Jeremy Cottino

Project Online (or Project Server) should be configured, not to say customized, in a way that it supports your business principles and procedures around Project Management. It should reflect your (probably tailor made) Project Management methodology. The first thing you generally do is to configure your way of doing project plans, by creating your own Enterprise Custom Fields and Lookup Tables that would be used together with your custom views.

Moving forward, your Project Management methodology might contain a method to manage risks and issues. This post is about configuring your own Project Online instance to match your Risk and Issue Management methodology. I choose the Issue list as an example but the same applies to Risks or Documents. Note that identical approach can be used for any custom features such as change requests, decisions log, assumptions and constraints…

Approach

The implementation relies on the usage of SharePoint Content Types. You can find more information on this topic reading: Introduction to Content Types on MSDN. Content Types, being centrally managed, can be easily updated to reflect your methodology changes, and those changes can be applied to any existing Project Site (avoiding to ask you poor dev team to manually update all project site lists after any changes).

The trick is to update the existing Risk or Issue Content Types (or create your own), understanding that Project Online relies on some fields of those content types. It means that you should never delete any of the existing fields. If you remove some fields (aka the trap of the beginner), the publish process may throw an error. Even for SharePoint dev superheroes, it’s very complex to recreate those fields (it’s not just a story of recreating the fields with the same names). You cannot delete fields, but you can create new ones or hide some of the existing.

If you are not familiar with this, here is a step by step procedure to create your own Issue Content Type and use it in Project Online.

As part of your projects’ management, you will most probably have to manage risks and issues.

The goal of this article is to show how risks and issues (but also documents or deliverables) can be managed within Project Server 2013 (or Project Online) and linked with Projects, Tasks or any other assets.

Before we start, let see how the Project Management Institute (PMI) defines issue and risk:

Issue: A point or matter in question or in dispute, or a point or matter that is not settled and is under discussion or over which there are opposing views or disagreements.

Risk: An uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on one or more project objectives.

Project Management Institute. (2013). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK® guide) – Fifth Edition.

In fewer words, risks might occur and we need to manage this eventuality, where issues are events that are already happening and we need to manage consequences.

My project