PPM Tricks

It's been a while since my last post - in the past couple of weeks I have played around with some videos of topics I find interesting. One of these topics are a very cool way of displaying a Gantt Chart upon your Azure DevOps board's. Check it out here!

Staffhub - Clock in / Out StaffHub have finally released the clock in/out feature together with a bunch of other features. The clocking feature is personally one I have been waiting for. Because it for some organizations is a way easier way to report time. Project Online time sheets or similar SAP time sheets work very well for departments where the workforce works on many different projects at a time. Ex. IT, R&D, etc. However, for organizations where the workforce mainly work on one project/job at a time and people are paid by the hour StaffHub is in my opinion a better choice. The clocking function is very simple, fist create a schedule like the following. If not already enabled, go to settings and enable Clocking. Note: Y ou can also limit your employees to only allow them to start their clock when they are at the workplace. Simply type in the address where of the workplace. Next have your employees go to their smart device (iPhone, Android or tablet) and start...

Project online sync to Outlook Ever since the "Sync to Outlook" button have been disabled I have looked for other ways to do this. The other day I found a way for a project manager to do this - it requires a little bit of configuration though. In the following we will create a calendar for one project and have the team members connect to that project. SharePoint calendar On your project site create a new calendar. Give it the same name as your project. Flow -> As a project manager go to Flow and create a new blank flow: https://emea.flow.microsoft.com/  Insert a new trigger of the type "When a new task is created". Type in your PWA URL. Insert a new condition and configure it match your project name. If the condition is not met let the flow exit without any further steps. If the condition is met configure the flow to create a new SharePoint list item and chose your calendar as the list. Set the start, end and title t...

Self service reporting 1/2 Note: If you are a PPM consultant, this post will be very very basic. I often get the question if it is possible to do self service reporting in Project Online. Now if you want self service reporting for all your project and team members you need some really good BI skills and thoroughly design the underlying data layer and make considerations for security. However, if you are just a single PMO guy/girl and just want a way to analyze your portfolio there is a simpler choice. Alright, to do self service reporting you can chose to use many different tools. I will here show you how it can be done in Excel and in a later post how it can be done in PowerBI which also have a nice publish/share feature. Excel Excel have some obvious advantages. You already know this tool, easy to understand, easy to use and extend. Disadvantages: Impossible/difficult  to publish to users, not easy to integrate, manual refresh (in most cases. Let's go... Find your ...

Reporting on Planner or StaffHub! For a long time I have been waiting for the reporting API for Planner and Staffhub. Today I got tired of waiting and found another way to do it. I manage to create a PowerBI report based on all the planner plans I have access to and the same method will work for Staffhub and properly many other services such as Microsoft Tasks, Microsoft Forms, etc.  How? Easy, but requires some Azure, Flow and PowerBI knowledge. These are the steps to I used: 1.        Create an Azure Blob to hold the data 2.        Create a Flow to save Planner data in the Blob 3.        Access the Blob from PowerBI Azure – Blob! So first, lets create a Blob. No, not that kind of Blob. Access the Azure portal - https://portal.azure.com/ Select New and search for “storage account” Fill out the form and click create. I kept all sett...

Microsoft Flow and Microsoft PowerApps have finally been released to the public after beeing in preview for some time now (some might remember PowerApps as Project Siena). Try it out and discover the easy business value these new services provide: https://powerapps.microsoft.com https://flow.microsoft.com/ PowerApps You have a new place to discover and run business apps. • Find and run all your business apps from a single place— Dynamics 365 . • Publish apps with PowerApps to make them instantly discoverable in your org’s dedicated AppSource gallery. Environments provide a space to store, manage, and share. • Create dedicated development, testing, and production environments. • Use environments to separate apps and data by geography or team. • Get enterprise-level management and security controls. The Microsoft Common ...