An Overview of a Collaborative Project Management Approach and Supporting Software

Project management (PM) is vital to the survival of many organizations. Traditional PM focuses on a single project at a single location (Evaristo and Fenema 1999) and is more concerned with project inputs and outputs than with project process (Turner 2000). The PM paradigm has begun to change due to the increasing number of distributed projects (Jonsson et al. 2001). Current and future PM will be more concerned with project process, explicit communication, and efficient and effective information sharing among contributors. Highlevels of collaboration will become essential for distributed project success. This article provides the rationale for a collaborative PM approach, explains major components of such an approach, identifies corresponding functions that PM tools should support, and presents an analysis of some collaborative PM supporting software. The objective is to present a collaborative PM framework and identify future trends in product development and implementation that can serve to guide further research.