Using Kanban and Scrum in Agile Project Management
Agile Project Management: In traditional waterfall project management where the end product is visible to the client at the end of the project and adapting to change at that stage of the project is difficult to incorporate. while Agile project management is based on an incremental & iterative approach so after each iteration some features are delivered to the client and to changing requirements by the client can be addressed in the current or coming iterations. In Agile Project management during initial iteration, the prototypes can be done so the client finalizes requirements. In this blog, I am going to discuss on below two Popular Agile Project Management methodologies: – 1. Scrum 2. Kanban SCRUM: Scrum is a project management framework for structuring your project. The project begins with a vision provided by the customer with product features in order of priority. These features become part of the product backlog, which is maintained by the customer or customer’s representative referred to as the Product Owner. A time frame commonly known as an iteration or sprint is created & each iteration or sprint generally from one to four weeks. All product features are divide into these sprints. After all the sprints the final product is delivered to the client. During the sprint all team members meet around 15 to 20 minutes meeting known as a Scrum. During the scrum meeting each member tell the status of current work item which he is working, and the issues faced by him. Fig 01: – Scrum Cycle Roles and Responsibilities: There are three major roles in Scrum Planning: the ScrumMaster, the Product Owner, and the Team. · The ScrumMaster is the keeper of the process, the advocate for the team, and the protector of the team. The Scrum master facilitate team communication, mediate discussions within the team and Product owner. · The Product Owner represents the voice of the customer and has the authority to make decisions about the product development. This Product Owner create the product backlog list & priorities it. Product Owner responsible for communicating the vision to the team. The Product Owner works with the team to answer questions and provide product guidance. · The Team consists of seven plus or minus two people who are responsible for the delivery of the product. The team members report their daily progress in the scrum. Team members select the feature from the black log and work on them. Sprint Planning Meeting: The sprint-planning meeting is held on the first day of every sprint. The ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Team member attend the meeting. The Product Owner presents the set of features to be completed in the sprint and team members determines the tasks and time needed to develop these features. Using these time estimates it is determined whether the team can accomplish these in this spirit else lower priority features go back into the product backlog or to the next sprint. Sprint Review: At the end of the sprint, the team invites stakeholders to a sprint review meeting where the features that were completed in the sprint are demoed and feedback is requested. The stakeholders feedback is noted by Product Owner and incorporates into product backlog. After the Sprint review, the team conducts a retrospective meeting to determine what they did well and what challenges they during the execution of the tasks. In the next sprint what action they can take for better execution of the project. Release Planning: Release Planning is also part of Scrum and is a way to do long-term planning for a time box that after of multiple sprints. This can be done on quarterly basis. Release planning can be feature-driven or time-driven. The release can be internal to confirm system integration and validation Kanban – Incremental Improvements In contrast to Scrum, which have time phase iteration and Spirits, Kanban advocates continuous work on tasks. When new tasks come up, the team evaluates the scope and creates acceptance criteria. Then each task goes to a back-log list. Theses task are taken by the team members on the priority. Kanban is Japanese word which means “visual signal” or “card”. Kanban is big board (as shown above picture) with story cards. These story cards are task with details. Kanban board have states/Phases as columns, which every work item passes through – from left to right. Team members pull work items from the back-log list and work on it and move it to next stage. The only management criteria introduced by Kanban is the so called “Work In Progress (WIP)” as show as the number on the top of each column. By managing WIP you can optimize flow of work items. Besides visualizing work on a Kanban board and monitoring WIP, nothing else needs to be changed to get started with Kanban. If a state reaches its pre-defined WIP limit, no new work can enter that state. The bottlenecks in the progress are visible – you can simply look at the Kanban Board to see where your process needs improvements. Once the Current work items are less than WIP a new work items comes in to the stage and team members will work on them. This is a pull system rather then pull system. In Kanban teams can meet ongoing basis and move the work item on the board. In this the team members when once completed this task and task acceptance criteria are meet can move the task to next stage and pull new task for him. The goal of Kanban is to identify potential bottlenecks in your process and fix them, so work can flow through it cost-effectively at an optimal speed or throughput. Conclusion Take a small step toward big value; get started with agile project management to create high-impact development teams with minimal business disruption. 1. Improved ability to manage changing priorities 2. Greater Productivity 3. Increased Visibility 4. Better delivery predictability 5. Increases morale and motivation MS Project 2016 latest version now offers the 2 new
