Showing posts with label Technical Topics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technical Topics. Show all posts
Enhance the “Track your work” web part
Implement your corporate Risk and Issue Management methodology in Project Online
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.
Updating the Status Manager, the sleight of hand
The status manager is
the resource who is to receive status updates for a task, from any resource
assigned to this task. The Status Manager (task field) is described in this page from Microsoft support.
Known limitation
Microsoft Project has
a limitation that prevents a schedule owner from setting a task’s status manager
to anyone except himself or herself. Hence, if you want to assign another
person as the Status Manager to a task within your project plan, you need to
ask him/her to edit the schedule in Microsoft Project and assign himself or herself
as the Status Manager.
The beginner's guide for Project Server/Project Online reporting using oData
Starting with a definition: “OData is a REST-based protocol for querying and
updating data and is built on standardized technologies such as HTTP, Atom/XML,
and JSON. It is different from other REST-based web services in that it
provides a uniform way to describe both the data and the data model.”
Source: webopedia.com
Applied to Project
Server (2013 +) or Project Online, ProjectData
is the OData service, implemented with the OData V3 libraries, which allow to
query project data.
You can access the ProjectData service through a Project
Web App URL. The XML structure of the EDM is available from the http://<pwa_site>/_api/ProjectData/$metadata.
The final note on managing Master projects and subprojects with Project Server (and Project online)
This
article will describe all the necessary information required to understand how
to manage master projects and subprojects within Project Server. Note that the
approach is similar with project Online.
For the
illustration, I will use a team of 4 persons:
- Jane Doe, project manager
- Jeremy Cottino, project manager
- John Doe, team member
- Yan Yellow, team member
And I will
use the delegation feature to illustrate what other users will see when using
the tool.
Create a new master project
Presenting Office 365 Planner
So, what is Office 365 Planner?
Announced by Office 365 Team, on September 22, 2015, Office
365 Planner (originally codenamed Highlander) is presented as a tool which:
“offers people a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files (using Office 365 Groups), chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress.”
- Office 365 Enterprise E1, E3, E4, E5,
- Office 365 Education E3, E4,
- Office 365 Business Essentials
- Office 365 Business Premium
How to change the SharePoint title bar text
How to remove (blank) values in an Excel Pivot Table
Managing risks and issues with Project Server 2013 (or 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
For the
demo, we will use a simple project called [Related
items project], that has the following schedule.
Use baseline and track your work
Let me tell you this story of a project manager; he spent
time with his team to compile their project planning, then proudly print it on
A0 page, and pin it on the wall behind his desk. This is for me one of the most
common mistakes a beginner does on project management. Why? Because the time
you print the schedule and pin it on the wall, the schedule is not anymore up
to date. You planning is alive, people will make work and progression on some
tasks, others tasks might be delayed… It is important to track the work done in
order to answer the question “how are we progressing compared to original
plan?”.
A snapshot of the original plan should be saved in order to
allow later comparison. This is what we call the Baseline.
Once your original planning is done, you can save your first
baseline, by clicking on Project
> Set Baseline > Set Baseline.
Understanding resource engagements
Resource
engagements, which is one of the new feature available in Project Online, is the
way Project Managers and Resource Managers agree on resource allocations (for more information about new
features of Project in 2016, please check my previous blog article: What’s new in Project 2016).
The
resource engagement feature substitutes the resource plan feature you might know
from the previous version of Project Online or Project Server. Projects’ resource
plans will be migrated to resource engagements. It’s important to note that only published resource plans will be
migrated, so before you start, publish all your resource plans.
In order to
use resource engagement, the feature needs to be activated. When you connect to
your Project Online tenant, you see this message (only admins see it):
What’s new in Project 2016
During the
Microsoft Ignite Conference Keynote Address in May 2015, the Office 2016 Public
Preview for Consumers and Enterprise customers was announced. The final release
is broadly available since the end of September 2015. So what about Project?
Here was the official announcement from Microsoft:
Project 2016 is […]
available online as part of Office 365. The new service side features […], are
being rolled out into Project Pro for Office365 and Project Online right now. The new […] features will
be available to on-premises customers in the spring of 2016 when Project Server
2016 is released.
Let’s see those new features in details:
Project Virtual Conference 2015 session: Successful business value realization with Lean Startup and Project Online
Friday October 23rd, I had the chance to be speaker
at the first Project Virtual Conference http://projectvirtualconference.com/.
As introduced by the conference team: “Project Virtual
Conference 2015 is the first-ever online conference that is dedicated to
Microsoft Project, Project Server and Project Online, that will run for a
continuous 24 hours”.
The Project Virtual Conference 2015 in numbers is 1400+
registered attendees, from 76 different countries, and 61 sessions (the list of
sessions is below).
My session was: Successful
business value realization with Lean Startup and Project Online. The idea
was to merge Portfolio Analysis with Lean Startup principles.
