5 ways telecoms benefit from project portfolio management
Project Portfolio Management (PPM) isn’t just an IT method; it’s a valuable management process that allows organizations to achieve their full potential. Project portfolio management in the telecom industry Many different companies are involved in the telecom industry. They all have their own products, goals, and work methods. Telco employees are required to work in constantly changing environments and various organizational structures. Diversification is a challenging task, that’s for sure. While project managers from all industries may have similar backgrounds, telco project team members are comprised of professionals from different departments. The essential skill for a telco project manager is to recognize and utilize all team members’ expertise and skills, trust them all, and delegate appropriately. What are the characteristics of telecommunications projects when it comes down to services? Projects to add capabilities to an already existing public network Establishing a network of businesses specialized in your field Projects for the establishment and dissolution of a temporary network The relative importance of each category’s constraints on quality, time, and cost varies greatly! In reality, quality is the primary condition for public services. For enterprise networks, the cost is the primary concern. Temporary installations are crucially important. Projects in telecom industries have complex interfaces, both internally and externally, international orientation, multidisciplinary activities, no mass production but many user requirements, and a long planning stage (even temporary installations). Project portfolio management solutions can address all these challenges. The proper foundation and maturation in portfolio management strategies and capabilities will allow telecom organizations to manage their IT departments as a business. This means that they can think and act in terms of business outcomes and business values and provide flexibility for workflows. Telecom companies should be able to adapt PPM best practices and develop and implement a well-defined, end-to-end portfolio management process, capabilities, and services. PPM solutions can provide a wide range of capabilities if done correctly. Facilitates leadership-level enterprise goals & objectives planning Coordination with senior leadership in order to identify areas of strategic and operational growth Leadership guidance through strategic discussions Through enterprise/IT exercises, empowers strategic investment planning Develops program and project delivery frameworks Implements governance processes for portfolio and program management. Delivers projects and programs using a comprehensive and efficient PMO catalog of services Why is project portfolio management valuable in the telecom sector? Project portfolio management is valuable and necessary in the telecommunications sector for many reasons. Organizations that adopt PPM solutions achieve their strategic business goals. They also experience greater productivity, cost savings, and less chaos. This allows them to deliver high-quality results that give their team the best chance to serve the clients. Let’s take a closer look at the reasons why PPM is so important in the telecom sector. To clearly define the objective of projects If the scope of a project is unclear, problems can arise because the most important thing, which is the goals, tasks, costs, deadlines, and costs for each project, was not completed. Insufficient resources may also cause a project to lose money rather than make it rich. The initially unattainable budget means that success is not on the horizon. Project justification and governance are critical components of project portfolio management. PPM solutions allow organizations to evaluate ongoing and proposed projects and programs to accurately assess the allocations of resources, time, and budget. PPM can help improve an organization’s return on investment (ROI) and on-time delivery. Looking for a project portfolio management solution implementation partner? Connect with us. To enable automation Automation is a key feature of PPM. The program management module eliminates multiple-point tools and paper manuals. It automates processes to manage scope, risk and quality, budgets, schedules, and other details. Provides scalability Setting unrealistic deadlines is a bad idea. Not even close. No one expects tasks to be completed in perfect condition. PPM can help telecom companies to scale up or down as required based on critical factors such as unplanned spikes or changes in project estimates, shifts in enterprise strategy or priority, resource constraints that cannot be mitigated, inability to secure the right resources or allocate the right skill sets at the right time, and inability to obtain or allocate the right amount of resources. PPM can guide project managers to help them implement the most appropriate levels of project and program management. Reduces time spent on low-value projects Organizations often fail to stop lower-value projects and instead spend more time on work that doesn’t add value. PPM covers the entire project life cycle, from idea generation through to operation. With project portfolio management solutions, telecom teams can collect more information earlier in the project life cycle, allowing them to drive projects and programs faster and execute them more efficiently. Alleviates Resource Planning Challenges Resource planning is an essential aspect of project and portfolio management. It’s crucial to ensure the best resources are available for the right projects at the right time. Enterprise PPM