Where do agile best practices fit into MS Project Technologies
I had the fortune of working for a start up about 12 years ago. They started implementing an agile methodology. The engineering manager had started using an Excel spreadsheet to collect user stories. The team was meeting daily and felt good about taking their first steps toward a more agile methodology. We quickly started pre-sprint planning meetings, conducting sprint demos and post-mortems. We advanced to playing agile poker and the $100 test with sponsors. We knew who the pigs were and who were the chickens. Team members were being added and removed as needed. We felt good about our agile approach and extending the approach to our other engineering groups. Everything was great until the CTO came to me and asked me for a schedule. I patiently explained the Agile Manifesto at which time he asked for a schedule and a roadmap. He was also considering another product line and wanted a vision, business case and release plan. I am convinced my experience is repeated over and over. I did not have Project Pro 2016 nor Project Online at the time, but this is what I would have done if I did. Earlier this year, Microsoft released a version of Project Pro that included agile features. The first place you are going to see a change is when you create a new project. The new Scrum Project, Kanban Project and Waterfall Project templates are available when you create a new project. Clicking on the Scrum Project template launches you directly into the Scrum view. You can change this by clicking on Project > Agile and updating the Agile setting, including None to switch back to a Waterfall methodology. You can start entering user stories and tasks. Of course, if you are like me, I would want a view where I could copy and paste my list of user stories from my Excel file. To do this, simply click on the Sprint Planning Sheet. I can now schedule and manage my backlog and sprints including dates. Microsoft Project also includes a couple of Current Sprint views for my daily standup meetings. While these are awesome features, and something the community has been asking of Microsoft for a long time (and I mean a long time), this is not the exciting part. I now have the ability to pull in the virtually impossible phases of the project my CTO was asking for. I can build out a proper WBS for all of the phases of a project and track them in a single tool. This is what I need to do. Assuming you have a project plan template with your WBS and roadmap. First, configure your project plan to use the Scrum Methodology. For the Agile field, select No for all tasks in your WBS except those tasks that will be managed using an agile methodology. Add (or copy and paste from Excel) the list of user stories and tasks to your appropriate summary task. You will also want to add custom fields to track Story Points to better understand you sprint velocity. With a couple of sprints under your belt, you will be able to estimate the remaining number of sprints based on the story points for the tasks in the backlog. When you save your project to Project Online, you need to be a little clever to show the same views in PWA Many of the agile practitioners struggle to complying with their executives request for waterfall-like artifacts. Even more project managers struggle to find their way in the forever changing landscape of agile. Combining agile with classic PMBOK project management can bridge the divide between rapid changes and structure resulting in a more accurate, high quality project plan and thrilled sponsors. To learn more about the agile features in Project Pro, register for the recording of the webinar “Know how to use the new Project Pro Agile Features (end-to-end)”.
How to Migrate SharePoint List Items to Project Online
Recently we did a Project Online/SharePoint Online Implementation based projects which included AdValue (Project Portfolio Management Package) implementation along with the migration of list items from SharePoint 2010 to Microsoft Project Online instance and creating projects from those list items. There were around 200 list items and more than 50 list columns in the old SharePoint list. So now the question is how this could have been done efficiently. Here, for explaining the steps, I am using limited rows. You can use as many needed. Also, I am referring old SharePoint list as source list and new SharePoint list as destination list. Below are the steps to Migrate SharePoint List Items to Project Online: Step 1: Define the fields mapping strategy (source to destination): We first needed to decide with client how list columns should be mapped to PWA custom fields. An excel template would help here. List Column Name List Column Type PWA Field Name (To be mapped with list column) PWA Field Type Project Title Single line of text Project Name Text Project Start Date Date and Time Project Start Date Date Project Finish Date Date and Time Project Finish Date Date Total Team Members Number Total Team Members Number Total Estimated Cost Currency Total Estimated Cost Cost Project Description Multiple lines of text Project Description Text Project Owner Person or Group Project Owner Text Type Of Project Choice Type Of Project Text Leveraging the same template, we created our mapping strategy. Step 2: Export data (in excel) from source list to be migrated: Go to the source list i.e. Project Requests. Export list items to excel. Step 3: Normalize the Excel Data for migration: Open the excel containing source list items. Here, I am keeping all list columns for mapping