Accelerate your project management for universities

Schools, colleges, universities, research institutes are all under pressure from digitalization. Not only in teaching methods but also regarding processes in administration and collaboration across different teams and faculties.

Project management and project management tools in universities are implemented in numerous ways and across different departments, faculties and teams. Of course, it is also a course that is lectured. OpenProject as a web-based project management tool can support by connecting faculties, students and project teams in one central system.
We are lucky to have quite a lot of universities and research institutes as clients and wanted to give you some insights into project management in this field.

Universities with diverse requirements ask for a versatile project management software

Project management software to learn and put knowledge into practice

Project managers are in worldwide demand in all industries. That is why project management courses are very popular and certifications sought after. Either at a university or offered by other institutions. In order to prepare students for their future jobs, the professors do not only teach them project management methodologies as well as relevant skills and behaviors. They also make the students work in teams to manage real projects. This also entails working with project management tools with which the acquired skills can be used. The University Coburg is using OpenProject to apply hybrid project management with its students.

Project management software for university research projects

In research projects, different people from different disciplines collaborate and are not necessarily working in the same place. And even if they are in the same place, they might not share the same routines, they might use the lab at different times of the day. That is why project management plays an important role. Especially a web-based solution that allows access to all project-related information, in real-time, at any time and from anywhere. With this, the project team can gather information in one central place. The team can for example use agile boards when working together in a sprint to develop the next step or feature in the project. With bug tracking, they could track, prioritize and solve issues really fast. Or they use a Wiki to share documents, protocols. And a common time tracking and budgeting feature allows to allocate costs to certain tasks.

Project management software to collaborate within and across faculties

In order to get organized within a faculty or across faculties, project management is important for the same reasons as in research projects. People are sitting in different buildings across one or more campuses. People from different teams are involved and have different routines and ways of working. But they all need to work together because they were asked to achieve a common goal or develop something together. A web-based project management tool can help to foster collaboration by making information available. Different features can be used, e.g. work packages that allocate clear responsibilities and transparent next steps. The project team can coordinate the overall project plan with a common Gantt chart. And the meeting feature in OpenProject records all participants, the agenda and minutes.

Project management software for general university administration and organization

In order to collaborate efficiently, it is important to create common processes within the whole organization. And a shared project management can facilitate this. Customize your workflows and include your colleagues from other departments in your project management system to work together. The progress is visible for everyone and responsibilities clear. Gantt charts, work packages, meeting and wiki features support your administration.

Project management software for coordination amongst students

Not only interact students within their classes. All extracurricular activities can also be organized with a project management tool as not everyone is present all the time. By using agile boards, tasks can be assigned to the respective student, the tasks’ status can be changed by drag and drop and everyone knows who has done what. Bigger projects can be planned in a Gantt chart to give a good overview. And new students can look up processes or any other documentation in the wiki. If you choose a web-based solution, you guarantee easy access, new students are quickly signed up, no need for installation.

Requirements by universities, educational and research institutes

Keep information safe, secure and centrally available

We experience that most of our clients in the university and research space ask for high security, i.e. data privacy. All information should be centrally available in one system which leads to less effort with regard to E-mails or managing Spreadsheets and other lists. OpenProject complies with European and national data protection regulations. It can be used both securely in the cloud and installed on site.

High flexibility and easy to use for every team

Easy and intuitive to get started and no long and time-consuming onboarding. Many are also looking for a very high flexibility: different faculties and teams would like to use different features, implement different ways of working. OpenProject offers all project management features mentioned above, classical and agile project management can even be combined.

Open Source und offene Standards

OpenProject is open source. We understand free software in the sense of free speech. Freiheit durch freie Open-Source-Software, lizenziert unter der GPL v3 und integrierte offene Standards. This helps students, professors, and communities with a better learning experience, they can be independent of big companies and develop the product further and add features they need. That is why a lot of European universities choose open source.

Integrations with other tools

OpenProject offers a powerful API that allows integrations of other necessary applications. For universities it could for example be platforms for remote learning.

Check how you are managing your projects. We are happy to assist you.