solutions collect vital information from cross-functional teams (IT Finance, HR, etc.). Portfolio management and IT management teams can align resources at an earlier stage in the project management cycle. This allows for proper analysis and resource reservation. Then resources can be allocated to prioritized projects according to organizational needs. Final thoughts: Project management in the telecommunication industry requires a high level of skill and knowledge. Project managers are responsible for managing and controlling work execution and wave rolling plans, analyzing new constraints and requirements, and reducing time and costs. Effective communication between stakeholders across the globe is essential for team management. It is time-consuming and can be frustrating. The telecom industry has been able to meet all of these challenges thanks to digital transformation. Telcos are taking advantage of AI-powered PPM solutions to simplify their work and give employees a chance to live a more humane life, which increases the likelihood of reaching the project’s goals and allows you to respond to the needs and expectations of project stakeholders proactively and healthily. Looking for PPM partners to get a custom PPM solution ready to cater to your telecom business needs? Connect
Project management tools by Microsoft
Planning is an important part of the project life cycle. Before starting the execution of any project the project manager needs to create a plan of action which includes breaking down the overall project goal into tasks and assigning resources to these tasks and defining the timeline for each task. Project planning plays an important role in project success. It enables the organization to decide the timeline of the project and anytime track project progress against this schedule. For project planning and scheduling Microsoft has some awesome tools and organizations select their tool as per their requirement and available resources. Microsoft provides its project planning and scheduling offerings majorly in three forms – Project Server (On-Premises) Project Online Project for the web. Microsoft Project Server on-premises and online has almost similar features. If an organization has the proper infrastructure, and resources trained on the infrastructure side and potentially need more data security then Project Server On-Premises is best suitable for them. Project Server on-premises requires installation and maintenance of at least Microsoft Project Server, Microsoft SharePoint Server, and Microsoft SQL Server. Eventually, everything is moving to the cloud. It reduces the burden of managing the servers on-premises and installing patches. If an organization has O365 licenses, then it must opt for Project Online. All the features of Project On-Prem and Project Online are similar for project scheduling and managing. Project Online and on-prem are best for managing complex project plans. For Project Online Project P1, P3 and P5 licenses are available which an organization can purchase as per their need. For managing small projects, Project for Web is quite a beautiful tool. Project for Web has several features which are special. Project For Web is built on Microsoft Power Platform whereas Project Server On-Prem and Project Online are built on SharePoint. Data of Project for Web stored in Dataverse, which could be easily accessible via other tools of Power Platform including Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI. Project For the web is best suited for users who want to manage a simple project plan with tasks and resource assignments without much complexity. It integrates into the Microsoft 365 suite. Program and portfolio management, financial management, resource management, and other advanced project management functionalities like baselining, critical path, etc. are not available in Project for the web. Along with Project scheduling, there are other project-related entities that are also important like risk, issue, change requests, etc. Project for web accelerator is a Power App that extends Project for the web. It provides several additional features to the Project for the web. Project Request Program Risk Issues Changes Status Project Request – Using Project for the web accelerator, project managers can create project requests with minimal information. By looking at the request information stakeholders can decide and approve it. After the approval, the request was converted into Project. Want information about our project portfolio management solutions? Click here. Program – To see a bigger picture users can create a hierarchy of programs and projects. By this users can group projects by their characteristics. Risks and Issues – A project manager always wants to track and maintain a log of Risks and issues in a project along with their mitigation plan. Changes – As the project proceeds with its deliverable, there are changes coming in terms of scope or design. These can be logged using Project for web accelerator. Status – The project manager can routinely update stakeholders about the health of the project. It also provides flexibility to centralize the status reports. Microsoft has Its project management offering for all types of organizations. Now it’s up to the users which tool they want as per their project requirements and resource availability. Shruti Vyas Shruti is a technical consultant at Advaiya. With over nine years of experience in the IT industry, Shruti has a passion for data and an ability to understand and analyze it effectively. She shares her insight on various topics such as custom application development, project server customization, client-side scripting etc.
