An Excerpt: The need for project collaboration is not new and to an extent has been conducted in an informal, non-structured manner for many years through traditional means of communication. However, the past few years have seen new challenges emerging with regard to successful project management, and there is an increasing awareness that managed project collaboration is a vital key to project success. Various software products, including web-based tools have been developed to streamline this process.

There are several factors that warrant careful consideration:

• With project lifecycles typically becoming shorter, there is less relevance in using traditional, detailed planning techniques, and expectations of shorter project turnarounds are much greater. Less detailed planning requires more emphasis on collaboration techniques for managing projects.
• A greater number of parties are now typically involved in different aspects of a project, often in different locations, and even working for different companies. Thus, the need to share information in an easily accessible manner is rapidly increasing.
• Many projects involve a large amount of repeatable work and the ability to build on previous project approaches and successes is often critical to the successful completion of the project in hand. Being able to model tasks and procedures on previously validated, successful work is important.
• Scheduling still plays an important role in modern projects. However, there is now an additional need to share information between different team members as well as being able to carry out more traditional project management tasks such as updating and controlling project status. Gone are the days when project management was solely the responsibility of the project manager or planner whose primary tool was a very specific project planning software package that required a high level of expertise and training.

In response to these changing needs, new project management tools, techniques, and attitudes have emerged. Through the use of a new breed of collaboration-based project management software, team members of differing roles are now being given additional responsibility and involvement in the project management process. Likewise, the availability of information to disparate team members has increased. When combined, these provide much broader participation and project visibility, which in turn increases the chances of project success.

In today's business age, where time is of the essence, collaboration-based project management software needs to meet the demands of companies who are seeking shorter turnaround times, working with distributed team members, and modeling tasks on previous work. Web-based tools have enabled team members to do this with ease.

This paper examines the roles of various team members within a distributed environment and looks at how a web-based collaboration tool can be of use in bringing projects to successful completion. The additional benefits of lower cost of ownership, absence of required training, and ease of integration with other key systems are also investigated.