Page 349 - Global Project Management Handbook

17-6 MANAGEMENT OF GLOBAL PROGRAMS AND PROJECTS

PROJECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

After globalization, a project may involve many activities around several geographic
regions, across different time zones, and supported by global resources. The physical
separation of the project team, timing delay, and resource mismatch can easily trigger
the chain reactions of miscommunication. A global project team may lose its team con-
sensus and consistent views during execution of the project. Furthermore, during the
project life cycle, a project team needs to share, collaborate, and innovate to produce all
milestone deliverables effectively. To overcome distance separation and time delay and
facilitate information sharing and message processing, a project management system can
be used to provide a set of tools, techniques, methodologies, resources, and procedures
for a project manager to manage a project team in guiding a project to completion.

COLLABORATIVE KNOWLEDGE FRAMEWORK

The proposed project management system is based on a collaborative knowledge
3
framework that consists of following five modules. A framework is an extensible
structure for describing a set of methods, technologies, and processes to organize a
complex system logically. A project manger can base his or her project’s need to cus-
tomize the project management system based on the given framework.
Figure 17.1 describes the collaborative knowledge framework. It consists of five
modules: (1) collaboration platform module, (2) knowledge portal module, (3) project
center module, (4) project workplace module, and (5) connectivity map module. These
modules can be described as follows:
1. Collaboration platform module. This provides configurable methods for real-time
meetings, instant messaging, e-mail, online communities, and real-time data
interchange.
2. Knowledge portal module. This personalizes knowledge management functions
for news update, smart search, intellectual property sharing, online learning, and

FIGURE 17.1 Collaborative knowledge framework.