Now Import Projects from Microsoft Project Desktop Client in Project Operations
Problem Definition: In contrast to Project Service Automation, where importing projects is made easy via a ribbon button, it was previously not possible for current Microsoft Project Desktop Client users to do so in D365 Project Operations. Project for the Web is supported by D365 Project Operations, although not all of Microsoft Project Desktop Client’s features are available. It was imperative to establish a connection between the two due to the system’s gap. Solution: Steps to import a file in Project Limitations: Project for the Web works well for the majority of projects, but it doesn’t totally replace Project desktop. The following features cannot be migrated or supported. Before you begin importing your project, make sure it doesn’t rely on these features. Cross-project dependencies, manual tasks, recurring tasks, subprojects, and even some types of selective constraint types like As late as possible, Start no later than, Finish no later than, etc. are a few characteristics. There are many such features which are not supported while importing. Refer given Microsoft link for more information: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/move-your-project-from-project-desktop-to-project-for-the-web-143ab391-002e-451a-aedb-3b6fa1f6ab8b#bkmk_featuresthatdontmigrate Conclusion: Users will have the freedom to utilise any project planning tool of their choice, including Project Desktop Client and Project for the Web, thanks to this import feature. This functionality is a good complement to all the other functionalities in the product and will help D365 Project Operations meet more customer requests. Thank you, Sankalp for your valuable inputs.
Filter Grid data, and Save results as a View
Introduction: Views in model-driven apps specify the data that is tabulated and displayed on a grid page. Views that have been developed by an administrator, shared with others, and normally can’t be changed are called System Views. Dynamics 365 2022 release wave II includes a new functionality that provides the ability to save the filter conditions on a grid as a personal view as well as enables you to manage and share views. You can save time with this effective feature. Following types of views are available in model-driven apps: How to Filter grid data, and save results as a view? To select the filter condition, click on the Edit Filters To remove a condition, select More commands (…) next to the row, and then select Delete To add one or more conditions, select Add option The following options are available to add conditions in the filter editor To add a condition, select Add row, To select a value, click on the down arrow After editing the view filters, select Apply to see changes on the grid page How to Save edits as a new view? On the command bar, select More commands (⁝) > Create view > Save as new view Enter a new name for the view, and then select Save How to Manage and share personal views? To manage and share views, turn on the modern Advanced find options. Click on the Save button In the view selector, the Manage and share views option is available Select the Manage and share views option Select View commands (…) and then choose the Share option Select the user to share the view Set the permissions Select Share option Conclusion: This feature is helpful because it increases Productivity by preserving the quick find filter conditions as a personal view and it also optimizes time. References: – Filter grid data, save results as view | Microsoft Learn Thank you , Amisha for your valuable inputs
Project Operations vs Project Service Automation, A Seamless Comparison to Read
We know that PSA is now known as Project Operations. Well, it’s not just a name change but also some significant improvements that Microsoft has brought in. The following blog will take you through the differences between PSA and Project Operations. The upgrade from Project Service Automation to Project Operations is going to be delivered in three phases. Below are the major changes which will be seen after the upgrade is complete. In this phase, the dependency on WBS has been cut off for projects. With all the modifications from phase 1, we even have WBS that is a part of the project operations limits that are currently supported In addition to the enhancements from phase 2, WBS also includes support for the Project desktop client and extends beyond the present scope of Project Operations. Let’s delve deep in feature wise comparison between PSA and Project Operations. 1] Project Templates: They help you generate the WBS structure from an already pre-defined WBS structure in the form of a template. Project Service Automation: ✔️ Included You can create a project template as shown in below image in PSA: After saving this record, you can add the record while creating a new project as shown in the below image. You can also select ‘Is Template’ field to save the current project as a project template. Project Operations: Not included This feature is not included in Project Operations, but the same functionality can be done with the ribbon button on the Project form named ‘Copy Project’. With this all the task information and the project properties get copied in a new draft project. 