Page 356 - Global Project Management Handbook

MANAGING GLOBAL PROJECTS 17-13

FIGURE 17.4 Project workplace.

Owing to the separation of duties and checks and balances between project and
organizational functions, the information repositories and workbenches need to be laid
out as depicted in Fig. 17.4 to represent the three different types of activities from
project requirements or concept analysis, to project development, to solution deploy-
ment. For instance, the repositories for project analysis that support operations also
may include business process and business data that contain trade secrets in doing
business and specific requirements for the solution. The repositories and workbenches
for project development may contain project results such as design details, intellectual
property, and quality control records. The repositories for production deployment may
contain project information such as hosting setup information, customer data, and pro-
duction problems. If some project functions are sharing the same repository, proper
access control rights need to be assigned to protect privacy and confidentiality.

All the project team members and stakeholders should be able to access the reposi-
tories in the project workplace according to their roles and responsibilities. The proj-
ect manager needs to review and audit the access control lists and application system
logs routinely through the connectivity map. All the repositories in the project work-
place are vital organizational assets that should be hosted under a secure IT environ-
ment with online and offline information backup for disaster recovery.

Connectivity Map Module
The knowledge portal, project center, and project workplace modules are integrated
through the connectivity map module for easy access and navigation. In general, the
connectivity map provides mapping information to organizational directories and the
common profiles system. It also defines access security level. For all the access
requests to the project management system, the connectivity map will govern access
based on the requester’s role and responsibilities and his or her access permission
level to perform proper authentication and authorization.