Are you a project manager, do you work with resource management, or are you responsible for projects that require precise planning and follow-up? If so, there is a good chance that Project Operations could be the right tool for you.

In this webinar, you'll learn more about:

Watch the demo recording:

Here you can read the transcript of the webinar from October 30, 2024:

What is Project Operations – project management

Merete Falck Erichsen: Hi, do you work on large or small projects? Have you noticed that customers' requirements for projects are increasing? But what if you had a tool that adapts to the project's size and complexity, giving you full control and flexibility from start to finish? Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is designed to meet precisely these needs.

Now we’ll give you an insight into how project work and project management tools have changed in recent years. Imagine a project where all resources are allocated correctly, the schedule is adhered to, and the budget is under control—all with minimal effort. A solution that not only supports the project’s growth but also adapts as needs change.

This is what using Project Operations can be like. Read on for an overview of the best project management tool options available on the market. We will also explain what Project Operations is and the needs this product addresses to help you succeed in your project work.

Frode Stenstrøm: And with that fantastic introduction from my colleague here, Merete, I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of you to a new broadcast from our studio here in Asker.

We’re going to change the subject a little and move on from the topics we’ve discussed extensively—work orders and field service assignments with Stine, and contracts with Pia—to Merete and project management. We’re really looking forward to giving you a first look at the project management tools Microsoft has to offer, specifically Project Operations. You haven’t met Merete on YouTube before, so perhaps you could say hello and tell us who you are?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Hi, my name is Merete Falck Erichsen. I have now worked as a functional consultant at ProsessPilotene for four and a half years, and in my spare time I either bake sourdough bread myself or drive around buying it from others.

Frode Stenstrøm: But do you sell sourdough starter? Isn't that a kind of yeast you can sell too?

Merete Falck Erichsen: I have—my "starter" has now been shared with various friends, and if the neighbors are nice to us, they may well get a loaf of bread in return.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yeah, okay, so if things go badly in the CRM industry, you have something to fall back on, right?

Merete Falck Erichsen: I’m not that good yet.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, but it’s good to have some hobbies in life. And you’re also a subject matter expert on project management tools, so I know you’ve delivered many solutions involving them for clients.

My name is Frode Stenstrøm, and I’ll be your host today on behalf of us here at Prosesspilotene. First, a few practical details, as always: we’re streaming live on YouTube, so if you have the opportunity to ask questions along the way, please do. We can simply display the questions on the screen like this and share them, and that’s why we’re streaming live—to make it possible for you to ask questions.

And one of us will be able to answer, I’m quite sure, and if not, we have a whole host of skilled colleagues who can answer as well. We’d like to know who you are, and as usual, we add subtitles and chapters to all the recordings, so you can jump straight to the parts of the broadcasts that are most relevant to you.

A reminder about Prosesspodden, our podcast. We have already recorded several podcast episodes on project management as a discipline and theory, including a very popular episode on how you, as a client, can work to achieve greater success in your projects, in which we interviewed our project managers.

Like and share, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next broadcast. Now, a quick look at today's agenda, which is quite packed with great content. We'll talk about why project management—and Project Operations in particular—is relevant, and the value you can gain from using this type of technology.

Agenda for today's project management webinar

Frode Stenstrøm: We will also highlight which roles it is relevant to. Project management and the project management profession encompass many different types of people, both on the customer and supplier sides, so we will shed light on them. We will also highlight the needs you can expect to address by investing in and using Project Operations, or other project management tools for that matter.

We will also highlight the available tools. Microsoft offers a range of excellent project management tools, and we will explain which tools are available and when you should use each one. This brings us to the final and most exciting part: Project Operations, a fantastic project management tool that we at ProsessPilotene also use. Merete has kindly agreed to demonstrate it for us today, followed by a few webinars that will also explore how to use this tool.

And then a summary at the end. With that, we have a fairly clear agenda. I think it will be exciting. Shall we take a quick look at the comments? You don't have any questions yet, so we'll address them as they come in. Yes, multitasking, you know. I thought we would start by talking a little about modern project management and the reasons why it makes sense for you and your team to invest in this type of tool.

Modern project management

Frode Stenstrøm: And we also know that modern management theory has influenced project management theory, and that the demands for collaboration are increasing significantly. So let’s start with a little structure. Why is modern project management so important? The first point is that project complexity is increasing considerably.

PMI, the Project Management Institute, has conducted some fairly specific studies showing that most projects—more than 85 percent of them—have increased in complexity and scope over the past five years. This often means more stakeholders, more advanced use of technology and, not least, greater interdependencies, which in turn increases the demands placed on project management as a discipline.

Then there is the matter of cost control. Organizations that choose to invest in sound project methodology, project management, and structure are much more likely to complete their projects on time and within budget than customers that do not. This is shown by Gartner studies, which are linked on the screen below and indicate how large the proportion is.

