Using PBwiki for Project Management

One of the most common uses for PBwiki is collaborative project management.  After all, project management is all about collaboration.  And unlike traditional project management software (such as Microsoft Project) which centralizes the work on a single project manager and forces you into a certain (largely inflexible) process, PBwiki lets you manage your projects collaboratively, in a way that fits your existing business processes.

Of course, while flexibility is great, you probably don't want to build your project management process from scratch.  This demo wiki shows how you can use PBwiki's built-in templates to construct a simple yet effective project management system that is easy for you to modify and customize to your own organization.

There are four elements of PBwiki that work well together for project management:

1. Project Tracker
2. Project Templates
3. Team Member Pages
4. Folders

Let's tackle each in turn, and see how they work together.

Project Tracker

The Project Tracker lets you view the status of several projects at a glance.  The goal is to allow you, as a manager, to see what your team is working on, and how the work is coming along.  Using PBwiki to maintain the Project Tracker lets all the members of your team participate in managing your group projects, rather than placing the onus on a single, increasingly overworked and out-of-touch project manager.

You can find the Project Tracker in the pre-installed Sidebar on your PBwiki.  It comes complete with instructions and a pre-built table for tracking your projects.

In this example, we've created a Project Tracker for our overall Webinars project.

Project Template

While the Project Tracker is great for a high level view of all your projects, the folks who are actually doing the work need to be able to drill down into the details of a project.  Project Templates provide a simple, easy-to-use structure for organizing these details.

While managers may only check on the Project pages from time to time, the active members of each project are likely to use them far more often, potentially even on a daily basis.

For example, here is the Project Page for the Business Webinar Series. You can also click through to the individual Project Pages from the Project Tracker.

To set up a Project page, use the “Project” template when you create a page.

You might want to set up a separate folder for each project.  You should also link to all of your active projects on the Project Tracker page, so there is a single place to get an overview of all the major projects.

Team Member Pages

While not specifically a "project management" template, the Team Member Pages are critical for closing the project management loop.  Team Member Pages provide an easy way for project managers and other team members to assign each other tasks, and keep track of what they need to do.

If you're the project manager, you can make sure that all project tasks are accounted for on the team members' pages.  Rather than forcing the team members remember what they need to do, you can make it easy for them.

Take a look at how Kristine's Team Member Page lets you assign her tasks, and track her progress.

As with the Project pages, you can create your Team Member pages using a PBwiki template.

The key is to make sure that you weave the use of these pages into your daily activities.  As a manager, you can also use PBwiki’s notifications to stay on top of your team member’s activities, just by reading the updates they make to their Team Member pages.

Folders and Tags

If your company or team is managing many different projects, one convenient way to organize your efforts is to store the relevant pages in a project folder, or tag them using tags.

Folders provide more functionality, because they automatically appear in the right-hand tools section, and because you can set up permissions on a per-folder basis (for example, you may want to restrict read/write access to the specific project team members).  Here, we've placed all the pages associated with the "Webinars" project into the Webinars folder.

Tags come in handy when a page belongs in several different categories (each page can be filed into, at most, one folder).  Here are all the pages that have been tagged with "webinar".

Both make it easier to organize your project efforts.

Conclusion

As you can see, PBwiki provides an easy and flexible way to manage your projects.  One final thing to remember is that once you've customized this project management system, you can simply tag the representative pages with the keyword "template" and add your customized templates to the wiki.  This makes it easy for your entire organization to adopt your customizations.