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- Hi everyone.
My name is Anav Silverman
and I'm a PM manager on the Project and Planner team.
In today's talk,
I'll be sharing an overview of Microsoft Project
and share some of the new and exciting updates
in the Project space.
A couple of weeks ago,
my team and I started to do some prep work
for a project we were about to kick off.
We've been having some conversations in various Teams chats
to discuss the prep work that needs to happen,
identifying some work
that team members would need to follow up on.
That led to a series of prep meetings
to discuss open issues we need to resolve
to unblock the project work.
And after every meeting,
we'd send out meeting notes with a list of follow-ups
that team members needed to resolve.
Some of the prep work involved,
creating documentation of the requirements,
which led to additional collaboration
and task captured in the document itself.
At this point, there were multiple locations
where we were tracking tasks for the project.
More team members joined the efforts
and in different time zones.
We identified more blocking issues
and dependencies between team members work.
And it seemed like folks were generally making progress
but it was tough to tell whether we're on track
to complete the work by our deadlines
and whether we're missing anything.
This is always that critical point of teamwork
where it's clear we need to use Project
to help us get organized
and increase our level of control and confidence
in delivering on our goals and on time.
This is a common challenge we often hear from customers.
A common pain point we frequently hear from teams
is that they often feel like
they're spending a lot of time managing work
instead of doing work.
85% of project teams work in multiple locations
and often in different countries
and sometimes different time zones.
92% cite the lack of visibility and inefficient processes
as the top two challenges managing projects.
And remote work is becoming part of the norm,
with people and companies shifting to hybrid work
and 73% wanting more flexible remote work options.
These work trends make it harder for teams
to collaborate in real-time
and drive the need for more asynchronous collaborative tools
that help teams stay aligned and connected
and have shared visibility into the overall progress.
These challenges are top of mind for us at Microsoft
and we aim to help teams deliver top results
through best in-class tools for managing projects.
We recognize that
there's often a mix of users in the organization
with various needs around managing projects
and therefore we offer two products in this category,
Planner and Project.
For teams that are looking to do lightweight coordination
of group work and get started with a basic experience,
Microsoft Planner is available
as part of Microsoft 365 subscription.
And offer a basic way of creating plans,
assigning tasks, keeping track of teamwork in a central way.
Microsoft Project is a available as an upgrade,
offering the same simple, modern, lightweight
and intuitive experiences Planner
but with additional enhancements,
giving teams more control over their projects,
managing projects at scale,
visualizing the timeline of the work,
managing dependencies, adding custom fields,
custom reporting and more.
We want to make it easy as possible
for users and organizations to try out Microsoft Project
when you're looking for more enhanced capabilities
that go beyond Planner.
Users can try out Project for free today
through free trials
and we're continuing to roll out more updates
to make it even easier
to get started with Microsoft Project.
It's been exciting to see the level of adoption
of Project and Planner.
In a recent CIO survey,
Microsoft's offerings were listed
as the most popular work management tools.
And we're continuing to see significant growth
in the number of users leveraging Project and Planner
to manage their teamwork.
And it's a number one tab created in Teams channels
as part of the tightly integrated experience in Teams.
One of the newer offerings we introduced in recent years
is Microsoft Project for the web
and there are several key benefits to highlight there.
Project for the web offers you a modern
and simple experience to manage your teamwork.
It's built on the powerful
and robust Project scheduling engine
with more than 30 years of investment in it.
It's deeply integrated with Microsoft 365 workloads,
including a built-in experience in Teams
and a configurable and extensible integration
with Power Apps.
And last but not least, we live by the standards
and practices designed to earn your confidence and trust.
And with Project, you're getting a product
that is built on Microsoft trusted cloud,
which supports your compliance and governance needs.
From talking to customers,
it's been exciting to hear the level of impact
that Microsoft Project has
on their organization's teamwork and projects.
Sean, a senior project manager at Ontic
stated how Project for the web helps
their initiative owners focus more
on delivering of the work itself
rather than managing the system.
Ronald, a group information manager at Climate for Life
shared how Project increased their team's overall output
and helped them collaborate across company
and deliver results.
And Kurt, assistant vice-president
for Planning and Value Creation
at Southern New Hampshire University
shared how Projects ease of use helps coordinate
their efforts with departments.
So let's take a tour of Project for the web.
I'll be showing some of the highlights
for how you can use Project for the web
to manage your team's work and deliver better results.
And in this demo, I'll also be sharing
some of the latest exciting developments
including the enhancements we recently introduced,
as well as a sneak peek
to some of the new capabilities we're currently working on
and we'll be rolling out soon.
I've created a project for my team
so we can organize and track our work
in prep for an upcoming product launch.
I'll go ahead and open that project here from the homepage.
The Grid view provides an easy way
to scan the list of tasks for the project
and add new tasks to the list,
make quick updates to the tasks
and review the overall progress of the work.
For each of the tasks,
I can easily assign to specific people,
set the due date, duration, attachments,
dependencies and more.
We've also added several new capabilities
for tracking the work within tasks.
We recently added checklists,
making it super easy to break down tasks into specific steps
and track progress in more details.
As I add or update the checklist items,
I have this visual indicator
that gives me a quick look at the overall progress.
Another enhancement we just delivered
is the ability to set labels for tasks
to easily organize tasks by specific areas or categories.
We offer a set of 25 labels with various colors
that you can use and organize the work.
I'll go ahead and set this particular task to planning.
Another addition we're currently working on
and we'll be delivering soon is priority field.
You'll now be able to set a priority
for each of the tasks in the project,
making it easier to track
the relative prioritization of your work.
I'll set this particular task to urgent
given the overall importance of it.
The nice thing about the Grid view
is that you can easily customize the view
and select the columns you'd like to see in the list.