2] Project work breakdown structure (WBS) integration with desktop client: A project management tool with automated scheduling, resource management, and built-in reporting is Microsoft Project Online desktop client. Project Service Automation: ✔️ Included This feature is very essential in PSA as with the capabilities of desktop client, Task management can be done efficiently. There is a ribbon button to integrate the system as shown: Project Operations: Not included This feature is not there in Project Operations as it has OOB integration with Project for the web. 3] Constraints – Start no earlier than, finish no later than: When you add a constraint on the tasks it forces you to start or end on that date even if the schedule is changed. Constraint is very useful, but one needs to be careful about the dates Project Service Automation: Not included This is not available in Project Service Automation and is possible if integrated with Project Desktop Client. Project Operations: ✔️ Included This feature restricts the resource to complete the task start and finish the task in the given time. When a constraint is set your calendar icon gets a cross sign stating that it is restricted. Example: If you select Constraint type as ‘Finish No Later Than’ and the Finish date is set as 3rd February 2023. The task then needs to be completed by the specified date. 4] Milestones – Tasks with zero duration: Milestones are key points in the project timeline and serve as markers to indicate that certain objectives have been met and provide an opportunity to review and assess progress. Milestones are typically used to track the progress of a project, to communicate with stakeholders, and to help manage risks. Project Service Automation: Not Included This feature is not available in PSA and is exclusively available in Project Operations Only. Project Operations: ✔️ Included Adding a milestone task with zero duration is now possible in Project Operations unlike PSA. Just add ‘0’ in the duration field and set same start and finish date as shown below: And now the milestone symbol can be seen as shown in the below image: 5] Resource driven tasks will respect the availability of assigned resources Resource-driven tasks are scheduled based on the availability of the resources assigned to them. This means that the start and end dates of a task are determined by the availability of the necessary human, equipment, or material resources. This helps ensure that tasks are completed efficiently and within the given time frame. Project Service Automation: Not Included This feature is not available in Project Service Automation. Project Operations: ✔️ Included The system considers the availability of resources when scheduling tasks and adjusts task dates accordingly. This helps ensure that projects are completed on time and within budget, and that resources are utilized efficiently. It takes into consideration the work hour template of the assigned resources and changes the Start and Finish date according to the availability. 6] Time-phased editing – Edit plans and work on a day-by-day basis This feature provides a detailed view of the project schedule, with tasks and their associated work broken down into daily increments. This level of granularity enables project managers to adjust the project schedule based on daily progress and to account for changes in resource availability or task dependencies. Project Service Automation: ✔️ Included With the help of this feature, we can change the efforts on the resource assignments grid on a day-by-day basics and even by week or month. This makes work easy as changes can be done on the grid itself. Project Operations: Not Included This feature is not yet added in the Project Operations, but we can expect this update in later phases. 7] Automatic/manual scheduling – Use the Project scheduling engine to schedule tasks automatically or manually Project Service Automation: ✔️included The scheduling of tasks for leaf nodes is determined by the task mode. Every activity supported by PSA has two task modes: automatic scheduling and manual scheduling. Automatic Scheduling: Scheduling engine uses the rules on task attributes to determine the schedule for the task. Manual Scheduling: It stops the engine from calculating the values of other scheduling attributes. Project Operations: Not Included This feature is not available in Project Operations. 8] Edit large projects directly in the user interface: There is no limit to the size of plans that are editable Project Service
Why were Modern Approvals introduced for Project Operations?
Problem Definition: Time entry approvals usually used to be an issue while approving when they were bulk in number. When the Project Managers (PM) used to approve more than 100-to-200-time entries, a lot of them used to get stuck in the queue and there used to be a rigorous process to go back and check which time entries are approved and which are still pending to be approved even after approving all of them. Solution: Microsoft has introduced Modern Approvals for such issues and so has introduced it for Project Operations. The way it works is, first we need to enable it on the Project Operations environment. PN: once enabled, cannot be disabled. Then we need to set threshold. This threshold decides the number of time entries to be approved synchronously. The prescribed Threshold from Microsoft is 5. Now when the project managers approve a set of time entries, let’s say for e.g., 100-time entries they are all put in an approval set and are tried to approve again and again until all the time entries are approved successfully. Below is where you can check the project related approval sets. Nevertheless, there can be some instances where there are failures in approving the time entries. These failures logs are also maintained in the approval set logs. When the time entries are approved, and the approval set record is created, it is in the active state and can be viewed in the active approval set’s view over the project. As soon as all the time entries in the approval set are approved, the state of these approval sets become inactive and can be viewed in the inactive approval set’s view over the project. Conclusion: Modern approvals have turned out to be a boon for the project managers when it comes to this tedious process of time entry approvals and can now trust the system that all the time entries will be approved successfully.
