Top tips drawn from experience

To create an project or programme information hub, you could do a lot worse than setting up a SharePoint team site as suggested by Dux Raymond Sy‘s definitive book on the subject. If SharePoint is already used in your organisation, it’s virtually a no-brainer. Project management “RAID” registers are prioritised lists of things like Risks, Issues, Actions, Decisions and so on. Keeping registers helps you to keep track of the factors affecting your project, and the things going on within it, so that the whole thing ticks along more smoothly. Microsoft SharePoint offers some facilities that can be used for this quite effectively, However, there are some things that I have discovered for myself in several years of creating and using project management registers on SharePoint team, sites that I would like to share with you.

1. Plan reference data

• Decide what data you want to be available throughout your site – the sort of thing you might set up in Excel using data validation to populate drop-down menus from lists.
• These lists could contain information such as the programme’s projects, locations, project stages, governance bodies, etc.
• It may sound odd to consider this at the outset, but you need it in place before you set up the RAID registers. It is far quicker and easier to create registers from a template that refers to pre-existing data lists than to reconfigure registers once you have realised it would be neater for them to use reference data.
• Set up any governance bodies (such as SteerCos) as SharePoint groups. You can use these anywhere you might use a person, e.g. for things like “assigned to”, “raised by”, and “escalated to”
• Set up your other reference data as SharePoint lists. This means:
  • Changes in the source list automatically become available for use across the site, including in registers.
  • You can “hide” reference data lists by preventing them from displaying on the main site navigation bar. You will know where to find them for editing (in “site contents”) but most users won’t.

2. Create a custom RAID register template

•  You will probably want to create a “family” of registers (for Risks, Actions, Issues, Decisions, etc.), that share many fields (Date raised, assigned to, Title, Description, Score, Progress, etc.)
• I recommend that you first create a risk register (by augmenting SharePoint’s built-in “Issue Tracker” template)
• Set up relevant fields to “look up” reference data from the lists you created earlier, (e.g. project name, project stage, document status, etc.)
• Save the risk register as a list template, to use when creating other registers. Of all the registers, the risk register has the most fields, so in order to create other registers you will either be removing unwanted fields from the template or repurposing them slightly. This is quicker and easier than creating registers from scratch, and ensures that reused fields are set up consistently across registers.

3. Create a consistent “family” of RAID register views

• Most people don’t want to view all the items in a RAID register; they are mostly interested in their items, or open items, or their open items.
• So, create a core “family” of consistent register views (All items, Open items, My items, My open items), all sorted by due / review date and priority.
• These can be outline views (containing only a few columns) as their main purpose is to enable quick review and finding of RAID items for updating.
• Create an “Open and recently closed” items view, which is good for reporting to governance bodies as it shows live items and those that have been closed since the last report / meeting (Date closed >= [Today] -28)
• If you create these views before saving the risk register as a template, then they will appear in any register you create from it.
• This means that users see the same logical “family” of views whichever register they are in, so they can find information faster and more easily.

4. Use Excel® for reporting on RAID registers

• For easy and attractive presentation of RAID data (e.g. top 10 risks, issues, etc.), export the register of interest to Excel (SharePoint Classic view –> Lists –> Export to Excel).
• Do this from a view that shows all the fields. In Excel, hide the ones you don’t want (for now) using data grouping or by hiding columns, then apply any formatting, filters, and summarisation formulae you need.
• You can create a workbook containing one worksheet like this for each RAID register.
• This approach gives you data tables (with detail that you can easily unhide) that can be refreshed with live SharePoint data at the click of a button (“Refresh all” in Excel).

5. How to tell which list item number you’re editing

• If you’re reviewing a list of items in a filtered view of a RAID register, it’s useful to know the number of the item you’re working on (e.g. “Risk 45” or “Action 199”) so that when you go back to the list you know which ones you’ve updated, and which still need updating. But nothing on the SharePoint editing page gives you the number of the item (maybe because this is not an editable field?)
• However, the number is there if you know where to look; up in the browser address bar, the item reference number is embedded in the URL, e.g. https://[SharePointServerName]/sites/[SiteName]/Lists/[RegisterName]/EditForm.aspx?ID=##&Source=VeryLongTextString
• Incidentally, you can resolve this problem by creating a view that shows items that are assigned to [Me], AND of which the Status = Open, AND for which the Modified date is not equal to [Today]; this will only show your open items that you haven’t just updated. But the tip is still true 🙂

6. Link items across registers

• It can be useful to understand where register items came from, e.g. that the action “Recruit developers” came from the issue “Development behind schedule”
• For this reason it can be useful to add lookup columns to each register enabling users to link to items in other registers (most helpfully via the item title); this cannot be done in a list template as the other registers need to exist first.

So that’s my list of productivity top tips for SharePoint RAID registers, learned through the experience of getting it wrong and coming up with a better way.

This article covers only the RAID register tips that I could explain in a compact form without the need for diagrams or examples. It doesn’t include many other conventions that I use when creating and managing SharePoint team sites to improve efficiency or usability, otherwise this article would have been more like a book (it’s already pretty long)!

If you would like to have the benefits of an approach like this but prefer not to have to worry about this sort of techy stuff, The PMO Professionals can help. Why not take a look at our “Tools for Teamwork” service, and if that looks interesting, get in touch to discuss how we can help you?

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Image “Sub Cash Register” by Franck BLAIS, https://www.flickr.com/photos/66971402@N04/7569786950/ Licence at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/