Collaborative Project Management Software

Abstract

Project management (PM) principles are rapidly changing due to business globalization and information technology (IT) advances which support distributed and virtual project teams. Traditional PM focuses on a single project at a single location and is more concerned with project inputs and outputs than with the project work itself. Traditional PM emphasizes scheduling, planning and tracking. The PM paradigm has begun to shift due to the increasing number of distributed projects involving team members from different sites, organizations and cultures. Current and future PM will be more concerned with project work and processes, and collaboration will become essential for success. Academics and practitioners have begun to discuss PM in terms of collaboration; however, there is little agreement as to a definition or interpretation of collaboration. One of the major changes in PM, over the last 25 years, has been the use of computerized tools and methods. In the future, the most significant change in PM may be the use of collaboration. In this article, we provide an explanation of different levels of collaboration, namely the communicative, collective, coordinated and concerted levels. Then we describe a prototype software package called C-PMS (Collaborative Project Management Software) to support 'concerted-level' collaboration among project team members. We believe that C-PMS, which supports all levels of collaboration, especially the concerted level, can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of project managers and team members.