Here is the session abstract
To develop their business and products, Coltham Metalhead, a
beer brewing start-up, has put in place the Lean Startup Method in order to
support their fast growing business. They have combine this practice with a
Portfolio Management Methodology, based on the Standard for Portfolio
Management from the Project Management Institute. Their Project lifecycle
starts with demand management and project ideation through their innovation
hub, then the portfolio management process helps the decision making process to
select the right projects to run and finally project management techniques help
ensure projects are successfully delivered. In this presentation, the focus
will be on the Portfolio management principles, and how Coltham Metalhead,
hence yourself, can apply Project Management Institute’s standards on Portfolio
management and lean start-up philosophy within project Online. By creating what
if scenarios (based on risks, costs¦), they
ensure they are “doing the right work”.
Have fun watching the recorded
Creating a resource plan
Within Microsoft Project Server, a resource plan is a forecasting
tool for estimation, used at the early stages of project initiation. It’s a way
to estimate resource capacity where projects are in different state, in other
words, it helps you to define high level resource needs for each project or
initiative.
Because you can use it during early stages of projects, there
might not be any task or WBS defined yet, some projects might be just proposed
and not handed over to Project Manager.
More often, resource plan utilize
resources that are generic just to get some idea of capacity. Using named
resources might also help resource managers to understand their team’s
availability and capacity.
Let see how it works:
How Microsoft Project Server calculate Projects priorities
Continuing the series of articles I wrote on Portfolio
Analysis within Microsoft Project Server 2013, and following my previous
article on How Microsoft Project Server calculate business drivers prioritization, this
will (should) help you understanding How Microsoft Project Server calculate projects prioritization.
To highlight this calculation, I will reuse the same
business drivers I have defined previously:
- Expand revenue of the Bobby Brown product line
- Increase product awareness among people between 13 and 18
- Increase the number of members of the VIP club
- Introduction of new premium products
- Reduce employee turn over
- Reduction of support call waiting time
And same set of projects:
- Ambush Marketing Reporting System
- Bamsolcare Service Desk Reorganization
- Colthan Metalhead Adventure Mobile Game
- Corporate Tax Returns Process Alignment With SOX
- Europa Workflow Upgrade to v12
- Kern Stinger Operating System
- Mountain Lake Corp Laptop Deployment
- Travelling Up Europe Marketing Campaign
How Microsoft Project Server calculates Business drivers priorities
As part of a
series of articles I wrote on Portfolio Analysis within Microsoft Project
Server 2013, there is another topic I was interested to understand. How
Microsoft Project Server calculate business drivers prioritization.
To highlight
this, I will reuse business drivers I have defined previously for my article on the EfficientFrontier:
- Expand revenue of the Bobby Brown product line
- Increase product awareness among people between 13 and 18
- Increase the number of members of the VIP club
- Introduction of new premium products
- Reduce employee turn over
- Reduction of support call waiting time
There are
within Project Server 2013, two ways to prioritize business drivers:
- A “Calculated” method where an automatic pair comparison of each driver generates relative priority scores (the one we will see here),
- And a “Manual” method where users specify priority values for each driver directly.
Understanding the Efficient Frontier
The
Efficient Frontier is a concept defined by the Nobel Prize winner HarryMarkowitz as part of an article published in 1952 named “Portfolio Selection”. He
stated that an optimal portfolio is the one that delivers the best possible
return for a given level of risk or investment. Applied to portfolio analysis,
the Efficient Frontier is represented as a curve, and plots strategic value (as
a percentage) against Portfolio Cost. It might happen, often when you choose to
force-out some projects, that the portfolio selection scenarios is plotted
under the curve, which mean that the portfolio is not optimal.
My first PMI Swiss Chapter speech about Project Server
Delete a project on Project Server (PWA) 2013
Click
on the Settings button, and click on PWA
Settings.
PWA Settings page is displayed.
Under Queue and
Database Administration, click on the Delete
Enterprise Objects link.
To delete a project, select Projects on the section What
do you want to delete from Project Web App?
You might also want to Delete
draft and published projects. You also have the opportunity to Delete the connected SharePoint sites.
Note that if you don’t delete the associated SharePoint site, you will receive an error the next time you will create a project with the same name as the deleted one, while publishing the site.
Click on Delete
and that’s it. Be careful as deleted
projects cannot be retrieved.
Demand management and ideation in Project Server 2013
In this article, I want to
share with you how we manage demands in my company. By using a SharePoint list
to collect project ideas and initiatives, we are able using a very simple
Project Server 2013 out of the box feature, to create a project and manage it.
Create a SharePoint list to
collect
The first step consists in
creating a new SharePoint custom list. For those who are not familiar with
SharePoint, here is the “HowTo”.
Click on the “Add lists, libraries and other apps.”
Image on the PWA home page. If this default web-part is not present, you can
access the same page by clicking on the settings button, then Site content. Finally on the site
content page, click on add an app.
On the [Site Contents: Your Apps] page, click on Custom List.
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