and removing default columns Item Type & Path. Step 4: Define the enterprise custom fields mapping in destination list: Go to the destination list. Go to list settings. Go to Project Server settings. Map list columns to PWA fields. Note: We can’t map the list item ID here. It can be mapped using SharePoint Designer list workflow. For mapping a list column to enterprise custom field, make sure that both have same data type. Multiline text type field values will be mapped only up to 255 characters. Step 5: Importing data from excel Create a CSOM solution in visual studio. For this, you can refer my previous blog .NET Managed Client Side Object Model for Project Online. Add a new class ExcelParser.cs to your visual studio solution. Here, I have named my solution as SPListItemCreation. This class file is used to read data from excel file. Step 6: Creating bulk list items List items can be created quickly using CSOM. Modify your Program.cs as my Program.cs file. Run the solution. List items will be created in your destination list. Step 7: Create projects from list items There are two options for creating projects which can be leveraged based on requirement and data volume. 1. From list item: Select the list items, for which you want to create a project in PWA. Here I am selecting all items. Under Items, click on Create Projects. You will see a pop-up form. This form will show you details of mapping done in Step 4. Select Enterprise Project Type under which you want to create the project. Click Create Projects. Projects will be created in PWA. 2. Using workflow: In SharePoint Designer list workflow, you can use the action “Create a project from the current list item with this Enterprise Project Type” to create the project from the list item. Also, you can customize the list workflow for creating projects only after certain approvals or column values. Finally, validate list columns & enterprise custom fields mapping Open project, which you have created from list item. Validate field values. You will see the same values as there in the list item. This is how you can create bulk SharePoint list items. In case of query, add your comments below.
Scrum vs Kanban: What’s the difference?
From Agile to Waterfall to Scrum to Kanban, there are a variety of project management frameworks, and choosing which methodology to follow can be tough. Scrum and Kanban, both related to the Agile family, are trending methodologies. Both have pros and cons of using them, and the key is to figure out why and when should you go for Scrum or Kanban. Let’s understand a bit about agile before we get into Scrum vs. Kanban. Agile project management: Agile means the ability to respond quickly to changes. In traditional project management technologies like Waterfall, the customer may get to see the end product on project completion, while in case of agile, sprints or iterations of shorter duration are delivered to the client. This way customer has more control over the projects. In Agile project management, new requirements are developed during the project execution and accommodated in the coming sprints. And this way, the outcome is different from what was thought at starting of the project. MORE INTERESTING ARTICLES REPORTS & DASHBOARDS FOR AGILE PROJECTS Now we would be comparing two agile methodologies – Scrum and Kanban. Scrum: In this methodology, we list down all features or wish list items to product backlog. Then we do sprint planning and add those wish list items to different sprints. The team then chooses which work they can complete during the sprint and moves the work from the product backlog to the sprint backlog. During this Scrum Master keeps the team focused on its goal. At the end of each sprint, the team presents the work they have completed at a sprint review and retrospective meeting. When the next sprint begins, the team chooses another chunk of the product backlog and begins working again. Kanban: Kanban is a visual system for managing work, related processes and their flow. The goal of Kanban is to identify potential bottlenecks in your process and fix them, so that work can flow through it cost-effectively at an optimal speed or throughput. Kanban board and Scrum board are usually associated with whiteboards and To Do – Doing– Done categories. As shown below, we can put the work on different categories. Things that are to be done, currently in process, and that are done. To Do – Doing – Done columns are not canonic, and usually teams expand ‘Doing’ section according to their needs (ex. Development, Testing, etc.). Kanban Methodology follows a set of principles and improves the flow of work which promotes gradual improvements to processes. These are the advantages of both Scrum and Kanban methodologies: Advantages of Scrum Advantages of Kanban Transparency Flexibility Improved credibility with clients Focus on continuous delivery High product quality Increased productivity Product stability Increased efficiency Team members reach sustainable pace Allows team members to focus Allows client to change priorities and requirements quickly Reduce wasted work/wasted time Now, let’s look at the differences: Scrum AKanban A lot of sprint planning is done in the beginning. It is open to make changes on the go. It means there is less rigidity and things can change as and when required. Work is done within time frame (usually 2-4) weeks. The goal is to produce a tangible deliverable after a sprint. There is no fixed length of sprints. Teams pull a task from backlog list and work on it. The product is released after the complete cycle of sprint. (may be 3 or 6 weeks) Release occurs continuously depending on the backlog items. Daily meetings and retrospective meeting at the end of sprint. Daily meeting not required, and