But 89% of all projects are completed within budget and under control, which is something most people are interested in, provided that you have good, modern project management and the associated tools. Then there is resource optimization, which I believe is a constant source of a great deal of work for the vast majority of companies.

With modern project management, resource waste in projects is reduced by up to 28% through better planning and resource allocation. We know that downtime is not particularly desirable, but it will often occur in projects, and with changing requirements for delivering successful projects, you also need to be able to optimize resources more effectively.

And then I would like to address risk reduction. When good project management methods are introduced, along with the tools that come with them, people become more aware of risk management in the project, allowing the parties to work together to minimize the project's risk. And finally, competitive advantage. Most organizations that report using standardized project management experience growth that is critical to surviving in today's market, and they become good at winning contracts.

And we also know from our own experience that we are evaluated when we deliver projects to customers, and the quality of the project proposals we submit is important in determining whether we succeed or not. That is why we have also invested heavily in our own project management office, with many full-time project managers, to ensure that customers get what they are supposed to receive.

So that was a little about why this is relevant. I thought I would also talk a little about the value this can create if you choose to invest in the very things Merete will be presenting today. And with the help we can provide to you and your team, one of the key benefits is improved efficiency.

We can automate a great deal of the project administration work, which will save an average of 20–30% of a project manager's time. We see that when project managers spend more time ensuring that the project and the team function well, the projects will create more value.

But if project managers spend their time on reporting, handling deviations, and that sort of thing, they have less time available for what really matters. Then there is the question of the basis for decision-making: standardizing processes and using a tool like Project Operations gives you factual, up-to-date figures. Instead of finding out what happened with the project perhaps 30 days later, when it is too late to take corrective action, you will have a basis for deciding: “Should we do something about this change or risk, or not?”

Productivity increases, and that is perhaps something all Norwegians learned in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. People are on Teams and are now scattered all over the place, and the fact that we are now able to collaborate on a project, with all parties involved in the project able to see the same information, results in a significantly greater improvement in productivity within the project.

Which in turn provides a better basis for documenting investments. I have worked in project management for quite a few years, and I often find that clients and companies skip calculating whether they got a return on their investment in the project. It becomes a kind of... Either they do not talk about it because they got nothing in return, or they do not measure it. But using the tools we are demonstrating today will provide a very good explanation and documentation of what, in plain English, is called return on investment.

And customer satisfaction naturally increases. So we've talked a little about that, and you've seen some of these projects yourself. Do you have any thoughts on why it's relevant?

Merete Falck Erichsen: And buy Project Operations?

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, or invest in project management tools.

Merete Falck Erichsen: It’s useful to have control over your own projects and who you assign to work on them, to let management see who is working on your projects and that they are going well, and also to identify projects that are going poorly.

That you can receive notifications directly on the screen when there is something that needs to be addressed.

Frode Stenstrøm: And then there are some important things that I’m working on for us here at ProsessPilotene with our internal system, as we prepare to roll out these systems for our own use, and that has to do with portfolio management.

Managing a project is one thing, but management will usually look at the portfolio as a whole—to see how things are going and whether the organization has taken on risks it may not have been aware of, because it has only looked at individual project reports rather than the aggregate risk. But I have a question for you. If we take a supplier as our starting point, we have our small fictional company, Miljøpilotene, and here we have a gallery of roles. In that gallery, you have highlighted four roles that are relevant to the use of project management tools.

Shall we talk a little about them?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Project Operations is an application that affects quite a few people in a company. For example, you have a project manager, who is the person you would expect this tool to be for. With a system like this, they get a project management tool. They get a timeline showing the tasks, who will perform them, and when.

It also means that either the project manager or a dedicated resource allocation manager will gain control over the company's resources—who will work on which project and when.

Frode Stenstrøm: And I would like to add to what you said about resource allocation. Some organizations have a dedicated resource allocation team or person, but it is also possible to support what we call decentralized resource allocation, meaning that it does not necessarily have to be handled by a central unit.

Merete Falck Erichsen: No, both approaches are supported here in Miljøpilotene. We have set it up so that Magnus, the lead project manager, also manages all the resources, but you can have two modes: either a centralized version, or one where the project managers book their own resources.

Frode Stenstrøm: What can you tell us about the salespeople, Merete?

Merete Falck Erichsen: A project has to be sold in advance, of course, and a sales department can provide its customers with a much better quote if it has supporting documentation from a project department. This allows a salesperson to access the system, retrieve all the estimates prepared by the project managers or presales team, and then provide customers with a concrete quote that includes a detailed timeline.

Here, you can include different rates for the various roles, showing the hours and products included in a quote. When you move to the contract stage, you will also see the hours that were actually sold.

