(upbeat music)
- Hello, my name is Russell Hercules.
I'm a Product Manager on the R&D team
with Project Operations.
Today we will review core project planning
and resource management scenarios along
with upcoming investments in the application.
Project Planning and Estimation in Project Operations
seamlessly integrates estimates of project delivery costs
within the sales cycle, thus minimizing error,
duplication of effort, while affording teams the ability
to provide detailed resource based estimates.
In the upcoming demo,
we will review three main components required
to develop an estimate defining a bookable resource,
building a price list,
and defining the work breakdown structure.
Now I'm going to demonstrate
how to create a bookable resource.
Bookable resources, comprised
of multiple supported types user,
contact, equipment, account.
For this example, we'll start with a contact.
Once the resource has been defined,
the next step is to associate
and define the level of utilization
and associated roles and skills
that this resource will have in the application.
Once the skills and roles have been defined,
the next step is to define the working hours
that the resource will be available for booking.
Priceless and Project Operations
represent a catalog of rates.
The rates express cost, sales and bill rates,
depending on whether the priceless express cost rates
or sales and bill rates.
The context of the prices is sales or cost.
From a project planning perspective,
team members defined on the work breakdown structure
express their effort across a time face scale.
That effort for each resource assignment is then multiplied
by the associated cost and sales price list
to develop the time phased estimates.
So user will navigate to the price list.
Hit the section related to the roll prices
and to add a new roll price.
You'll specify the roll
and provide a price.
In the sales cycle,
the Sales Team will develop an initial quote for a project
and then hand it off to the Delivery Team for estimation.
Leveraging Project Operations that quote
and its details can be integrated
with one or many projects for estimation.
In the preceding example, we will review
how the work breakdown structure is developed,
along with the estimations at the project level.
And then we will demonstrate how that estimation is
then linked to the quote to fulfill the sales cycle.
And in this demo, I'm going to demonstrate
how we leverage the project planning capabilities
at Project Operations to build a bottoms up estimate
with the quotes on your projects.
In partnership with the Microsoft Office Project Team,
Project Operations has integrated the new Project
for the web Scheduling Engine
within the work breakdown structure
of the Project Operations application.
With this new scheduling capability
Project Operations brings rich scheduling functionality
with the emphasis on user experience,
but backed by a robust scheduling engine based upon 20 years
of scheduling IP.
In the grid view, project managers have the ability
to personalize the project planning experience
by specifying the columns and their associated order.
With desktop layout controls,
project managers have the ability to drag and drop,
multi select, cut and paste and even leverage undo redo
to quickly build a work breakdown structure.
Using the fixed duration schedule mode,
users can define a task where they're able
to hold duration constant regardless
of the changes to the effort,
thus allowing project managers
to focus on plan to delivery dates.
Project Operations also supports scenarios
when a task will start and end within the same day,
as well as it provides support
for milestones otherwise known as zero duration tasks.
When assigning resources, Project Operations
will force project managers the ability
to define named resources as well as placeholder resources
when estimating the project.
The named resources can be determined
at the time the project has been created or booked to later,
as will be covered in later sections.
In the board view, Project Operations supports customers
who prefer a more agile methodology to scheduling projects.
These views provide many
of the editing capabilities in the grid view,
and give the project manager the flexibility
to define local buckets tailored
to the specific needs of their project scenario.
A highly useful board view is the view
where you can group by assigned to
this gives project managers an informative visualization
of the tasks assigned to resources.
With the timeline view,
project managers gain a visual representation
of the work breakdown structure at varying timescales.
The timeline view provides editing capabilities,
allowing a project manager
to define relationships between tasks,
along with changing start dates
and end dates of each task in the work breakdown structure.
Once the work breakdown structure has been developed,
users can leverage the resource assignment view
to view and review the time phase estimations
and confirm the contours meet expectations
for each assignment.
Once the resource estimates have been developed,
project managers now have the ability
to specify the expenses that are expected
to be incurred to deliver the project.
