XProM: A collaborative knowledge-based project management tool

There is a growing need for better project management to bring together people with diverse knowledge and skills to develop and implement project activities effectively and efficiently. This paper is a preliminary report on XProM (Expert Program Manager), a project management tool which assists users in project definition and control. XProM improves on most existing commercial tools by integrating groupware and expert system technologies into the concept map knowledge building tool developed at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. By employing groupware concepts, XProM facilitates communication, collaboration and cooperation among all involved parties in order to jointly identify project needs and requirements and to reduce the number of changes due to misunderstandings. XProM also includes a rulebased project control advisor which contains heuristic knowledge to guide users to possible corrective actions when things do not go as planned. The paper describes XProM's components and possible future directions for this work.