Sprints are not defined in Kanban. Scrum Master will be there to drive the project No specific role required. It helps firms to save time and money. It focuses on the continuous improvement, productivity, and efficiency. The total work is done in batches/sprints. The entire project is performed on the single-threaded work item flow. It measures productivity using velocity of sprints. It measures the cycle time in the work flow process. Every individual has its role and responsibilities. No set roles, so there’s flexibility in terms of individual responsibilities. It is not possible to add new work items to the ongoing Sprint. New work items can easily be added and taken up on the basis of priority. A sprint backlog is owned by only a single team. Multiple teams can share the Kanban board. Best for teams with stable and defined priorities that may not change as much over time. Best for projects with widely-varying priorities and requirement. Conclusion No framework is perfect, and each has its own benefits and flaws. Project managers should focus on the aspects of Scrum and Kanban, which can be used effectively to develop products and services for their organizations. Given the advantages and disadvantages of both framework approaches, development and product teams can choose which framework works the best for them. Recently, some teams have also experimented by combining both frameworks and taking best practices from each of it to achieve better team synergies and improved productivity. If you don’t know already, now Microsoft Project Professional 2016 supports both Scrum and Kanban agile project boards. This opens up a world of easier scheduling for Agile methodology within projects. I hope that you enjoyed this article, and if you want to know more on this topic, you can register here for our webinar recording of – ‘The Future of PPM’ Yashwant shrimali System Analyst-EPM Advaiya Solutions Inc Udaipur, Rajasthan, India TALK TO OUR EXPERT!
Reports & Dashboards for Agile Projects
Implementing Projects in an ‘Agile’ way is common norm and best practice these days. Agile project management allows Project Managers to keep track of the project deliverables and provide up to date project status. This results in greater visibility thus delivering better implementation of software with approval of all the stakeholders. Thanks to Agile methodology through which one can react very quickly to changes and loopholes in the development process. The main idea behind using Agile framework is to break a complex project into smaller chunks called sprint and simultaneously testing it in manageable, two- to four-week cycles rather than building the entire product and then testing to find hundreds of product flaws. Why Dashboards are important for Agile Projects? Many organizations still follow the waterfall methodology of planning a project where they set an annual or biannual planning cycle to achieve the set goals. This results in poor execution of the projects. And for those organizations who have adopted the Agile methodology, even that does not guarantee best results. So, the need is to get a clear view of all the deliverables in a consistent manner. Dashboards and reports can help provide complete visibility across projects. Dashboards provide a snapshot of how sprints, iterations, and projects are doing at a given point in time. Reports help you regularly monitor your team’s progress against targets. Let us have a look at the reports that are useful for tracking key components related to an Agile project. MORE INTERESTING ARTICLES SCRUM VS KANBAN BOARDS: 11 MAJOR DIFFERENCES Iteration Burn Down: A burn down chart is a graphical representation of work left to do versus time. At iteration level, the burndown chart presents the work remaining and completed in the iteration. It tells you whether the committed tasks would be completed by the end date or not. It is the easiest way to determine the chances of iteration getting completed. Team & Iteration Velocity Chart: Put simply, sprint velocity represents the average number of story points a team can take on for a Sprint. Velocity measures the amount of work a team can tackle during a single aprint and is the key metric in Scrum. In other words, it represents the average number of story points a team can handle in a single iteration. When one knows the team velocity, it becomes easy to distribute the work among the team members and it becomes easier for a project manager to assign work to team members at the beginning of a sprint. Defects Trend Keeping a track of defects is very necessary for smooth running of a project. Defects Trends helps in tracking defects count for a release or a product. Not all defects may be resolved within the Sprint as they are identified. Non- blocker defects tend to get carried into future Sprints or iterations. Thus, having a view which shows the urgency of fixing a defect helps the developers tremendously. All these reports and dashboards tell us whether we are on track or not. By incorporating reports for Agile projects, one can ensure the following: You can track how good or bad a project is performing. You can immediately identify the sprints which are not doing well and thus can take measures to reduce the risks and issues involved in the sprints. You have reports to manage the team in a better manner and regularly monitor your team’s progress against goals. You can identify those teams which are not working at the desired pace or whose work has exceeded the bug count. Thus, reports help stakeholders, project managers and team members to observe, manage work allocation and work distribution, and approve funding. Himanshu Nandwana Technology Analyst – DW/BI Advaiya Solutions Inc Udaipur, Rajasthan, India TALK TO OUR EXPERT!
