Chapter 8: Managing the Project to Success!

In this chapter, we will review how to best manage the timelines and activities within a project. We will review cost and selling price implications and why you may make changes to a project. We will further set up collaboration capabilities that will help in the overall usage of the system. The value of collaboration is in project execution, which means meeting project goals while managing a project smoothly.

Therefore, in this chapter, you will learn about the following concepts:

• Managing the project timeline and activities
• Substituting resources
• Changing project contracts, costs, and selling prices
• Managing risks, status reports, and change orders
• Collaborating through Microsoft Teams and Outlook
• Time entry considerations

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to manage a project, team members, and all other aspects of a project to a successful conclusion. It is unrealistic to think that a project...

Technical requirements

To perform the tasks in this chapter, you will need the following:

• An Microsoft 365 account and an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) login
• A Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations license
• A Microsoft Project Plan license
• A project manager security role

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Managing the project timeline and activities

As a project manager, you may have been involved in some of the previous steps of setting up a project for your company. You may have been involved in the process of setting up a project's work breakdown structure (WBS). You may have contributed to or set up generic resources and roles that apply to a project. We are now at a point where we need to review a project's completion in detail before we begin having team members book time to it.

This includes completing the project's Summary tab and Tasks section. The Summary tab is going to have key information that will drive downstream processes. The Tasks section provides Task, Timeline, and Grid views to support your project timeline and planning needs. Therefore, let's take a look at a project's Summary tab.

Project Summary tab

A project's Summary tab shows you an overall project at a glance and gives you the highest level of information about the project...

Substituting resources

Some projects will have a static team that will deliver a project from start to finish. Other projects—and maybe a majority in your project world—will have changes throughout the project. Some of these changes will be due to the skills and talent needed to fulfill the project's requirements. Others will be potentially due to changes in the workforce, or people leaving the company or the project.

The Team tab is how we add team members to a project. This can be seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 8.5 – The Team tab

The Team tab shows not only the team members on the project but also their roles, resourcing units, required hours, hard booked hours, and total effort. To add team members to a project, select the + New button and add a new position to the project.

After being added to the project team, you will want to go back to the Tasks tab, in Grid view, and add the team member as a resource to the...

Changing orders to costs and selling price

Making changes to the costing of a project is a process of changing out the resources you have currently staffed with offshore resources from a different organizational unit. The following screenshot (of the Estimates screen) shows the costing associated with the project as we have it outlined currently:

Figure 8.8 – Estimates

When adding a team member from a different resourcing unit, remember that you need to set up a cost price list to the role and the organizational unit. Without this, your costs will be missing from the estimates and this will affect your billings.

The following screenshot shows how we can add a new team member to a project. This is performed by opening the Team tab and selecting + New Team Member:

Figure 8.9 – Adding an offshore team member

As a project manager, you may also need to validate that billing is set up properly in a project. To view this information...

Managing risks, status reports, and change orders

Managing risks, change orders, and status reporting is one of the key elements of a project manager's job. Depending upon the project management methodology employed, there are things that may be beneficial to use to manage a project internally as well as communicate the project status externally.

One of the key areas a project manager will focus on is the resourcing area. This is natural, as labor costs are the primary costs that will affect a project. The Resource Reconciliation screen will provide a project manager with not only what the resources bookings are short of or in excess of but will also give them the ability to extend bookings. The following screenshot shows the Resource Reconciliation screen, and what we see here are the hours that have been assigned and booked for each of our resources:

Figure 8.12 – Resource Reconciliation screen

On a larger project, we may see this screen full...

Collaborating through Microsoft Teams and Outlook

Microsoft Teams is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools to come out of Microsoft. Teams gives us the ability to talk to our colleagues on a regular basis and communicate effectively across multiple teams and multiple channels. We can run meetings and save documents in Teams, giving us unlimited capabilities to manage a project across a whole organization. Therefore, it is worthwhile outlining how we can best integrate our project into Microsoft Teams so as to keep our users from context switching throughout their day. Context switching refers to the process of a user needing to sign in to a specific application to perform a function on such a periodic basis that it is disruptive and detracts from productivity during the working day.

Utilizing Microsoft Teams to perform some functions such as project overview and time entry keeps context switching to a minimum. This results in less multitasking, resulting in your team members...

Time entry considerations

In this chapter, among the topics most important in a project manager's world and in managing a project to success, we cannot ignore the importance of time entry. As we all understand, labor is the biggest part of our project costs.

Therefore, one of the key considerations we need to make is what kind of timeframe we capture time in. Do we work on a Sunday-through-Saturday week or according to some other calendar? These are all pertinent details inside of the project setup that will drive the success of the time entry.

It is further important to realize that the time entries that are put into Project Operations appear to be entered on a weekly basis, but the result of the time entries will be daily records representing the hours entered in the Weekly view. This is important as you follow the downstream effects of time entry.

When it comes to getting time into the system, it is important to capture project costs quickly and efficiently. However...

Summary

In this chapter, we gained an understanding of how to manage our projects. We began with the work breakdown structure and the tasks that are created. As we reviewed the various views of the tasks, we discussed how this helps a project manager work through tasks such as a budgetary item; a Kanban board as an agile type of management approach; and a Timeline view where you can generate dependencies and move the timeline. All of this supports the modern project manager's need to deliver projects successfully.

We then reviewed the resourcing, costs, and selling aspects of the project and the tabs that drive these factors. We learned how to add and remove team members from a project and how to set up offshore resources with different cost rates, organizational units, and currencies. This allows us to make real-time personnel adjustments, resulting in better costing and profitability of our projects.

While learning how to manage risks, change orders, and status reports...

Questions

1. What function does the business process flow provide in the context of a project?
2. In an integrated environment with an accounting system, what kind of importance does a Project field become to the integration of a project?
3. True or false: The Customer field is important for integration with accounting.
4. What are the three views available in the Tasks tab?
5. Which Task view is suitable for an agile environment?
6. Which tab is used to substitute resources?
7. Where can I view the cost of the resources on my project?
8. True or false: Change order management functionality comes out of the box with Project Operations.
9. True or false: Microsoft Teams has an app to show Dynamics 365 CE entities, meaning you can use Teams to deliver Project Operations functionality.
10. Which app allows you to input time through Microsoft Outlook?