When we think of ‘Project Management’ we tend to picture a complex, industry-specific practice, such as for large construction projects.
However Project Management is actually a universal building block of all organizational work.
Whether it’s planning and delivering a marketing event or producing a client proposal, there is a common pattern of team collaboration, task dependencies, risk management and stakeholder engagement, which when managed well produces successful results, and when not, delayed and poor quality deliverables.
So a Project Management capability is critical to the success of any organization. In the case of the sales proposal the speed and quality of the output can be the determining factor in whether that deal is won, or not.
Agile Enterprise 365
Similarly Agile practices are mostly associated with software development, however again they can be generalized and applied to any type of work.
The Project Management Institute explores this here, describing how any type of team can use principles like Backlogs, Scrums, Sprints, User Stories and Continuous Integration to better manage their work. Microsoft defines their Agile Methodology for Projects here.
Thus we can define a high level goal of synthesizing Project Management and Agile practices and applying them wholesale across the entire enterprise, as a formula for enabling high performance teams.
Furthermore a common building block for Project Management is simply the effective office communications and collaboration that is universal to all work, such as notifications about the progress and status of project tasks.
Hence why Microsoft 365 is ideal for this whole paradigm, and what we’ll be exploring in this guide. 365 offers the mix of both general collaboration tools, like Teams and Sharepoint, as well as specific apps like Project and Planner.
How they all integrate together and enable work techniques like Agile is what defines Project Management 365.