How to ensure effective demand management with Project Online
Within an organization, project requests can originate from anywhere. The absence of demand management process makes it chaotic and difficult to figure out as to what is being worked on and by whom. Establishing a right process to centralize all demand requests, use of standardized templates and governance processes help streamline the process for consolidating data collection and providing the appropriate amount of flexibility and autonomy for individual business units. Demand management as a concept in Microsoft Project Online integrates project proposals, portfolio analysis, and project management through workflows and project detail pages. It captures all work proposals at one place, guides the proposals through a multistage governance process, helps decision-makers make decisions about which proposal to approve, and track progress on project execution until the work is completed. Microsoft Project Online can serve as an effective demand management tool for your organization by capturing demand as potential projects directly into Project Server or via a SharePoint list that is connected to Project Server. The above figure shows the four phases of demand management, and how they are interlinked. Within each phase, there are various stages, and each stage can be associated with a Project details Page (PDP) in Project Web App and linked as a workflow to Enterprise project template (EPT) in Project Online. Let’s understand the demand management concept through a simple example: – Consider yourself as a program or project manager for ABC organization who is using Microsoft Project Online for managing projects and proposals. Now per recent management decision, you are asked to collect proposals and requests, as well as project ideas from different people in your team or even across the organization at a centralized space. A simple way to do that would be to collect these through email requests or one to one conversation, and then you consolidate them and manually enter in Project Web App (PWA) one by one. The problem with this is that it’s pretty time consuming, and not easily scalable for a continuous and seamless agile process. Plus, the proposals could be submitted in different formats, which creates a further overhead of converting them to projects in Project Web App (PWA). READ MORE ARTICLES PROJECT SERVER 2007 END OF LIFE – MIGRATION OPTIONS TO CONSIDER PLAN & MANAGE WITH ADVALUE – THE ULTIMATE ADD-ON FOR PROJECT SERVER/PROJECT ONLINE It would be great to have a mechanism of having everyone enter their requests and ideas into Project Web App (PWA) directly through a SharePoint list tailored per organizational needs (using specific list items to capture the request), and then you could convert a subset of those list items to projects? Just start by creating a custom SharePoint list within your Project Online environment with criteria that matchProject Custom fields Ensure that this list captures the minimal information you require to manage demands. In the example above there are two requests entered as: New Windows Phone App and New Windows 8 App Custom SharePoint list items with columns such as Description, Submitter, Budget Cost, Budget Estimate, Risk, and Rating) can be created to capture the demand requests. All the List items, or ideas listed can be easily “promoted” to Projects by clicking on Create Project button as available inside the list items control, which brings up the “Create Projects in Project Web App” dialog which lists the data captured in the Ideas & Requests list and intelligently maps to equivalent PWA custom fields automatically. For instance: Budget Cost maps to Total Cost, or the Risk choice list maps to Risk Rating. Note that, you can always set the default mappings, by navigating to the SharePoint list settings, and choosing Project Server settings options. Once all mappings are done and you are ready to proceed to choosing the process that would be used to evaluate and execute the request. In Project Sever and Project Online, there’s a concept of Enterprise Project Type (EPT) that allows diverse projects to be driven by different workflows and in this new scenario we will choose the New Product Development EPT. Now post process selection, move to the command “Create Projects” which will then convert the SharePoint list items as selected as projects in PWA. You will be notified that the projects have been successfully created in PWA: Now navigate to PWA’s Project Center and you can now see your new projects listed there. Let’s select the New Windows 8 App project and you will notice there are five phases in the workflow specific to New Product Development EPTs associated. All the information captured in the list item is also transferred to the project’s custom fields as shown below: Microsoft Project simplifies overall project management by providing an evaluation phase through out of the box portfolio analysis capabilities of PWA before the execution phase. It’s an end to end process without any customization or a single line of code required! PROJECT STATUS REPORTING TOOL Keep things up-to-date and focus on your project’s success
AdValue is now available with new and enhanced features