Frode Stenstrøm: You also mentioned the contracts to me. In an earlier broadcast, Pia showed us how you can use the platform for contract management—that is, the contract management part. Just watch the video on YouTube. We said there that these contracts often govern the major framework agreements and purchasing agreements you may have with customers, while sales can create call-off orders or project contracts. I believe you will show us a little later in the overview how you can manage these contracts and the sales side.

So stay tuned to see what it looks like toward the end of the broadcast. Then we have Linda, our project team member.

Merete Falck Erichsen: There are many different people working on these projects, and a project management tool isn't very useful unless you properly track the time spent on the various tasks they are assigned. This way, project team members will be notified of which tasks they have and can log hours against them, allowing the project manager to see whether the tasks are progressing, whether the project is on schedule, or whether it is falling behind.

Frode Stenstrøm: And you just mentioned a key feature of these modern systems: they include time tracking. It’s not a project plan sitting in the project manager’s drawer that the project team members know nothing about. Everything happens in the same tool, so you capture the time spent as well.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And that also brings us to the last person I wanted to highlight here, who in this case is the CFO of Miljøpilotene.

Because he can also see all the hours logged and the progress of the projects, and he will also have the invoice documentation ready. So, with everything that has been done in sales regarding hourly rates, and when the project team member logs their hours and so on, the invoice and supporting documentation are ready in the system.

Frode Stenstrøm: And with that, we have covered the key roles involved in project work within a company.

There are, of course, more roles than the ones we have discussed. But we are also seeing a change now, with other parties becoming involved. Traditionally, the supplier would work with their own plan and tools and deliver something to the customer, while the customer would have no real insight into the planning process beyond what was shared in meetings or through intermediaries. But we have also put together a similar brief overview of the customer's members and team members and their needs. And the first point is perhaps what we mentioned earlier: there are multiple parties involved in a project.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And we may be a subcontractor with subcontractors of our own, in which case we need to keep track of our costs and determine whether or not this is a profitable project for us.

How much does it also cost to purchase these parts from that subcontractor, to purchase services from that subcontractor? The customers may be different legal entities, as they are called, among which the invoice is split. They want transparency and to collaborate with us. They want to know that we are in control, that we know Linda will be working here during these months. We can tell them that before we begin.

Frode Stenstrøm: And there is another aspect to it: when you mention suppliers and subcontractors, you also need end-to-end contract management, so you know how much things cost to buy, what you sell them for, and therefore whether you are making money on them. So, for us, modern project management is not limited to what the supplier does, but involves collaboration on both sides. And more often than not, when we create projects for our customers, we also need to specify how many hours our customers are expected to contribute as part of their input, for example.

And that brings us to the next part, which is collaboration—people working together on a project. We have now become so accustomed to collaborating in Teams, so I think it is important to have both Teams and these portals. We have already mentioned contracts. But it is incredibly exciting to bring all these things together in a single solution, so that there is shared ownership of the project plan, its content, what needs to be done, and, not least, why it needs to be created.

And then there is—you touched on reporting and deviations—but being able to have shared reporting, where subcontractors can also report into the supplier's project plan, which the customer can view. This provides a high degree of transparency into the project and its progress. So those were the roles. We thought we would say a little about the Microsoft approach, because we have now talked a lot about project management in general, project management theory, what the requirements are, and how they change over the years.

But I’ve challenged Merete to tell us a little about the products, services, and tools Microsoft offers to support project management. And that’s a bit of a challenge, because some projects are tiny, while others are very large, and some involve goods and so on. So could you walk us through the tools Microsoft offers?

Various project management tools from Microsoft

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and figuring out all these tools is a jungle in itself. But if you just need a simple task list showing what you need to do that day and when you need to do it, then there’s Microsoft To Do. It’s very simple, can be integrated into Outlook, and gives you an overview. These tasks need to be completed by a certain time.

But if you need a bit more collaboration and more advanced task management, Microsoft has now introduced Planner. It comes in two versions: Planner and Planner Premium. The premium version gives you some additional functionality, including more options for portfolio management and collaboration.

Frode Stenstrøm: And I just have to add that this is a product Microsoft has made. It has been very good and popular, but it has changed names so many times that I actually had to check again: Is it called Tasks in Teams or Planner?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Or Project for the Web.

Frode Stenstrøm: Or Project for the Web. Now Planner is the final piece. In fact, a new upgrade was rolled out just last week, which means you have it both in your browser and in Teams. And the great thing about it is that it gives you an overview, so if you're a member of five projects, or ten projects, you can see them all. It doesn't matter which other tools we're going to talk about now; you can see the big picture.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and if you're tagged in Loop and assigned a task there because someone is taking notes in Teams, it will also appear in your Planner, which is an app in Teams.