Critical path in Project for the web
When working on a certain project, it is very important to analyze how various tasks would affect your project timeline. Project for the web provides such a method to calculate critical path of a project. Project for the web helps you to calculate the estimated finish date of your project and the delay or timely completion of your project. What is critical path? Critical path of a project is the complete series of all the tasks in your project that needs to be completed on time to complete your project on its due date. Example: In this case, assuming that there is no dependency within your tasks, then the critical path of your project is Task 3 because it ends the latest and thus defines the finish date of your project. What is critical path? Without the ability to calculate obstacles within the time period of a project or analyzing different portions of a project which defines the completion, many projects would never even leave the ground. Critical path is basically a ‘red alert’ for your project. If your project does not follow the timing of the critical path, it will never be able to finish within the timeline. How to calculate critical path? Divide your project into tasks. Identify all the dependencies. Estimate the duration of your tasks. Determine the critical path based on the task finish date. Now moving away from theory, let’s see how we can work on this with Project for the web. Project for the web has three tabs in the top menu bar: Grid: Grid gives you a project online type of view of your project by listing tasks, resources, and other information in a tabular form. Board: Board gives a more concise bucket view of your project wherein when you click on each task, a detailed view is opened. Timeline: Timeline provides a Gantt chart view of your project with all the tasks displayed in a more graphical manner. 1. Select timeline 2. The view after enabling critical path will be something like this. The critical path feature is user specific. If two users A and B have permission on one project and user A enables critical path, the same will not be reflected for user B. Also, every time the user reloads the project, the ‘show critical path’ toggle will turn off. Thus, because of the incredible usability and effectiveness, critical path is a project necessity in organizations everywhere. In modern times, organizations tend to work on a hybrid system, and Project for the web effectively combines Agile methodology with timeline and critical path. Users with Plan 3 and Plan 5 licenses can make use of this functionality. Compare project management solutions and costs | Microsoft Project Hope this article has helped you learn how to find critical path in a much more straightforward way. Happy planning! Zenab Waglawala Zenab is an associate at Advaiya. With over six months of experience in the IT industry, she has a passion for data and project server development. She likes to share her insights on project server customization, data analysis through Power BI, data manipulation, and working with a database such as SQL, etc. She loves working with various project planning applications such as Project Online, Project Planner, and Project for the web. Her passion for technology and commitment towards customer satisfaction are the driving forces behind her career at Advaiya. She attended Geetanjali Institute of Technical Studies, where she completed her B.tech in Computer Science and Engineering.
4 innovative approaches to improve your BI Reporting
Fewer than a third of all projects were successfully completed on time and on the budget over the past year. Keeping projects on track when handling continuous change requests is a project manager’s greatest challenge. From the beginning, if the objectives are not clear, and right expectations are not set with executives, the client, or the team, deadlines can suffer. Project delays are frustrating and costly but can be easily avoided with a little foresight and planning. If we look into the reasons, missed deadlines, unclear objectives, and lack of communication are some of the common causes that can sabotage successful implementation of a project. Here are a few suggestions to avoid unforeseen project delays and efficiently handle large project portfolio programs. 1. Pay a lot of attention to project planning Planning is an essential component of project management and the biggest defense against cost overruns and delays. A well-developed plan in place lowers the overall uncertainty and risks. It would be a good idea to have customized Project Plan templates like Agile Development, or Software Development, specific to organizational standards, and detail out the complete project scope before starting the actual work. Once the scope is defined, get a sign-off from the client and the stakeholders. 2. Keep all information/ assets organized with a single workspace Ensuring that the team members working on the project are organized from start to finish can help in cutting down unnecessary time spent in finding out project related information. Have a central workspace that acts as a portal to store all your documents, track, share and collaborate. Customized project workspace for better tracking, information sharing, and collaboration. 3. Simplify best practices and automate project processes Setup custom process templates to increase standardization, help project teams and set the stage for the upcoming project. This ensures best practices across all projects and saves time and effort which can be invested in other critical project tasks. 4. Constantly track and measure the progress To govern the level of success achieved, the measure of progress attained is necessary. It is imperative to have quick access to all relevant project information and summarized weekly project status for informed decision making. Easy to create BI dashboards for team members, project managers, and executives, can help the entire team stay on track with their goals. 