We are very excited to present some of the new features that are now part of AdValue – one of the most powerful project management solutions. We deployed AdValue on various project sites, and based on our experience and feedback from the users, we have now integrated some new features in it. The key highlights of the new features are: Web-based version of project manager and executive dashboards, Monthly and weekly task completion updates for project manager, Role-based access to project workspace, Risk heat map under project workspace, Overall performance and reliability improvements, and much more. 1. Project Manager Dashboard The web-based version of the project manager dashboard is now available with more in-depth insights on task completion velocity. So, you can track the project progress in the past month or week at any time, and take necessary actions to finish the project on time. Fig.1: Project Manager Dashboard with task completion velocity details Fig.2: Web-based Project Manager Dashboard OTHER INTERESTING READS:1. ADVALUE EARNS TWO PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE AWARDS FROM FINANCESONLINE2. PLAN & MANAGE WITH ADVALUE – THE ULTIMATE ADD-ON FOR PROJECT SERVER/PROJECT ONLINE 2. Executive Dashboard Fig.3: Web-based Executive DashboardThe web-based version of the executive dashboard is now live and lets you get all project and portfolio insights anywhere from any device, platform or browser. 3. Team Member Dashboard Team members can now get a complete summary of the current/overdue/future tasks at-a-glance, and quickly navigate to the project workspace with just one-click. Fig.4: Web-based Team Member Dashboard 4. Project Workspace The role-based project workspace displays the information based on the user logged in. Also, without much roaming around, the tasks, risks, issues and other lists data can directly be accessed and added right from the workspace. Fig.5: Project Workspace view for Project Managers Fig.6: Project Workspace view for Team Members Now, project managers can view assignments of all the project resources in a single view, and team members can see all their associated tasks and items from the workspace. 5. Risk Heat Map With this update, we are launching a new feature in AdValue called ‘Risk Heat Map’ that will display identified risks in the project, their severity, mitigation measures, owner, and other useful information. Fig.7: Risk Heatmap We’re also working on further improving and developing other exciting features like stakeholder analysis, issue tracker and few others, that we can’t wait to unveil. So stay tuned for more updates and additions in this new year! Interested in AdValue Solutions? Checkout the pricing & features here
Leveraging automated workflow to streamline project processes
Effective project management is the key towards successful project execution within any organization. There are several important aspects of a successful project management within an organization and one of the most important is process automation. An effective and robust process automation may result in a faster and smoother project management. In an organization where the project processes are followed manually, it becomes very cumbersome to handle the project and track information about processes because of scattered data. With advancement in traditional data storage systems, the storage is increasingly moving towards cloud, emails, OneDrive, etc., hence enabling a central process in the organization for project execution. There are several tools available for process automation, and custom applications can also be developed for specific needs. Microsoft Project – a project management tool solution – enables extensive process using SharePoint designer workflow, Nintex workflow, Microsoft flow. Project workflow automation Automated demand management workflow can be built for different project types. By default, Microsoft Project Online provides workflow phases as – create, finish, manage, plan and select. Customized phase and stage for approval can be added according to the organizations’ needs. Below are few actions and examples which can be automated inside the workflow Customized email notification on different stages of the workflow Approval task assignment and notification to task owner for the action taken Project information can be marked as read-only/required based on project stages and phases Using stage gate condition, a checklist for the actions to be performed can be verified before moving to the next phase/stage/ These are only high-level and most generic actions. Specific processes on each stage gate, whether its integration with other system or updating something on the project itself can be performed with the help of the workflow. Configuration based interface provisioning by SharePoint Designer enables quick development of such workflows. Process automation on project artifacts Microsoft Project Server/ Project Online offers workspace for each project created that allows to store all the project related information in a consistent manner. There are several workspace-based processes, which can be automated that includes change request management, issue/risk management, action required, document approval process, document retention, among others. For example, to handle a change request in a project, a customized SharePoint list can be created and using the SharePoint workflow on the change request, approval process of that request from the financial department or stake holder can be implemented. Microsoft Project Server/ Project Online by default provides the register for risks and issues in project workspace. Risk management process can be built, wherein whenever a risk is added for a specific project, notification emails can be sent to the project owner and the sponsor for approval. Process can be built when a new issue has been identified and added in the