Frode Stenstrøm: Fantastic. So then you have the two basics for the smallest types of projects, which you can grow with—that's essentially what we're saying.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Then there is something called Project Online, and, surprisingly enough, it is available as a desktop client. It is still called Project Online. But it is the traditional, very powerful project management tool.

The downside is that it is stored locally on the project manager's PC and is not shared. Nor does it show the hours spent. The project manager then has to manually enter all the hours spent so that you can see the progress of your project. ,

Frode Stenstrøm: And, as always, Microsoft has been working with projects for years, and most people who have worked with project management are familiar with Microsoft Project for desktop. It is a product that is now 25 years old or something like that. Then an online version was released, but we can see that Planner and these other tools are beginning to undermine the very basis for that product’s existence.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Mm, but it’s still the most powerful tool for planning and really getting things under control for your own part. It also has a lot of functionality that they don’t yet have in all the other tools.

Frode Stenstrøm: And perhaps that’s not so surprising when they’ve been working on one for 25 years and the other for three years, so there’s some catching up to do.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Mm-hmm!

Frode Stenstrøm: Then we have a little something that might be a bit surprising, which I know I fought to get onto your list.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, because you might not think about it, but if you don't have large, long-term, complex projects, you can use Microsoft Dynamics Field Service and work orders to manage projects.

They share many of the same features, and the scheduling board that I’m going to show you works for both apps.

Frode Stenstrøm: Both apps. And we have demonstrated Work Order from different perspectives. There are YouTube videos about it that you can watch on our channel, where Stine has shown what it is and how it is used. What we see is that the great thing about work orders is that they are very well suited to projects lasting one, two, or three weeks, with small, simple checklists, and they also support material consumption. For very, very many of our customers who think they need a project management tool or platform, Field Service is actually the answer—they could get a long way with that solution alone. But that brings us to the final topic of the day.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Today’s topic is Project Operations. It offers slightly more advanced project management than work orders. Its advantage over Project Online is that it is integrated into Dynamics 365, allowing you to make it available to the entire company.

Like the CFO we saw at Miljøpilotene, he doesn't want to have to access all his desktop clients installed locally on separate PCs. Here, you get full resource and project management capabilities within the digital platform.

Frode Stenstrøm: So I know that you’ve now put together a brief overview for us to show what to use and when.

So I thought we'd move on to that now. And then, if you could take the first one, Merete?

Merete Falck Erichsen: As mentioned, if it’s mostly simple task management and you mainly need an overview of your own day, you have Microsoft To Do. If you want to use Teams and collaborate a little more with others, there’s Microsoft Planner. Or Tasks in Teams.

If you have very large and complex projects and need dedicated tools for them, there’s Microsoft Project. It has a desktop version, which is the most complex. They also have a product called Project for the Web. It’s actually called Planner now, but you can still use it. That’s the one available in Project Operations.

Frode Stenstrøm: And that brings us to the large ecosystem that we're going to talk about.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And that’s the advantage here: you get the project ecosystem.

There, you have Field Service for shorter projects and Project Operations for larger projects. And one of the key strengths is precisely that it works within the 365 ecosystem.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly. And I’d also like to share a brief reflection, because there are some crucial factors that determine why you should move from the team-based approach to the larger solutions. And I think resource management is one of them: do you need resource management or not? Often, a task is simply delegated to one person, in which case resource management isn’t really that important.

But you've also prepared a brief overview for us here, and we've created a table that gives an overview of the functionality, and... Perhaps you could pick out a couple of the most important features.

Features and complexity of the tools

Merete Falck Erichsen: It depends somewhat on how advanced the task management you're looking at is.

If that’s what you want, you have Project Operations or the Project Online desktop client. Do you need to collaborate? Do you need full integration with Dynamics 365? Or is integration with Teams enough? How much resource management do you need? Do you need it across projects? Or is it enough for me to manage my resources for my project on my local PC?

Or do you need centralized resource allocation that manages all your resources?

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, if the resources are even defined. If I'm working on my own, then hopefully I have control over myself.

Merete Falck Erichsen: But if I had you working with me, I could have kept track of both you and me in my local version, but in our company there are lots of people working a little here, a little there, and a little somewhere else, which makes it even harder to keep track of everyone.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly, exactly.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So you may need reporting, and when everything is in Dynamics 365, you can connect Power BI and generate highly advanced reports from it.

Frode Stenstrøm: And that's a great benefit, because when you're using Dynamics, it means that all the other modules I've shown in previous webinars are available to you.

This means that if you want to communicate with the customer, you can use CashMe Insights to create customer journeys when events occur in the project, thereby freeing up time for project reporting. As you mentioned, you can use Power BI to create reports and status reports. You can manage risk processes and the risks in an individual project, as well as the overall risk across the entire project portfolio.

