New "decomposition tree" visual in PowerBI!

Do you remember this visual? Long time ago, we used to create nice dashboards using PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer. I think it was part of SharePoint Server 2010. That was really nice for people like me who are not doing any codes such as SSRS reports or .NET. We could deliver to our customers nice interactive web dashboards with drill-down capabilities. Basically I think it must have inspired MS engineers when developping PowerBI.

Here is a vintage article about PerformancePoint (in french).

PerformancePoint most famous visual was the decomposition tree.  It allowed you selecting a data (custom field) then seeing all sub-decomposition along a measure (work for example). So much better than selecting many filters. As a PM, you could see in your department, your project type, your project stage, your project client, the work by phase.

Here was what it looked like:

Since then we have been playing with PowerBI at lot (more than that) but still to such visual. Now it is done! In PowerBI november update, you have this decomposition tree visual. Thanks Microsoft!

Go and play with it!

New service: "project for the web"!

It has been a while since we didn't have such a major update in the Microsoft Project World. I would say that the last key change was in 2013 with Project Online, available in MS cloud. That being said, the features were the same as the on-premise version and it was more the subscription model that was changed.

Since beginning of October a new service has been announced by Microsoft, following Roadmap and Project Server releases earlier this year: PROJECT FOR THE WEB (P4W).

I won't describe here this service in detail since the Project community is quite active and already has produced a bunch of nice article. I'll just point to those articles and highlight the most interesting parts.

• http://prasannaadavi.com/2019/11/6-mvps-share-their-favorite-tips-features-for-new-project-for-web.html#.XcqjeFdKiUl
• https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Project-Blog/The-new-Project-is-rolling-out/ba-p/909721
• https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-can-you-do-with-project-for-the-web-b30f5442-be5f-43d2-9072-c95bff778ea1?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
• https://docs.microsoft.com/fr-fr/office365/servicedescriptions/project-online-service-description/project-online-service-description
• https://bsaiprasad.wordpress.com/2019/11/08/make-project-for-the-web-bigger-1/
• https://blogproject.fr/2019/10/29/project-for-the-web/

Basically it is a brand new service, well described by the following diagram.

You see there that P4W and Project Online are 2 separated services. The first one is based on the Power Plateform and use the CDS (Common Data Service) to store data. Project Online is still available, using both web access (PWA) and desktop client (MS Project). Both services can be accessed by Roadmap for consolidation and PowerBI for reporting.

Here are the key feature of P4W:

• The grid is an Excel like view allowing managing in a simple way tasks, attribute and assignments.
• Gantt chart allows having a graphical and timephased view of the tasks.
• The Kanban view brings more agility in the day to day task management.

Note that those 3 views support co-authoring and real-time (no more check-in/check-out, publish). Accesses are managed through O365 groups and you can embed views in Teams. Note also that since this new service is based on the Power platform, there are many opportunities to enhance the service.

You'll find some screenshots in the links I shared above.