5. Notify stakeholders about overall project status and change requests Giving stakeholders adequate knowledge on the projects health status, team’s achievements and concerns can save the project from trouble in the long-run. The status reports help to raise important matters, discuss them freely and find a solution to issues before they get out of hand. Also, the stakeholders should be notified of any new change requests, the scope of the change, and information about what it will take to implement it. They can decide and take the required action to accommodate the request, without impeding the overall project schedule. Fast track your project schedule with AdValue. Advaiya has designed AdValue pack for project management to help you and your team use standardized processes, and quickly visualize and analyze project data to make better-informed decisions, faster. Want information about our BI reports and dashboards solutions? Click here AdValue is a package you can install on top of your Project Online tenant that instantly helps you to get the most out of your deployment. Here are some of its many benefits: Insightful Power BI dashboards customized for Executives, Project Managers and Team Members Customized project workspace for better project tracking and collaboration Built-in workflow to standardize project management phases Alignment with PMBoK tools to manage projects better Quick and easy deployment to make you look like a superstar Extensible solution that can later be customized to specific needs Need more guidance on project and portfolio management? Write to us to discuss how we can help you and your team become more efficient. Romi Mahajan I’m an accidental marketer. My skills are in building deep relationships, seeing markets before they burgeon, and in applying socio-political concepts to business. I have 3 pillars on which I pursue opportunities: People, Impact, and Autonomy.    Â
Microsoft new Project service
The revolutionary changes in Microsoft Project with the release of Microsoft’s new Project service have the vision to enable organizations to perform more productively and efficiently with a simple and intuitive range of tools across Microsoft cloud. These changes have been made in the product to support the wide range of project management terminologies and methods like agile, waterfall, or hybrid. The key attractions in this release are: A fresh new and fluent user experience Improved collaboration with Office 365 groups & Teams Power Platform base for better extensibility To experience the new Project, you may navigate to Project icon from Office Launcher Clicking on New blank project creates a new project where you can perform all basic project planning activities like create and schedule tasks, assign resources, define task dependency, etc. The new experience is very intuitive and simple. Its fluent UI facilitates various options for project scheduling like creating a task as sub-task, promoting subtasks, assigning resources, scheduling the task dates, adding notes and attachments to tasks, etc. The three views on the top, i.e., Grid, Board & Timeline, enrich the user experience by displaying the project plan differently. The Grid view , as shown above, provides an intuitive interface for scheduling resource allocation. The quick task actions like Insert, Delete, Promote subtask, Mark task as a subtask, etc. are readily available in a single click. The Open details allow defining task metadata in the task pane. Each field in the task pane is quite self-explanatory and simple to use. The Board view, on the other hand, is kept similar to Planner, Task board in Microsoft Project Professional, Agile board in DevOps interface for providing a similar user experience to users who have been using these tools for project planning. On the view, tasks are by default grouped by Progress; they can also be grouped by Finish date & Bucket. By default, to each task To-do bucket is assigned. Users can create as many buckets as needed and group tasks accordingly. The timeline view is an improved view of the traditional Gantt chart view available in the project online. This is more intuitive and fluent. To assign the resources to Task, you may click on the task, and you get the option Assign for resource allocation. The new feature in resource allocation is the creation of a collaborative group. While assigning the resource, you may create either a new or use existing group for the project team. Notice at the top right side. Clicking on this allows you to add or edit members in the project team. You may use this group to create Teams for team collaboration and can track the project plan from Microsoft Teams after integrating it. In addition to new project planning experience, the Roadmap service enables us to bring diverse projects together on a single interface. You can connect the project from Project Online, Azure Boards, and track those at a single interface. More Interesting Read Project Service, the next generation of Microsoft Project Hence the new Project is designed for any role, any skill level, or project type. For novice users, the user experience is refreshed to allow them to quickly manage their project planning and tracking with a simple and intuitive user experience. On the other hand, the professional Project Managers can use advanced tools in extension to Project for enriching their Project Management Life cycle. Being built upon the Common Data Service (CDS) platform, the new Project service can easily integrate with other Microsoft Tools like Planner, Teams, Dynamics 365. Now the entire Power Platform can be leveraged primarily for project management solutions. With this release, Microsoft has also revised the subscriptions as detailed here. Where Project Plan 1 is available for purchase in the U.S. and by mid-November in other parts of the world. If you already have a Project subscription plan, you should receive a notification inviting you to try the new Project experience. Another important note is that the existing Project Online subscriptions are not going away. All the new capabilities available through the new Project service will be available through existing Project Online subscriptions. More details can be referred to from The Future Vision of Project. In upcoming months, Microsoft is promising to enrich the new Project bunch with more tools covering budget analysis, resource management, and expense tracking, etc. We will keep you posted, stay tuned!
