Anna Godwin – Project Manager

Company: 

    •    Employs 3500 people globally 

    •    Headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware 

    •    Telecommunications and Network Security

Characteristics: 

    •    32 years old 

    •    Uses various social networking tools both personally and professionally 

    •    Has a degree in Project Management and Library Science 

    •    Lives in suburbs of New Jersey 

    •    Occasionally will telecommute 

    •    Uses SharePoint for work as a document sharing tool

As a project manager for GoForward Technologies, Anna works long hours managing various large project teams.  The teams vary in size and are composed of people with different levels of expertise and all include members who live in the U.S., Europe and Canada.  

She often organizes and conducts meetings and works with different software packages to accommodate global and local team members.  One of her major projects is to investigate an organizational enterprise solution that will satisfy stakeholder requirements. 

Initiating and conducting a meeting involves the following:  

• A topic and agenda are sent out along with the meeting request 
• All team members are expected to contribute to the meeting and provide a status of projects 
• Meetings typically last 1.5 hours since many on the team are global and meeting organizers are sensitive to this 
• At meeting close, everyone knows what is expected for the next meeting

Since the project is in the early stages, they are gathering requirements from a key group of subject matter experts.  One important component of the project was to survey and collect qualitative and quantitative data from the employees of the organization. 

Based on meetings with stakeholders the must-haves for a tool is the following: 

• Provides document management capability 
• A tool to facilitate collaboration amongst team members 
  • Everyone has access and can monitor their progress 
  • Everyone can track the project status 
  • A mechanism that allows brainstorming – chat /IM/ Discussion board 
• User-Friendly 
• A tool to track resources and budget 
• A separate tool that will work in conjunction with existing organization calendar or has a built-in calendar where meetings are established and notices are then sent to the team. 
• Team access based on permissions 
• Reporting for management 
• Will use a separate tool for interactive meetings [GoToMeeting, WebEx] and needs the capability to upload large media files for reference.

Because of the recession, Anna’s company is looking to the project team to come up with a scalable cost-effective solution.  

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