For example, I can easily add the priority field
to quickly scan through the list
and review progress of the urgent and high priority work.
I can also filter the list for tasks with specific labels
and view the status of all tasks related to planning
as an example.
One of the popular capabilities in Project
is custom columns.
Often there are specific elements of the project
that we need to track consistently across all the tasks
and that requires adding some custom columns for tracking.
For example, I need to track the overall risk
for all the tasks in this project
and I'd like for each task owner to set the risk level
as part of their status updates.
So I'll go ahead and create a new field, name it risk
and set up three options, high, medium and low.
One of the recent enhancements we introduced
is the ability to color code these options as well
for a quick visual indicator of the status.
So I'll go ahead and set high to red,
medium to yellow and low to green.
Then I can easily walk through the tasks with my team
and set the risk field based on their updates.
Next, let's take a look at the project in the board view.
My team and I often meet to check in on status
and we find it super helpful
to review the project board together.
It's a visual representation of the work
that offers a fun and interactive way
to keep track and organize the teamwork.
As you can see,
my project is organized in buckets based on locations.
If I want to shift one of these tasks from Seattle,
I can easily drag and drop to the appropriate bucket.
I can also easily drag and drop items within the bucket
to stack rank the items by priority.
Another advantage of this view
is the ability to group by various fields.
For example, when my team and I meet,
we like to review the work grouping by assignment,
making it easy to quickly view how we're doing as a team
whether we need to balance the load.
Another nice part of this view is that I can easily see
which tasks aren't assigned to anyone
and in a very quick way, drag and drop the appropriate task
to a specific person to tackle the work.
Grouping by finish date is another useful view
that enables my team to organize work by when it's due
and quickly view what work is past due
and what work is up next.
One of the most popular features in Project
is the Timeline view
backed by the powerful scheduling engine of Project.
This view enables the team to get a sense
of when we think work will get done
based on the work start date, duration, dependencies,
assignments and more.
Within this view,
I can see where things are at on the timeline
and if I need to make any adjustments.
For example, if I'd like to change the order of assignments,
I can change the dependencies
right from within the timeline.
Or if I know a task is going to take longer,
I can update the duration.
Another powerful feature within Project
is the ability to view a collection of work
across multiple projects in a single view called roadmap.
In this example, I created a roadmap
to track the work that needs to get done
for a V1 product launch,
which includes work captured in the engineering project
and marketing project.
I can choose the specific tasks from these projects
that I want to track in this unified view,
giving the flexibility I need
to focus on the key parts I care about for this roadmap.
As you can see,
the roadmap view has a similar visual timeline display,
making it easy to see where the work lands on the schedule.
In using the roadmap view,
I can then add specific key dates I need to track,
such as private preview, public preview
and major conference demos
to ensure that the work we need to get done
for those milestones are on track.
And I can also color code these items based on their status.
I now need to start a new project
to manage the work for onboarding new team members.
One of the top asks we often hear from customers
is the need for having some example templates
that can help users get started on a project.
We're excited to share
that we'll be shipping the first set of templates
in Project for the web soon,
providing a quick way to create
a structured project pre-populated with sample tasks
that can give you some ideas
of how to best structure your project.
I'll go ahead and select Employee Onboarding.
Once I create, I get some useful sample tasks
to give me some ideas of what I'd like to track
as part of this onboarding effort for my new team members.
And from here, I can assign these tasks to individuals,
set some due dates, delete tasks I don't need,
modify tasks, set some labels, priorities,
checklists and more.
One of the popular ways of using Project
is within Teams itself.
Since that's the location where teams are communicating,
connecting and collaborating on work,
it's a great place to surface projects
to make it super easy to review our progress as a team
and have all of our related conversations
in a single location
without having to switch between multiple windows and apps.
As you can see here, this is my Teams channel
where we're often connecting and discussing work.
To add our team project to this channel,
I simply select the plus button, choose project.
and then I can either start a new project
and select an existing one such as event planning.
It then loads the project view directly within the channel,
making it possible to view progress in context.
Now to take that a step further,
one of the recent enhancements we introduced
is the ability to have conversations
on specific tasks in the project.
For example, I have a follow up question for Alan
on the task he's working on.
So I can open the chat window within the task
and easily mention Alan right from here.
And since this is built in Teams chat experience,
I can add emojis, gifs, rich text, attachments
and all the chat capabilities
you're used to having in Teams.
There are a lot of new developments
in Project for the web
that we can't wait for you to try out
and share your feedback.
And there are more exciting updates to share.
We recently rolled out Project for the web
to the GCC environment
and we're continuing to roll out frequent
and incremental enhancements to the user experience,
including the ability to copy and paste tasks.
In addition, we have several exciting new capabilities
that are in progress
and address the top feedback items we received
from our customers.
Soon, you'll be able to collaborate on a project
with Microsoft 365 users
and without requiring a project license.
They'll be able to update
and edit their assigned tasks in Project.
In addition, we'll be delivering an update
that enables guest users to participate and access projects.
And we're also working on enabling users
to easily view all the tasks that are assigned to them
in a single view.
We have many more exciting enhancements underway,
including people workload view, task history, charts,
sprints, accelerator improvements and more.
For a deeper look at some of these areas in Project,
check out some of the other sessions,
including collaboration and scheduling in Microsoft Project,
managing people and resources in Microsoft Project,
accelerate projects while maintaining PMO governance.
It's easy to get started by going to project.microsoft.com.
Your feedback helps shape our product
and we'd love to hear from you.
You can easily share your thoughts
and asks through our feedback portal.
And in addition,
we're continuing to roll out updates on our plans.
And if you'd like to keep track of what's coming to Project,
follow our roadmap and blog for more information.
Thank you all for watching.
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