Project Online home & roadmap – Track your projects
Microsoft has released a new update in Project Online by the name Project Home. To access this feature, the user needs to have a Project Online Premium or Project Online Professional subscription. Project Home has made the experience simpler and easier. In order to navigate to Project Home, click on App Launcher and select Project, in the O365 site. The home page displays all the recent projects which were visited by you within project web tenant. It essentially lists the roadmaps and projects for which you have the access. The Type column helps in the segregation of Roadmap and Project. It is possible to get different views like shared with me, created by me, etc. to filter information to another level. There is a Create New button at the top of the home page to create a project or roadmap. By clicking on Project, you can navigate to the new project creation page of PWA tenant where one can select EPT and create a new project as needed. Below the Create New button, there is a Favorites section. In this section, users can add projects for quick access. To add a project to the favorite list, click on start that appears in the projects lists when you hover on a project. You can also remove a project from the favorites list by clicking Remove from favorites. The Roadmap is a new feature introduced in Project online to view multiple project timelines in a single window. To create Roadmap, under Create New button, select Roadmap. Now you can give a suitable name to the new Roadmap in the blank page which can be editable. To add content to the Roadmap, click +Add row. The right sidebar gets updated with new attributes. Name the row and click Connect on a project under connection. This gives two options Project & Azure Boards. In order to connect to PWA tenant, select Project. Enter PWA tenant URL to which you need to connect. The connect to a project feature of the Roadmap, gives flexibility to a project manager to track the status of different projects regardless of their native tenant. For example, when you add another row in the roadmap you can add a different tenant URL or Azure Board url. This means all your projects can be tracked with regards to timeline in a single view. Once you connect to a tenant, you will have to search for the project in the search bar to add to the  roadmap. Once populated, click on connect. Notice the flow above the Connect button. When you set up a connection in the backend, the Roadmap creates a Flow to get the updates from the connected project. Once you click connect, you can see the project in the Roadmap, and you can also check the flow of the site. When you click on see details below the connect button, it displays the details as below: Once connected, enter the tasks that need to be tracked in the search box, as shown below. You can add as many tasks as you need to track. Once listed click Add button at the bottom of the page to add these to the roadmap. In the owner text box, specify the name of the owner of these tasks. Please note that this owner is different from the resources assigned to these tasks in the project plan. By clicking on Add Items, you will be able to add rows to the roadmap as below: You can also set the status of an individual bar from the available options. As you select the status, the color of bar changes accordingly. You can use this method to create rows for tracking multiple projects in a single view. Additionally, there is an option to add key dates which can be used to plan operational or strategic tasks. To add Key dates, click Add key date. In the pop-up, add the title and the date to complete the task. Key dates are hooked up as callouts at the top of the timeline in the roadmap, as shown below. Like taskbars in the row, you can set the status of key dates, which causes a change in the color of the circle. Once you create the roadmap, you can share this with your group to update the respective users. For this, click on Members at right top. You can add the name of the group or individual you would want to share. The option Choose an existing group will list all existing groups in the tenant. You may select one and share. Once shared, all the users to whom the roadmap is shared are displayed as members. Hence the new Roadmap feature is exciting and offers a intuitive and straightforward way to manage the high-level status tracking of the projects. For now, it connects to Azure Board and Project, but the plan is to connect it to Planner and other apps. We will keep posted about it. Stay tuned!
