Managing collaborative activities in project management

Abstract

People working with current ad-hoc collaboration tools suffer from information overload and information scattered. Our five-month study of project managers found their work was comprised of fragmented activities implicitly organized by activity threads. Most of these activities were communicative to track and report project status, which introduced frequent interruptions and low efficiency. Accordingly, we explored an activity centered approach to help them manage work information. In our Activity Centric Project Management prototype, solutions like integrating activity with project task, providing timely activity awareness based on RSS, utilizing activity data to generate status report, and allowing third-party easily to update task status were introduced.