So, I think there are many good reasons to use Project Operations, even for fairly small projects, if you view them from a portfolio perspective. But as I said, if you only run projects that last 1–2 weeks and involve 1–3 people, then Field Service is actually a perfectly adequate solution.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And it also has a sales component built in.

Frode Stenstrøm: It does. And you can take a look at that, because Stine has demonstrated it in our webinars. So for the rest of this broadcast, Merete, I thought we could focus specifically on Project Operations. Could you tell us a little about Project Operations? Yes

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and the first thing I think I should mention is that Project Operations actually comes in three versions.

This is one of the few Microsoft apps that works both in what we call the CRM or Customer Engagement part of 365 and in the ERP or Finance version of 365. They call it tri-deployment. There is the resource, non-stocked version, light deployment, and stocked production-based.

Frode Stenstrøm: What does that mean?

Merete Falck Erichsen: The first one works in both the Finance and Customer Engagement versions. Number two, light deployment, is only available in Customer Engagement.

That is the one we will talk about the most, because that is where our focus lies as CRM consultants. And the last one is only available in Finance & Operations.

Frode Stenstrøm: Correct.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So the same license will give you access to this product in both systems. We can say that if the first version doesn't work, you can create a custom integration between Finance & Operations and CRM.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, we’ve done that.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So that is also possible. This is therefore a complete product that is integrated with Finance & Operations.

So again, in Light Deployment, which is the version available in CRM, that is what we have control over. That is where you manage all your resources and can view all their attributes, such as whether they have a particular certification or another attribute. You can manage the resources' time and working hours, and time tracking is included.

To make progress on the projects.

Why choose Project Operations?

Frode Stenstrøm: And I think it is important to highlight that. Not many people are aware that the platform includes a good time-tracking module. And customers who want to track their hours can actually use it instead of acquiring a separate time-tracking tool. So the tool offers quite a lot, and I thought we could move on to why you should use it. What would you say to those wondering why they should use Project Operations, now that we have shown them some simpler alternatives?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, it’s for when you need the portfolio and ecosystem that come with it, because it’s an application that integrates sales, project management, and resource management, and in the Light Deployment it takes you all the way through to the invoicing basis. This allows you to improve resource utilization and find the right person for the right project, because you know what skills the different people have. You can also determine which people or roles you need for each project and track the project’s progress.

You can track the project in the plan and see whether it is behind or ahead of schedule.

Frode Stenstrøm: And I know that here at our company, we use this a lot when preparing proposals for customers. We sit down and create a complete project plan, and the great thing about that is that several people are involved. There may be solution architects, developers who need to estimate their tasks, designers who need to contribute, and project managers who need to be involved. This gives us all a single tool to work with when preparing a proposal for a customer.

Sales process and project process

Frode Stenstrøm: So if you contact Merete, you can get a quote for this from her as well, and she will set up Project Operations accordingly. Merete, the tool supports two key workflows. I thought you could walk us through them.

Merete Falck Erichsen: The tool primarily supports a sales process and a project process.

So, if we look at the sales process first, it is essentially the same one you are already familiar with, which Stig and Edvard have previously demonstrated on YouTube. You might start with a prospect or a lead, which is then qualified into a sales opportunity. Here, we refer to project quotations, but it is really a quotation in the sales sense, which then becomes a project contract, or an order as you would previously have known it.

Frode Stenstrøm: And what you're saying there is very relevant, because it is the same process. The only difference is that now, instead of offering an apple or a pear, you are selling a project with all the line items included in it, both materials and labor hours. So it uses the same tables, but provides a very clean and streamlined process.

So that's the sales process. There's really nothing very exciting about it; it's just very simple.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Then you also have a project process. These two processes run more or less concurrently, but you always need to hear from a customer before you can create a project, so you generally always start with sales.

But once you have an idea, you can already start creating a project and planning it. You then send a quote, where the sales department can retrieve all the line items included in the plan. The longest phase is usually the delivery phase. While carrying out the project, you need to keep track of resources, hours, and material consumption before closing the project.

Frode Stenstrøm: And what I think is so great about this is that projects can be created in many different ways, as we know. As you say, a customer might contact their supplier and ask for a quote, and that is where it starts. The salesperson talks to their project manager, project department, or delivery department and asks them to create a project plan.

They create the plan, and once the plan is ready, the sales team can import all the line items from the plan into their quotation contract and send it to the customer, after which revisions can be made. So that is one natural approach. Another approach we often see is when one of our regular customers contacts one of our excellent advisers or consultants and asks them to solve a problem, and then our consultants set up the project.

And sales actually comes into the picture a little later, because the ideation phase has already begun. But the great thing is that regardless of how the project is created, Project Operations supports the two most common alternative processes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: They coexist to some extent.