issues register, and task action can be assigned to the owner of the issue and the notification be sent to the project manager. In this blog post, we discussed generic workflows and processes, which can be easily automated with the help of SharePoint and Project Server workflows. However, process automation with specific requirements like integration with other LOBs, calling any external APIs on project publish, project closure workflow, sending custom email notifications, enabling document approval process up to nth level of approvals and review, can be configured per the need. Using SharePoint Designer for workflow development requires less development and allows focusing more on the process enablement. Microsoft Project Server/ Project Online built on the top of SharePoint leverages all the features of SharePoint and can merge these with its project processes like publish, save, checking, etc., to create more robust processes. You can learn more about this topic in our upcoming webinar on ‘Streamline your process with Project Online’ on January 9th at 11:00 AM. Register now to view the Recording! Sonika Jain EPM Developer Advaiya Solutions Inc Udaipur, Rajasthan, India TALK TO OUR EXPERT! CALL NOW CALL NOW
Microsoft Teams and Project Online integration using Microsoft Flow
Microsoft Teams is a unified communications platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. The service integrates with the company’s Office 365 subscription office productivity suite and features extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products. Microsoft Teams is being used by over 125,000 organizations across the world, since its launch on March 14, this year. It has come out as core product of Microsoft ‘s vision for intelligent communications – bringing together conversations, meetings, files, Office apps, and third-party integrations at a single hub in Office 365. And as Teams become a single hub for team work, it is obvious that all project related updates should be available as posts in Teams as well. Though Teams provide a bunch of connectors to integrate with other application, but not for Microsoft Project Online. This integration is important because it would help to keep the project team updated with the latest project happenings in the form of posts in Microsoft Teams. Isn’t it interesting? In this article, I’m going to share a simple scenario about how we can quickly integrate Teams with Project Online using Microsoft Flow. To give you a bit of context, Microsoft Flow is a cloud based workflow service that enables automation of common tasks and business processes across the most common apps and services. It has Project Online connector and supports the following triggers: Microsoft Teams is core to our vision for intelligent communications—bringing together conversations, meetings, files, Office apps, and third-party integrations—to provide a single hub for teamwork in Office 365. New project created New resource created New task created Project published And following are the actions available for Project Online: Check-in and publish project Checkout project Create a new resource Creates new project Creates new task List projects List tasks Let’s see how we can develop Microsoft Flow workflow to post a message in Microsoft Teams whenever a new project is created in Project Online. To begin, sign-in (or sign-up), into Flow and click on Create from blank. Step 2: At the bottom of the screen, click on Search hundreds of connectors and triggers Step 3: In the search bar, type Project and you will see the list of connectors available for project management. Step 4: Click on Project Online Step 5: Next screen shows all the supported triggers for Project Online. In this scenario, we want to post message in Teams whenever a new project is created so select Project Online – When a new project is created. Step 6: Provide your project root site URL and click on + New step Step 7: Click on Add an action Step 8: Here we need to specify action for Microsoft Teams. Type Teams in search bar and click on Microsoft Teams Step 9: Select Microsoft Teams – Post message. Step 10: Select Team Id to post a message. Step 11: Select Channel Id. Step 12: Draft a message for post using custom text and fields from Project Online. From the right Dynamic panel, select needed field and drop it in the Message box. See the below image: Step 13: Once you have drafted the message, give a name for your Flow and click on Create Flow to save this workflow settings. Testing Flow Go to Project Online and sign-in Create a new project Check Microsoft Teams to receive project creation notification in the configured channel There you go! You have successfully integrated Project Online with Microsoft Teams without any coding. If you are looking for more such integrations with Microsoft Project Online, our PPM experts can help you with the right solution. Here I showed just one example for a trigger and action. Similarly, you can add more triggers as you require. Good Luck! You may find these useful: Related services & solutions Robotic process automation Automate repetitive tasks focus on higher-value work Read more Implementation Deploy and adopt automated, integrated, and customized applications and tools, to stay proactive. Gain a complete picture of your organization with a system of integrated applications and data stores. Read more Collaboration with SharePoint and … Automate workflows and empower teamwork Read more Business productivity Read more Related Technologies: Apps and Business Automation Integration Adoption Services