A Star Is Born

Project Management evolution continues

Portfolio and Project Management practice, as we know today has come a long way from where it started. The KPIs for the projects to determine the success traditionally lean towards having cost and schedule management but now we are focusing more on stakeholders management. PMI’s, PMBoK in its sixth edition has included “Agile practice guide” for the first time, which reflects that the projects need to be ready for the rapid changes and digital disruption age we are living in. As the saying goes the best way to ride a horse is in the direction it is going.  

Microsoft remains the partner of choice; however

Project Online has been using the SharePoint based architecture since 2000 when it was called Project Server. MS Project Professional stays as the scheduling engine and the rest of the collaboration features are based on the SharePoint. Several features are easy to use due to the collaboration oriented features of SharePoint, but there are several challenges too. Security, data synchronization and performance issues start hitting hard as the size of the data grows due to the platform constraints. Yes, Powershell scripts to update the project site registers has been a big issue for many of us. Most importantly, MS Teams and Groups are the new collaboration tools and these are way ahead of SharePoint features.  

Game changer comes into play!

Microsoft introduced the Power Platform which starts getting traction with the transformation of the business applications like Dynamics CRM (aka Customer Engagement) and its module on the new platform. Dynamics Project Services was one of the module which has many cross-cutting features with Project Online but it was not fully available on the Common Data Service, which is the backbone of the Power Platform.

Microsoft announced reimagined Microsoft Project on 10th Sept 2019 and the new rock star is expected to be available to play tunes for all existing Project Online subscribers from 7th Oct. What we know publicly so far, it is going to be primary project management service from Microsoft. The existing Dynamics PSA and Project Online customers can still continue using the available features but it is the time to start experiencing the best solution, we have seen yet for the project management. 

I asked Mark Smith and Steve Mordue in their weekly Power Platform show how they are seeing this disruption and the response was clear, “If anyone is using anything old, you probably need to think about using the new stuff !!!”

Now what to expect?

As the role out will happen in a few days, we will have the world’s leading scheduling engine shining and sitting on the most advanced application platform, we have today. By having it on Common Data Service (CDS), it means it is inherently integrated with Dynamics Customer Engagement and Dynamics Finance and Operations modules. All the goodness of the citizen application platform or Power Platform will be available to extend your project management practice and yes there are fewer or no boundaries this time.

In the next few weeks, I will be writing more about the new capabilities and how-to stuff. I hope it will help you in getting understanding with new technology.