Jeremy Cottino

Like Jim Morrison said in one of my favourite songs of the Doors, “This is the end, Beautiful friend, This is the end, My only friend, The end”…

But, to quote Microsoft now: Once an MVP, always an MVP! So I’m now proud member of the MVP Reconnect Program. This will allow me to stay in touch with the community and be able to have, among other benefits, an “Exclusive engagement opportunities with Microsoft headquarters and subsidiaries” (no clue what this concretely means J ).

But overall, that’s also an opportunity for me to do something else. When I do something I’m always obsessed, so I will find another hobby and share it with my readers (if any).

Stay tuned.

For once, a short article with a quick tip on how to enhance the Track your work web part, on your Project Online home page, by updating some links and changing the colour of the tiles.

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.

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.

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.

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:

And I will use the delegation feature to illustrate what other users will see when using the tool.

Create a new master project

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.”

One of the most frequent question I’m asked, is, if it’s possible to change the SharePoint title bar text, being on SharePoint or Project Server.

You can call it perfectionism, but I hate when my reports are not looking good. One of the most irritating element are those (blank) text you may have on your Excel pivot tables.

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

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.

The practice of estimating in project management is one of the most challenging. Whether you’re trying to figure out project effort, duration or cost, given the inherent uncertainty of projects and their uniqueness, we often end up “guesstimating.” This article provides techniques to use in order to be as accurate as possible in doing your estimates. While I focus on effort estimation, the same techniques apply to duration or cost estimation.

Let’s start with a reminder about how project time management is articulated, according to the PMI® PMBOK® Guide & Standards, Fifth Edition:

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):

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:

Friday October 23^rd, 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

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:

Wednesday, 13. May 2015, I had the chance to be the speaker for the PMI EMEA congress, held in London, UK and the subject was:

MasteringPortfolio Analysis with a Project and Portfolio Management Tool.

The event description I have created to present my speech, was the following.

Understanding the Portfolio Management Body of Knowledge might help you to better comprehend the goals of a portfolio and the advantage in selecting the right one(s). When it comes to life, you need to select the best tool in order to help ensure that those making the decisions, make the right ones. By attending to this session, you will be able to understand a three-step process of portfolio analysis through one PPM software.

After going through basic principles of Portfolio Management, I gave a concrete example of Portfolio Analysis using Microsoft Project Server 2013.

Let me share here this experience, by giving you a copy of the white paper I wrote and the slide deck of my presentation.

Also, we were proposed by PMI to create a selfie video to present our session. That was my first experience doing this, you can enjoy the decor of my living room J

Hi All – I wanted to let you know about a great free event that Microsoft and the MVPs are putting on, May 14^th & 15^th 2015.  Join Microsoft MVPs from the Americas’ region as they share their knowledge and real-world expertise during a free event, the MVP Virtual Conference.

The MVP Virtual Conference will showcase 95 sessions of content for IT Pros, Developers and Consumer experts designed to help you navigate life in a mobile-first, cloud-first world.  Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Developer Platform, Steve Guggenheimer, will be on hand to deliver the opening Key Note Address.

Why attend MVP V-Conf?  The conference will have 5 tracks, IT Pro English, Dev English, Consumer English, Portuguese mixed sessions & Spanish mixed sessions, there is something for everyone!  Learn from the best and brightest MVPs in the tech world today and develop some great skills!

Be sure to register quickly to hold your spot and tell your friends & colleagues. 

The conference will be widely covered on social media, you can join the conversation by following @MVPAward and using the hashtag #MVPvConf.

Register now and feel the power of community!

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:

And same set of projects:

What a great pleasure for me to be awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional on Project! I am really grateful for the recognition. April 1^st 2015, will stay a strange April fool’s day for me. When I receive the email from the MVP programme, I did not say anything to any colleagues even to my wife until I receive another email asking me for my shirt size…

I hope to live up to these great names who made me love Microsoft Project: Vincent, Guillaume, Dale, Ben, Cindy, Ellen, Andrew, Prasanna, Gary, Paul, Sam, Bill…

Thank you guys for welcoming me on your family J

Learn more about the MVP Programme

http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/overview.aspx