The 5 pain points of project management
Project management is very much at the heart of every organization. Roughly 1/3rd of organizations never or sometimes deliver projects on time, to budget and defined benefits. The next question is therefore key; what are the largest challenges your organization faces when it comes to project, programme & portfolio management? We have listed down the biggest project management challenges and how a PMO can tackle them. 1.Lack of project prioritization Can you easily prioritize projects? A project manager can use a PPM software to prioritize projects and break down larger projects into tasks for easy delegation, assignment, and organization. These programs can be especially valuable for creating project scorecard, define project scope, manage workload, estimate time, map out costs and create custom reports for various projects. You should also aim to simplify best practices across all your projects with process templates based on your methodologies. Standard and custom process templates can cut the time and effort needed for projects that your team runs. Look for project management packs/solutions that can help you simplify project processes. 2.Project Collaboration & Workflow Management Project documents, communication is shared in order to enable more effective team collaboration. It creates a work space for project teams & other required stakeholders to interact, monitor & manage the different project stages. It typically includes: Document management, work flow management, notifications, e-mails, and meetings. Standard intake and easy sharing of requests can cut time and effort. You can automate project processes with built in workflows with the help of AdValue. 3.Project reporting Is project reporting a pain? Do you ever realize how much time do you spend each month collating project status information? 47% of the people spend 1 day or more collating project reports each month. Project reporting is often the most time-consuming part of a manager’s work life. Collating, making a report and keeping track of numbers are processes essential to getting things done in a progressive manner. Click to publish status reports can sharpen project visibility substantially and cut time and effort to produce reports. Once this is automated, a manager can concentrate on other important responsibilities. Can you quickly find and see the status of all your projects? Data-driven dashboards can give you visibility into all the projects your team runs. Everyone on the project will gain deep project portfolio insights with dashboards for executives, PMO’s and team members
What’s the difference between a program manager and a project manager
The roles of a program manager and a project manager sound alike, and they are not without their similarities in terms of responsibilities and day-to-day activities. However, it is important to understand that programs and projects differ from one another in terms of scale, governance, financing, and objectives. It stands to reason, therefore, that the roles of a program manager and a project manager would also have substantial differences, and that program management courses would have different focuses to project management courses. In this article, we will take a closer look at the ways the two roles differ from one another. Understanding Programs and Projects First, it is important to establish the differences between programs and projects. Put simply, programs are concerned with long-term business strategy and operations, and have multiple components. By contrast, a project is more of an individual undertaking, with a clear start point and an objective that signifies completion when achieved. “Projects have clear end dates and short-term goals that give way to tangible outcomes or deliverables,” says Brianna Hansen, writing for Wrike. “Programs are composed of several underlying, interconnected projects. A successful program drives strategic benefits and organizational growth, rather than a single, tangible deliverable.” One way to think of this difference is that programs tend to be broad and made up of several different projects, which are managed collectively and coherently. Meanwhile, PM training courses tend to emphasize the fact that projects are much more individual, focused entities, with a clear objective and a deadline to be met. Exploring the Nature of the Two Roles Aside from programs and projects having clear differences, it is also important to understand that the roles of a program manager and project manager differ in their very nature. These differences mean program management courses and project management courses teach fundamentally different approaches to day-to-day work tasks. It is generally fair to say that a program manager has a broader range of responsibilities, while a project manager’s responsibilities are more focused. This is because program managers often need to oversee multiple projects and project teams, while project managers oversee their project, and their project team. “Project managers are more like engineers, who plan in detail and provide ways to enable the vision,” Wright1 Consulting explain in a blog post for Workfront, Inc. “Program managers are more like architects…they think about the structure of the program, organizing the projects within the program, to achieve success.” It is also sometimes said that program managers engage in day-to-day activities that are more strategic in nature, taking into account the bigger picture, as their results tend to have wider implications for the