. 
  • Click on the icon towards the upper left part of the screen.  In the next screen enter a name such as "My Project List" in the entry box on the right hand part of the screen and choose "Custom List"
  • You can have as many columns in the project list as you would like.  Project Name, Project Manager, and Status columns provide a good starting point.  In order to edit and add columns you have to choose the List Tab under List Tools and then click on List Settings as shown below.

  • Under the Columns section of this page click on the "Title" column and change the name to "Project Name", then click "OK"
  • On the same page click on "Create Column", enter the name "Project Manager" and click on the "Person or Group" radio button.  This will allow users to browse the list of staff members to assign a project manager.
  • Create another column, name it "Project Status", click on the "Choice" radio button and fill in the choices that you would like to have available for the status of a project - an example is shown below:

Add more information columns if desired.

Clicking on the list from the left side panel will now show the columns that you have defined.  You can now add projects to this list by clicking on the "Add New Item" icon.  

With the project list now in place the next step is to create a library of project documents.


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