One Project At a Time

From its inception, the management of construction projects on the Internet has centered on the now cliché term within the industry, 'Project Specific Websites'; that is, a website specifically for one project. While this structure is being abandoned rapidly, the marketing focus and pricing of several services is still based on the idea that a member's organization use their site only for selected projects. This concept is a leftover from a preliminary cultural perception that the use of the Internet as a project management tool is powerful but secondary.

In a Project Specific site, the member that hosts a project must create an organizational container just for that project. Thus, if multiple projects are to be hosted, a new organizational container must be created for each project.

 This structure creates several obvious inefficiencies in the form of redundancy and a lack of shared resources such as master lists of contacts, phone numbers, users and security profiles, not to mention an awkward process for switching from one project to the next while using the application.

 Furthermore, since an organization will be involved in a number of projects at any given time, it is inevitable that some of those projects will be on the Web and the rest will be tracked in some other system on the organization's Local Area Network (LAN). Thus, the benefit of online collaboration and remote access come at the cost of disintegrating enterprise-wide information and format.