business. By comparison, project managers engage in activities that are more technical in nature, as they are primarily concerned with completing the tasks they need to, in order to deliver their project on time and meet the specification. Additional Areas of  Comparison One of the most interesting areas of comparison between program managers and project managers is centered around tangible benefits Vs. the collective benefits. More specifically, there is a difference in the way success is measured in either a project or a program for professionals working in the two roles. Again, this is largely linked to the differences between programs and projects. For example, with a program, success metrics tend to be less rigid, clear-cut or easy to quantify. This is because the outcome of a program is typically a much broader company benefit. Measuring success can be more nuanced because it depends on the benefit that was intended to be delivered, and the extent to which the program actually delivered it. Programs also have less obvious end dates, so the benefits may need to be measured continually. On the other hand, the outcome of a project tends to be a ‘thing’, which is either delivered or not. Success can  be measured based on whether the project was delivered on time, completed within the agreed budget, product quality, or end users satisfaction with the outcome. Finally, the issue of funding is also a critical difference for program and project managers. Program managers tend to have more financial responsibility because a program can have wider implications for the company’s financial results. This means their budget may not be static, and finances need to be continually managed. In contrast, PM training courses may not place such an emphasis on financial management for project managers. This is because a project will usually have a clear budget allocated to it, which the project manager will be aware of from the outset. From there, their financial management largely amounts to staying within the budget. Conclusion Ultimately, while there is plenty of cross-over, the roles of program managers and project managers are markedly different from one another. These differences can largely be explained by the differences between programs and projects, in terms of scope, financial management, objectives, and output, among other things. Put simply, the role of a program manager tends to include a broader range of responsibilities, as well as more continual financial management, while there is less emphasis on tangible output. The role of a project manager tends to be more focused, with more definitive budgets to work with, and judgments are based on the finished product. Need a solution to help organize and manage your programs and projects? See how we can help your team improve efficiency and meet deadlines faster!
Project Service, the next generation of Microsoft Project
Microsoft has recently announced a new era of modern work management. The new Project Service – the next generation of Microsoft Project, offers better collaboration, improved extensibility and greater integration than Microsoft Project. Now, what does this mean? Does Microsoft plan to stop Project Online and Project Server? What is the platform for Project Service? Is it a new and redesigned service being introduced? Would Project Service support existing custom solutions/ applications? Such questions are evident for users. Key notable points of this announcement are as below: • Microsoft would continue to deliver performance and security improvements for Project Online • For Project On-Premise users, Microsoft has released Project Professional and Standard 2019 and will release Project Server 2019 in the next few weeks. • Moving forward, much of Microsoft’s focus will be on driving innovations in the new Project service. The new Project Service is based on Microsoft CDS (Common Data Service) for Apps. This is a revamp of entire base architecture. Which means it is a complete re-design of product to meet the changing needs of work management and hence it is being called a new era of modern work management. Using CDS as a platform, the Project Service integrates easily with other tools and systems like SharePoint, PowerApps, Power BI, Microsoft Flow, Office 365, and Dynamics 365. Benefits of Common Data Service platform are as below: • Build and consume solutions for web and mobile with PowerApps • Automate and integrate business processes with Power Automate • Put all your data to work with Common Data Service • Gain insights from your data regardless of where it lives with Power BI • Customize, extend, and build all the apps you need • Seamless Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Azure integration along with connectors to more than 200 data sources The first release of the new project management service will be available in the first half of next year. These services will be available to Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions with no additional cost. You may refer the FAQ for more details. The first release of the Microsoft new Project Service will be available in the first half of next year. These services will be available to Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium subscriptions with no additional cost. You may refer the FAQ for more details. The revolutionary changes in Microsoft Project with the release of Microsoft’s new Project service have the vision to enable organizations to perform more productively and efficiently with a simple and intuitive range of tools across Microsoft cloud.