Project Management 365: Platforms and Practices for Enterprise-Wide High Performance Teams
The Microsoft 365 Suite Offers a Platform for Implementing Agile Project Management Principles That Enable High Performance Team Work Across the Enterprise.
When we think of ‘Project Management’ we tend to picture a complex, industry-specific practice, such as for large construction projects.
However Project Management is actually a universal building block of all organizational work.
Whether it’s planning and delivering a marketing event or producing a client proposal, there is a common pattern of team collaboration, task dependencies, risk management and stakeholder engagement, which when managed well produces successful results, and when not, delayed and poor quality deliverables.
So a Project Management capability is critical to the success of any organization. In the case of the sales proposal the speed and quality of the output can be the determining factor in whether that deal is won, or not.
Agile Enterprise 365
Similarly Agile practices are mostly associated with software development, however again they can be generalized and applied to any type of work.
The Project Management Institute explores this here, describing how any type of team can use principles like Backlogs, Scrums, Sprints, User Stories and Continuous Integration to better manage their work. Microsoft defines their Agile Methodology for Projects here.
Thus we can define a high level goal of synthesizing Project Management and Agile practices and applying them wholesale across the entire enterprise, as a formula for enabling high performance teams. Furthermore a common building block for Project Management is simply the effective office communications and collaboration that is universal to all work, such as notifications about the progress and status of project tasks.
Hence why Microsoft 365 is ideal for this whole paradigm, and what we’ll be exploring in this guide. 365 offers the mix of both general collaboration tools, like Teams and Sharepoint, as well as specific apps like Project and Planner.
How they all integrate together and enable work techniques like Agile is what defines Project Management 365.
Microsoft Project: Agile, Goals, Workloads, and more
Microsoft Project is the centrepiece of Project Management 365, providing the specific project functionality, that is enhanced and complemented through the general team collaboration tools like Teams to form the entire practice.
It provides the specific project functionality, like Gantt charts et al, which are then enhanced and complemented through the general team collaboration tools like Teams to form the entire practice.
In this demo video learn more about the new Project for the web features that will provide agile support, goal tracking, balancing of team workloads, advanced dependencies, conditional coloring, and more.
Some of these features in more detail include:
- Track team milestones with Goals: Use Goals in Project to better drive alignment with your team and stakeholders.
- Manage interconnected tasks with Advanced Dependencies: See you can manage dependencies and ensure that your project stays on track with Advanced Dependencies in Project.
- Balance your team’s workloads with People view: See how you can easily assess and rebalance workloads across your team with Project and account for over- or under-allocation, expertise, and preference.
- Manage an agile project with Sprints: Learn how to prioritize tasks into time-boxed periods with the Sprints feature in Project.
How to be Agile with Microsoft 365
In this video Microsoft explain how you can implement Agile practices with Project. Agile Sprints are an essential component of the Agile methodology, a project management approach widely used in software development.
Agile support in Project for the web enables you and your teams to create and prioritize tasks in their backlogs, define sprints and their date boundaries, move tasks between sprints and their respective backlogs, and build reports that include this data.
In Agile, projects are divided into smaller, manageable iterations called sprints. Each sprint typically lasts for a fixed duration, usually two to four weeks, during which a specific set of tasks is completed. An Agile Sprint is a time-boxed iteration where a cross-functional team collaborates to complete a set of prioritized tasks.
It allows teams to focus on delivering a specific increment of work within a fixed timeframe. The work to be completed during a sprint is determined in advance and is based on the project’s backlog, which contains a prioritized list of user stories or requirements.
People often find that there are so many different tools, approaches, and versions of technologies that they become overwhelmed with how to make sure they are productive. In this webinar, Advisicon explores tips and tricks that will allow you to be both Agile in your approach to getting work done and avoid duplicating effort across your different tools. In this webinar you will learn:
- Tips and tricks in both Methodology & Tools that support you in delivering more work, faster and more agilely in your day to day work life.
- Agile & Waterfall Project Methodologies with Microsoft 365 tools & templates.