Based upon organizational categories defined
by each customer, project managers can quantify each expense
and associate them with categories or tasks.
Once the time phase estimate has been deemed satisfactory,
the project manager can engage the Sales Team
to let them know the estimation has been completed,
and the Sales Team can then update the qoute
with the accurate estimates based upon the project plan.
At this point, the sales team does not need
to re-key any estimate details
as the estimates from the project are natively integrated
with the quote.
Along with the details,
the Sales Team will have the flexibility
to import the estimate with varying levels
of detail based upon the work breakdown structure
or categories defined on the project.
With the quote submitted and the deal won,
the project manager now has received the green light
to stop the project.
From the team member grid,
the project manager has the ability
to specify demand from the project based team member
based upon the role, the additional skills
and proficiencies needed to fulfill the request.
For organizations with central resource managers,
the project manager submits this requirement
to be fulfilled by a resource manager
and subsequently reviews the proposal
to close the requirement loop.
Once a resource request has been submitted
to the resource manager,
they will review the inbound request
and react either from a list of existing resource requests
or from the schedule board
where multiple resource requirements can be triaged.
The resource manager can leverage a schedule assistant
to find a resource based
upon the stated requirements related to effort,
the role and any other criteria in the resource requirement.
Once the correct resource has been identified,
the resource manager can submit the proposed resource back
to the project manager for review.
Once in their court,
the project manager will review the proposal resource
and have the ability to accept
or reject the proposal resource.
Once that resource has been accepted by the project manager.
That resource will be added to the project team.
They will replace the generic resource assigned
to any tasks in the work breakdown structure.
And the resource requirement can then be completed.
During the life of the project,
there may be realities that result in changes
to the level of effort of a resource.
With Project Operations,
a project manager can quickly adjust the project plan
to reflect what is needed to deliver the work.
And from the resource reconciliation grid,
the project manager will have the ability
to extend the resources commitment
to the project by extending their bookings.
Once the project is in flight,
project managers can leverage the tracking tab
to get a view on the progress of the work.
PMs can review the actuals approved at any level
of the work breakdown structure at the project level,
the summary tasks or leaf node tasks.
PMs can adjust the remaining effort
to accurately represent the estimate at completion
and for time and material projects.
This also influences the associated revenue
for each line item.
Out of the box,
Project Operations facilitates the reservation
of a resources capacity against a project.
However, because Project Operations is integrated with URS,
we also have the ability
to define other entities as schedulable.
In the example that we shared earlier,
the project manager in our
fictitious accounting firm staffed
the project related to a specific customer engagement.
Now we will take this one step further
and illustrate how audits can be related to a project
and be scheduled separately from a specific reservation
of a resource on a project.
We will review how we define an audit
as a schedulable entity,
and share an example
of how a customer would manage the requirements
and bookings of the audit.
We are very excited
to share some new investments upcoming in the next wave.
First off is schedule modes.
In addition to the currently supported
fixed duration scheduling mode.
At the organizational level,
customers will also have the ability
to choose whether or not they want
to schedule based upon fixed units or fixed work.
The second investment related
to task management is our ability to edit resource contours.
Beyond defining scalar values for work,
Project Operations will soon allow customers the ability
to edit individual resource assignment contours.
For the resource managers,
we are introducing a new schedule board
and schedule assistant experience.
The new experience will provide a modern user interface
with improved visual representations
of bookings along with more intuitive controls
to manage the board.
Lastly, for the developers, we're launching a new suite
of APIs focused on the schedulable entities.
These APIs will support, create, update
and delete on tasks, resource assignments,
tasks dependencies and team members.
Thank you for attending the session.
If you're interested in learning more,
we encourage you to connect with us on LinkedIn,
Yammer or Dynamics Communities.
We also encourage you to visit our ideas portal.
We hope you really enjoyed learning about project planning
and resource management in Project Operations.
Thank you.
(upbeat music)