A Better Project Management Method

Everyday I work to collect activities, durations and a host of other items that can be considered part of the project management principle. I do this for 8-10 projects. Constantly refining predecessors, successors, resources, load and the like. No matter how much time I spend researching the topic and asking the team to give me all of the activities they need, they invariably miss something. Therefore a schedule that had one date for completion is now destroyed, because somebody missed one item. The team then freezes thinking that the schedule needs to be updated with this new item before they can move on. We update the schedule, redistribute the tasks, due dates and hope we did not miss anything the second time. I would think a better way exists. My problem with many project teams exists in a simple matter of office geography. Teams need to sit together on a project, invariably they sit in cubes down the hall from each other. When working on a project if the piece they need is not present, then they E-mail the project manager to go fix the piece they need. Then the resource is off to another project. Offices need to foster a collaborative approach where the teams can come together and disband. If I could design an office around project management, it would have the following characteristcs: *modular carts where people can show up together, plug in their laptops and work on the project *Projects would be divided into days they are worked on. For example, in a company with a full portfolio of projects, Monday would be database projects whereby the entire team would just work on database related projects. Tuesday could be application specific projects. The goal here is to put all team members in the same mind shift whereby when another team calls out for help, all parties are engaged. Too often we have the same resources working on different projects. This would allow the resources to become lock step on a project for a finite period of time in an attempt to show more progress with a shorter duration. JJD - projects by people...