Frode Stenstrøm: They do, right? And what often happens in practice is that once you've created a plan, it's sent to the quotation stage, the quotation lines are retrieved, and then a quotation is sent to the customer. The customer makes revisions, and the cycle continues over and over again until a contract has been secured, at which point you can move on to delivery.

What is not as easy to see from the diagram is that the system will also handle change orders. Changes often arise during a project, and a collection of changes can then result in a new project contract, for example. And I know it also supports milestone payments and all kinds of progress-based payments.

And it’s important to keep that particular process in mind, because you’re now going to demonstrate it in the product. In upcoming webinars, we’ll show what it’s like to work as a salesperson in Project Operations and what it’s like to work as a project manager in Project Operations, but today we thought we’d give you a little taste of what it looks like and what you can expect.

Again, a standard system, a standard solution. One that you have spent just a few hours installing.

Merete Falck Erichsen: I haven't customized anything.

Frode Stenstrøm: So you've entered some demo data.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, I have.

Frode Stenstrøm: With that, I just wanted to mention, as we do in all our webinars, that the basis for all these demonstrations is a fictional company we have created called Miljøpilotene.

They have a website, miljøpilotene.no, which you can visit. The company develops and installs renewable energy systems and provides project management for the implementation of ISO standards, among other things. So the images you saw earlier and Miljøpilotene are not actually real; they simply give us something we can build, demonstrate, and use to tell a story about what can be achieved using Microsoft technology.

Demonstration of Project Operations

Frode Stenstrøm: And now we'll spend the last 10–15 minutes on the exciting part, shall we?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes.

Frode Stenstrøm: So I click on it, and it works on the first try. That's absolutely wonderful. What are we seeing now with this?

Merete Falck Erichsen: We are now in the table called Project. And this is essentially the standard place to be when working on a project as a project manager.

What I think you should take note of, then...

Frode Stenstrøm: Oh, it's the PC. Yes, it came back.

Merete Falck Erichsen: That’s exactly where you have this process bar, and it matches the process I was just looking at.

Exactly.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And as a company, you’ll want to keep track of where the various projects are in the process, so anything that doesn’t become a new opportunity, quote, or plan is essentially pipeline you haven’t sold.

And then you can also see how many projects you have in the 'delivery phase', for example

Frode Stenstrøm: But what you just said is very important, because one thing is the projects that are currently underway, but in addition to having the classic sales pipeline on vungekortesellet, you can also see how many projects are under consideration, which can probably indicate the level of resources your company will need going forward.

Merete Falck Erichsen: That way, you'll know how many people you need in a given role and when you'll need them.

The other thing we can look at—these are fairly standard screens that you would customize—is a section with estimates, such as when you expect it to end, when the system itself calculates that it is likely to end, and how many hours are planned.

And then there is also the estimated labor cost: how much will it cost my company or the environmental pilots to run this project?

Frode Stenstrøm: And you touched on that earlier as well. They actually use two types of price lists: the cost price list and the sales price list.

Merete Falck Erichsen: There are different planning modes, depending somewhat on the type of company.

Like here, this project is set up with a fixed duration, meaning that the time spent on a task is what matters. In the process pilot, however, the effort is always fixed, whether you work by the hour or based on time.

All such things are supported by this tool.

Frode Stenstrøm: And for everyone who is used to Microsoft Project, this is quite a familiar concept.

Merete Falck Erichsen: It is a little difficult to enter hours in the demo environment when you do not have all the project team members who are supposed to log hours, but once they start logging hours, you will be able to see how many hours have been completed, how much it costs the company, whether they have used materials, and whether there are any other expenses, so you have control over the cost per project.

So we thought we'd move on to the Tasks tab, which is where things get interesting.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, it's fantastic.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And that is the one called Project for the Web, which has become Planner, and which they have integrated directly into the tool. So if you're used to using Project for the Web, that's the tool you get in Project Operations.

Frode Stenstrøm: So I have to remove that, and then you can see what it looks like. There really isn't much to it, no.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Here you can see that you can assign the tasks to a person. For now, I have mostly just assigned them to general roles. They have a start and end date, a duration, and a number of hours.

Frode Stenstrøm: Personally, I think this is absolutely invaluable when I use the tool myself.

So I often don't know who will do the work, but I do know what type of role or resources are required to get it done. That doesn't stop me from creating project plans anyway, and then generating a report showing how many analysts I need, how many people responsible for planning I need, and how many project managers—or, in this case, Magnus, that wasn't it—how much project management capacity I need for the project in question.

