Book Image

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations

By : Robert Houdeshell
Book Image

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations

By: Robert Houdeshell

Overview of this book

Dynamics 365 Project Operations is a game-changing solution set for project-driven businesses that allows you to deliver commercially successful projects in a timely and cost-effective manner, keeping the project teams productive and collaborative. With this book, you'll find out how you can bring more value to the business by winning new projects and driving exponential revenue growth. Starting with the key principles of Project Operations, you'll understand how it improves project planning and execution. You’ll then learn how to successfully deploy Project Operations along with different integration strategies and get to grips with the best approach for sales through project opportunities, project contracts, and pricing workflow implementation. This book will guide you through setting up direct staffing and centralized staffing models and enable you to manage project changes confidently by getting hands-on with project timeline management, pricing management, resource assignments, and modifications. In the final chapters, you'll find out how to use Project Operations effectively for project accounting and finance. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the confidence to deliver profitable projects in a well-connected organization through efficient decision-making and successful customer-client relationships.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Foundation and Framework of Project Operations
5
Section 2: Project Sales through Delivery
10
Section 3: Project Delivery through Operations

Summary

We have learned through this chapter that Project Operations is a solution built to make end-to-end processes for project managers a solution set, not just a toolset. The project business industry is built around delivering projects in a timely and cost-effective manner for their clients. The value of the Project Operations solution is that it is built upon the Microsoft Dynamics 365 framework, making the Project Operations solution an end-to-end, user-friendly system.

The functionality begins in the frontend with the CRM/sales functionality to support sales professionals who are building their project opportunities into SOWs. When provided to the delivery team, the SOW provides the contractual framework to engage in and work to completion of the project. While working on the project, team members can easily and effectively enter their time and expenses. Upon approval, this information integrates into the Finance and Operations project accounting functionality to perform billing, revenue recognition, and costing.

Underlying all this are the benefits to the firm, which are recognized through the financial improvements to the firm and visualized through the tools in Project Operations dashboards, Customer Insights, and Power BI.

As we proceed through the next chapter, we will dig deeper into the underlying technology that will be used to deploy Project Operations. This includes a deep dive into the Microsoft 365 framework, the Power Platform, and Dynamics 365 CE.