Quick Tip: How to apply non-working hours from Calendar Template in PSA / Project Operations
Problem Definition: It is generally thought by Project Operations / PSA (PO/PSA) users that the non-working hour cannot be copied via 1 Template resource to another resource when the Calendar Template is assigned. It is only assumed that the working shifts and the weekends marked are the only ones that gets copied. But that is not the case. There is a minor catch in how we do it. Following tip will help you make the non-working hours copy when a Calendar template is applied to a resource that contains a template resource which has the non-Working hours in the Work hours. Solution: Perform the following steps to get to the required solution mentioned in the Problem Definition. Step 1: Add a non-working hour in the template of the resource by following the screenshots below: Step 2: Click on the Template Resource and add a non-working hour as shown below in the Screenshot. Step 3: Select the Date range that you want to mark as non-working days. Mark them as all day. In my case, I have selected 12-July as the non-working day. The Calendar gets marked with a non-working day as shown below. Step 4: Navigate to the Calendar Template again and Remove the Calendar Tempalte Resource and Save the Calendar Template as shown in the below screenshot. Step 5: Re-add the same Calendar Template Resource again and Save the Template. Step 6: Navigate to the Resource entity and select the resources whom you want to apply the Calendar Template and apply as shown in the below screenshot. Step 7: Final step to validate if the resource which was applied with the Calendar Template is having those non-working hours as the Calendar Template resource had. This blog reflects my personal findings and based solely on my experience of using PSA/PO for last 4 years. For those who are looking for a platform that can track and manage the entire procedures of sales and project managements, I would highly recommend them to try Microsoft dynamics 365 for project service automation. This helps in keeping all the ONLY ACTIVE projects in the view and the ones that needs our action and attention.
First cut review of new D365 Project Service
The new Project Service coming up is a much-advanced version of PSA. Even more that it will be called as Project Service. We would learn about it and a few features that are exposed to the world shortly in the blog below. How to Install and Basic Requirement? The new project service can be installed on the Default environment of CRM. Now if this confuses you, let me explain. Every CRM environment has a Default CRM Instance associated to it. How to go and check it? Follow the below steps: Step 1: Ensure you have Project Plan 3 or Project Plan 5 license procured. Go to your admin portal and assign the license to your login id. Step 2: Login to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ with your admin credentials. Step 3: Click on Environments. Before that ensure you toggle the switch to use “Try new admin centre”. Step 4: On the right-side pane, you will see a default environment mentioned as “Default” in front of the environment name. Click on it to see the URL of the environment. Step 5: Click on the URL to open the environment and below page will appear. Click on Project from the apps that you see. You will be taken the Active Project view as shown below: Create a New Project In order to create a new project, click on +New Project button mentioned on the Ribbon Control. It will ask you for some basic details like Project Name, Project Manager and Calendar Template. As soon as you save the project, the estimated start date comes up as the current date. Next step is the plan the schedule (WBS) so we will navigate to Tasks. As soon as you click on tasks. It will take some time initially for the first time to connect to the project online services and you will see 3 tabs coming as shown below. Let’s look at each one of them one-by-one. Grid This is where you create your WBS, Assign Resources, Set Duration, Predecessor and many more. As soon as the task is created in the WBS. It creates the similar task on the Board (Explained below). Good Thing: We can mark the task as complete in new WBS with Project Service which was not the case in earlier version (PSA). It is connected to the new Project Online Services so we can take advantage of the Project Online features right herewith. We can manage the project using the board which is much nice a feature. Needs Improvement: Here the Duration and efforts are tightly integrated to each other and in case one changes the other too changes. Boards should had allowed to add sprints in them, so we could even do Agile Project Management there. Board This is where you can create tasks, to which the resources can be assigned. You can add Bucket (Swim lanes in Azure DevOps) to manage the state of the tasks. It also manages the progress of the task, Remaining effort, etc. Timeline This is the Gantt Chart view of the tasks based on the efforts entered. What’s not available and when will it be available Currently only the WBS or the Project Planning Module via Project Online is Exposed for General Availability. The sales extension and the invoicing piece is expected to be announce in Feb’2020. This blog reflects my personal findings and based solely on my experience of using Project Service for last couple of months. For those who are looking for a platform that can track and manage the entire procedures of sales and project managements, I would highly recommend them to try new Project Service as guided above.