There are two aspects to project infrastructure the actual infrastructure components such as an intranet, instant messaging, or e-mail and the structure of the project itself, which includes the processes and procedures your project will use. We ll discuss infrastructure in terms of the physical, tangible components and we ll discuss processes and procedures in the next section.

If you recall from earlier discussions in the book, we talked about working with a diverse project team. This diversity includes culture, geography, age, and gender, to name a few. When you re defining your project s infrastructure, you need to be cognizant of the needs of your IT project team. We ll talk about how to form that team later in the book, so you may not be able to complete this segment until you ve identified your IT project team members. If they ve already been identified, take a moment to think about what technology, tools, or infrastructure might be most helpful to the team. Do they need cell phones, wireless access, instant messaging, a secure, shared website? Think about how you ll run the project and which tools will help you and the team be most efficient. Clearly, you should look to leverage existing assets first such as laptops, computers, Internet access, cell phones, etc.. However, you should also step back and ask if those existing tools will be enough. If team members need to share lots of documents as part of the project, you may want to create a secure website that IT team...