Thursday, May 28, 2020

Microsoft Project bricks: Project Online, Project for the web, Home, Roadmap, Project Operations

A new brand area is coming in the Project world. I do believe that the project management paradigm is changing. 10 years back, project managers used to be professional schedulers with certifications, excellent project management skills and a dedicated continuous training and education.
Nowadays project managers are more and more employees who have project management appetence and are coming to this position by seniority after a few years holding other responsibilities. They could be web designers, developers, architects... 
When the traditional Project world (Project Server and Project Online with MS Project Pro) was perfect for the first category with strong scheduling and project/portfolio capabilities, the second category could not fit in it: tooo complex, too many features, too many constraints, training required, etc... 
Project for the Web with Roadmap coming with the CDS and Power Automate bring all together a brand new project management approach: simple, intuitive, full web, no training, drag and drop. No more critical path, just a few columns, you can start just right now to plan your project and activities, using a simple task grid, Kanban or Gantt. You can of course add some information such as effort, % complete, predecessors to make your project plan relevant and gather data at portfolio level using PowerBI. 
My guess is that Microsoft with invest more and more on this approach. Moreover, Project Operations, coming this fall will extend Project for the web using CDS to make it work with PSA service. You can still use Project Online, there are so many organizations using it that it will still remain for at least a decade. And Roadmap helps you consolidating both Project for the Web and Project Online data.
I won't give more technical details about Project for the web since you can already find a lot of amazing things on the web, especially about implementing business rules using Power Automate. 

References:

Below a few screen shots:


In Roadmap you can have a portfolio view adding your Project for the web projects (Déploiement PPM), your Project Online projects (Projet ITSM). You can also add Azure DevOps projects.

Finally in Project Home you can see your roadmaps (portfolio views) and your projects.

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