Supporting collaborative project management

This article presents an approach for collaborative project management in which not only the project but also the management is collaborative. The focus is on the support of collaboration and communication in globally distributed projects. Several project management tools exist for planning and monitoring of project tasks. Other tools exist to support information exchange and technical interoperability. However, few solutions are available for the strengthening of intangible assets and supporting the common understanding of the project objectives, requirements and practices. For this objective, 'Collaborative project alignment' is defined in this article, together with a model and services to support the identification of the alignment aims and bridging possible gaps. The project alignment model and the related services, a project alignment booster, have been developed in the context of COIN-project (FP7 EU 216256), and relying on results from this project. The first evaluation of the tools has been made in relation to large engineering projects.