Merete Falck Erichsen: You will also see it displayed in a very nice timeline. Yes, now I've loaded it—that's how it goes when you're working.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, that should work.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Here you can see the nice timeline. You can set dependencies between the tasks. The standard options are start to finish, finish to finish. All the

Frode Stenstrøm: the variants available in Project, yes. But what it has, which I think is incredibly cool and wasn't so easy in regular Project, is that if I decide to move the start of this type of task forward, I can just drag it.

Instead of going back to the list and changing the dates, you can actually do it this way, because you can often see it so clearly in the visual overview that you feel it almost has to be like that.

Merete Falck Erichsen: The only thing it can't do is account for the fact that it can create lots of tasks down the line and assign them all to Magnus, making it look like Magnus has to work 100 hours in one day.

Because it can't really automatically schedule the tasks over time.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, resource, I think it's called—activity leveling is what it's called in the Project world.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So you have that in the desktop client, but I haven't added it here yet. Or if I've booked the training manager at only 50 percent, it still shows them as working full-time, so you have to extend the tasks over time yourself.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, at the right time, yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: But the project needs to have something to work on in that as well.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, and they also need to be somewhat mindful of those things. But in any case, compared with sitting down, as I often did in the old days, with PowerPoint and creating timelines, I find that once I’ve put in the effort and created the project basis, we can actually generate Gantt charts directly from the tool.

And I think that's incredibly good.

And we have created project plans with thousands of road alignments, so it can be done.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So here you can now have 1,500 lines up here, and you can have 10 levels down.

Frode Stenstrøm: Exactly.

Merete Falck Erichsen: It’s quite a large project

Frode Stenstrøm: yes.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and you can also have a large number of people assigned to each task. So it doesn't have to be just one person working on a task; you can have several.

And once you have people assigned to the task, you can also get an overview of the required hours per role, as I have here now, and how many hours you need. From here, you can generate what are known as requirements.

Then you click here and generate requirements.

Frode Stenstrøm: What happens then?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Then you create a requirement. If your company has a central resource committee, they can handle the bookings.

Alternatively, you can book them from there. If you do not have the centralized version, you can also book directly from here as a project manager. You can also assign a named resource to a task right from the start, if desired.

Frode Stenstrøm: And this is role-based access control, as I understand it. In our organization, I’m not allowed to request resources myself; it has to go through a designated person.

Sales in Project Operations

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, so this is how you can manage things based on what your company needs. That was really all I intended to show about a project for now. We’ll return to how you actually use this in later broadcasts. I thought I’d move on to sales. So now I’m looking at a quote. It looks quite different from how it looked when Stig demonstrated it, for example.

In Project Operations, they have included a few more charts and a bit more profitability analysis as standard. Precisely because there is a sales price list and a cost price list, the costs are shown above the revenue.

Frode Stenstrøm: This is a tremendous help, because when we prepare estimates for fairly large projects—say, a project of 5,000 hours or more—we know that such projects carry an inherent risk, no matter how solid the basis we have prepared is.

And knowing how much leeway you have before you really start bleeding money is important. And as we said at the outset, this provides decision support. It then becomes easy for a salesperson to determine the right hourly rate to charge the customer for that project without us losing money.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And again, you have the process bar, which is quite similar for sales.

So this runs independently of the process bar on the project.

Frode Stenstrøm: Because this is the seller's perspective that we're looking at now, and you can see that it says contract instead of the traditional proposal section.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Moving on. Here, you essentially move the details of the quote onto the quote line. And if you pay close attention, you can see that these are the same lines I had in my project.

I see. I've now imported all the lines from the project here. That gives me the number of hours estimated by the project manager, and since I have a price list, the prices are added automatically.

Frode Stenstrøm: And that saves a lot of time. Wow, there’s so much here. How can you group this? It says here that you’re not grouping it by anything, but you could group it by role, for example.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, so then I can see how many hours each role took and how much it cost. And here you can probably see that I have assigned different rates to the various roles. One role may require more equipment or in some way be more expensive to operate than another.

Frode Stenstrøm: Junior and senior consultants, for example.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So that goes straight into the system here.

Frode Stenstrøm: Oh, it saves so much time. So often, I’m working on this project and creating things, and then when you need to add it all up, you’re sitting there with Excel, entering the figures, and it’s so easy to enter something incorrectly.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and here someone has already entered the data and reviewed it. As you mentioned, there may be many different roles involved in creating the project plan, and then you can simply retrieve the data directly.

You can also split it up and create an invoicing schedule, specify that the customer should pay as different customers, and of course you can also add regular products.

You can also specify whether this is a fixed price or time and materials, meaning that you can exceed the estimate.

Frode Stenstrøm: And that includes an invoicing schedule, payments at specified milestones, and that sort of thing. It’s really slick, and just to be clear, this is no secret: at ProsessPilotene, we’re going all in on Project Operations for our entire business and all our consultants.

