The Global Project Management Challenge

Shared Services Deployed on a Global Scale

With any globally distributed organization, a consistent portal experience is needed to ensure that standards are implemented effectively. In our case, we wanted to leverage the capabilities of Microsoft's SharePoint technology in particular to meet this goal.

Borrowing from the Data Inc. example, a shared services infrastructure can be deployed at a single central location in concert with multiple shared service farms globally, ultimately creating redundancy should any problems occur. Figure 2 shows a typical deployment that includes three shared services farms at the enterprise, divisional, and group levels.

Figure 2: Deployment that includes enterprise, divisional, and group portals with multiple shared services farm.

This type of deployment helps standardize practices in project management across the board, creating a true 24-hour development lifecycle on projects.