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

Using resource forecasting

Resource forecasting is the forward view of your practice utilization. It is not a firm prediction of what exactly a team member will work on, but is instead is a plan of what they should work through in the next timeframe.

As you may recall, team members have roles and skills assigned to them that provide you with the ability to assign them to a project based upon those filters. Once a team member is booked, their calendars and work week should reflect bookings that have been made. Therefore, based upon their utilization goals, you should be able to view the proper utilization of your team members.

The following screenshot shows the utilization of our team members across a monthly timeline:

Figure 6.9 – Schedule board forecasting

The schedule board forecast shown in Figure 6.9 is purely an hours-driven view of the forecasted utilization of your team. The implications of this forecast drive revenue, whether working a...