And we believe in it so strongly that we're investing heavily in it ourselves, so I hope that you at home will do the same for yourself.

Merete Falck Erichsen: And again, making a sale in Product Operations will be covered in more detail in another video. For now, this is just a very brief overview of...

Frode Stenstrøm: You show what it is, not how you do it.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So the last thing I wanted to show was resources. Those who have seen Stine's webinar will notice that this looks exactly the same, and that's precisely because it is the same. So if you have both field service and project operations, you can manage the resources in the same view. And, especially if you have resources that can be booked for both, you can see whether she was busy with a field service assignment at that time or working on a project.

Booking customization

Frode Stenstrøm: I asked about the requirements, so I see that it has appeared here like this.

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, so these are the requirements for the roles that I hadn't booked in the project we showed. And these are assigned to roles. All my resources here have a role. I don't have that many, so not many show up. But I did say that I could find the right resource for the right project.

So if I search for availability now, a resource should appear. Looking at the filter here, she is the person who has these attributes and the analyst role. She also has a good proficiency level in the attributes I have specified as requirements for that role. So she can simply select her, book her, and finish.

Here I can specify whether it is binding or non-binding. If there is a central resource committee, you can submit a proposal for the project manager to accept or reject a resource. You can take the entire requirement, or book only a percentage, but I can simply book and finish. She is then booked because she was available during that period.

Hard-booking and soft-booking resources

Frode Stenstrøm: And we use it a lot ourselves too. It’s about what we call hard booking. There’s a signed contract, everyone agrees that it will start on a certain date, and then there’s soft booking, where we think it will happen then, or we simply make a reservation based on the assumption that this is the person who will do the work, but we haven’t taken it any further because the sales process hasn’t progressed far enough to make that necessary.

So you can customize those resource statuses?

Merete Falck Erichsen: Yes, and you can customize the colors here depending on whether it is a soft or hard booking. You can change views and create additional views. Miljøpilotene did not have that many resources, so they did not need that many boards. But for us, it is relevant to know whether someone is a functional consultant, a technical consultant, or an analyst.

Frode Stenstrøm: Stavanger, Bergen, Tórshavn, Moss. Asker—yes, where in the world do they live?

Merete Falck Erichsen: All such things are supported. And when searching for resources, you can specify which organizational unit you work in. You can also have different cost rates for the various resources in the different areas.

Frode Stenstrøm: Fantastic, great.

Merete Falck Erichsen: So that was really what I was planning to show today.

Frode Stenstrøm: That was no small feat ... I would say. Let me show you, if I do it like this

Merete Falck Erichsen: It is a very comprehensive product that affects a great many people in your organization, so this was just a brief look at the product.

Frode Stenstrøm: But in a sense, it is straightforward. Yes, it supports complex scenarios, but it is still not complicated to use. I notice that myself—I spent all day yesterday using Project Operations for the project plans of the projects I’m involved in. And it provides a very good basis for discussing projects.

And in that case, three of us—three ProsessPilotene—worked on the project plan and added tasks to it at the same time. It's incredibly rewarding to get that collaboration working. But I see that today's broadcast is drawing to a close. There are no questions at the moment, so I think we'll simply move on. And just to give a brief summary, we've looked at

Summary and conclusion

Merete Falck Erichsen: Why should you choose Project Operations, and what value does it create for your business? Who is Project Operations relevant for? What needs does implementing Project Operations address? What alternative tools are available?

Field service or simply the desktop client may be the right tool for you. And we have also briefly looked at how Project Operations fits into the system.

Frode Stenstrøm: And with those words, I would like to thank Merete for a fantastic contribution to today's broadcast. If you have any further questions, just leave a comment on this video on YouTube.

Subscribe for more professional insights. And if you liked the content, click Like and share the video with your colleagues. That way, we can spread the good news about what the products can solve for you and your colleagues. The broadcast is produced by the process pilots, who increase the value of your customers through the use of Microsoft technology, and today's demonstration uses Project Operations.

Our analytics team can help you with insight analysis, data analytics platforms, and artificial intelligence, while our collaboration team can create everything from customer portals and loyalty programs to mobile apps that also make data from Project Operations available to your partners. So stay tuned over the coming weeks, when Merete will show you more about how to use this tool.

I, Frode Stenstrøm, have been responsible for the episode and served as host. The project manager is Oddbjørg Berge. Wishing everyone better work processes. See you next time.

This is the first part of our webinar series on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations—the ultimate project management solution. In this first episode, we give you an in-depth introduction to Project Operations, what it is, and why it is Microsoft’s most advanced project management tool.

You can watch the webinar on our YouTube channel. Subscribe to the channel for the opportunity to ask questions directly and discuss them live with our experts.

See you at the webinar!