Documentation of status of technical projects in SharePoint 2013?

Question

A company has a lot of projects (partly product development projects, partly infrastructure projects and "miscellaneous" other projects), where very often different departments are involved.

How can SharePoint (2013) be used to document and show the current status and last actions of each project and to collect information about those projects?

For example:

• list of all projects
• show responsible persons in the different departments
• show project status (phase and % of completion)
• link to important documents
• place for notes (maybe like a "blog" with "atomic" entries) about the project progress and decisions
• project calendar with important milesones, dates, etc.

I assume there are plugins, but maybe you can also recommend some "best practice" descriptions for such solutions?

Note: The company does currently NOT use Microsoft Project for project management.

Answer 1

This sounds like a SharePoint web site per project. Team site template should be pretty much sufficient.

list of all projects

• list of all web sites (subsites) on some higher level Projects site

show responsible persons in the different departments

• Person/Contact Web Part on the project front page

show project status (phase and % of completion)

• simple HTML content on the front page

link to important documents

• either have all documents in document libraries of the project web site, and/or include Link content type in the document library to also include links inside that document library. Or have Links list and add web part to front page showing the links to individual documents (only if there isn't too many of them).

place for notes (maybe like a "blog" with "atomic" entries) about the project progress and decisions

• Note Board web part

project calendar with important milesones, dates, etc.

• Calendar list on the site and web part(s) displaying items from the calendar on the project front page