Project web sites with design management extensions

Web hosted project spaces offer dedicated collaboration and information sharing functions to dispersed members of design, engineering and manufacturing teams. During the recent dot.com boom these so‐called ‘e‐Project’ services became increasingly popular in the A/E/C (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry. This industry has started to refer to these products as ‘project web sites’. Their basic service component is a web enabled ‘information space’ for building teams offered through an Application Service Provider (ASP) business model, and accessible via an Extranet requiring only a standard web browser. An expanding set of web hosted applications is meanwhile included in most products, e.g. for messaging and calendaring, data and document management, design reviews and project management. This paper shows how the functionality of project web sites can be enriched by adding advanced task coordination features. Such features are especially relevant for design management. In particular, the paper deals with the need to support the formation and coordination of spontaneous short‐lived sub‐teams in the course of a project. A crucial element of these ‘self‐appointed’ teams is the need to establish rapid agreement on a shared coordination template for the execution of the task at hand. It will be demonstrated how task templates for that purpose can be defined and managed. The chosen solution serves as a task sensitive filter to the overwhelming amount of documents stored typically on a project web site. The approach will be demonstrated on a daily exercise in academic environments: the abstract and paper review process in the preparation of a conference.