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!
