The value of the Microsoft Project Operations solution
Looking at projects in a more modern way takes a modern solution approach. Furthermore, it requires collaboration, communication, and flexibility in the project delivery to be successful in tomorrow's world. In order to work best together, we need to have more modern tools and capabilities. This is the value of Project Operations.
The following screenshot shows what a project plan in Microsoft Project Operations looks like:
Figure 1.3 – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Like Neo in the movie The Matrix from 1999, you are about to swallow the red pill. The red pill represents an awakening that could be difficult and painful. Your world will be totally changed with the red pill and you will see the truth in the success you can have in your career with the right tools in place. You can take the blue pill if you want and go back to the cold comfort of believing that you have all your projects under control and you are delivering profitability to your firm. The choice is yours, Neo!
Welcome to the project awakening! Now that you are here, let's talk about some of the facts of the projects you have been managing. You have been doing a great job over the years and that is why you have been promoted so many times. However, the underlying understanding of your purpose is something that may be missing. Your purpose for the delivery of projects on time, on budget, and meeting your client's needs has been to meet and exceed the performance expectations of your firm.
With the tools you have used, you have achieved much success. However, you are now on the verge of realizing your full potential by connecting with your firm's purpose. Let's get that out of the way first. In a most capitalistic circumstance, your firm may be engaged to make a profit from every project, every time to a profit margin that is prescribed by the firm. In other firms, the purpose may be to provide the highest quality services and solutions to the clients within a given industry or solution segment. In other firms, you may be directly connected to the welfare of your customers and your ability to deliver will directly impact the success of real people and their lives and livelihoods.
Let's now connect this with the tools we use to gain more success and align more tightly with the end-to-end processes in your firm. Microsoft Project Operations is an end-to-end solution built upon the Microsoft Dataverse utilizing Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) for project sales, resource management, planning, scheduling, time and expense entry, billing, and project accounting functionality in one solution. The end-to-end integrated environment combines the power and functionality of the CE Project Operations solution with the accounting power of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.
Embedded into the Microsoft 365 framework, Project Operations provides an all-encompassing solution to the project professional's daily life! The reason this is important is that when a solution is designed to work together in your daily life and support the end-to-end processes of a project, it provides the infrastructure needed to succeed.
Imagine, if you will, your home. Would you tolerate different settings on your faucets in different rooms? Hot on the right, cold on the left in one room while the opposite is true in another? How about your light switches? What if, randomly, they were different in different rooms? More so, what if your kitchen was wired for 230 volts while the rest of the home was 110/120 volts and had different plug configurations? Sounds like a mess, does it not?
Technologically, this is what businesses tolerate every day when they use one solution for the sales team, one for project task management, one for billing, and yet another for accounting. Yes, you can produce a best of breed integrated environment but the results are highly dependent upon the technical skills to pull this solution together. Furthermore, the solution is only as good as its weakest link and will break (not may break, will break) at the most inopportune time! These solutions proliferate through businesses today. Small armies of technologists support these solutions to keep them running and even at the best of their performance, they simply ensure an end-to-end transaction works through the system without error.
Building the right solution for tomorrow's project manager requires decades of innovation combined with the latest technological foundation. The entire solution must work seamlessly together while continuing to improve as workforces change, technology improves, and technical capabilities increase at exponential rates. Let's check how an end-to-end solution with Microsoft 365 works.