To ensure your team is efficient and effective, resources need to be allocated and deployed when and where they are needed. In practice, different teams utilize a variety of methods and tools to manage resources. To ensure resources are optimized and increase business value, the process must be standardized across all business units. Using one tool saves time, labor costs, and helps to increase project success rates as commitments can be based upon true availability. The benefits don’t stop there. In addition to being able to better assess demand and requests, employee satisfaction increases with efficient resource management as teams are not continuously overburden with unreasonable workloads and commitments.

Unlock the Benefits of OnePlan

Visual Resource Capacity Planning within Projects – Skip the spreadsheets and let OnePlan do the work! OnePlan enables resource planning for individual projects based on organizational-wide capacity and demand. You can dynamically manage resources with drag and drop capabilities to easily match individual resources to project requirements based on role, skills, and availability.

Enterprise Resource Capacity Planning – Gain high-level capacity and demand across the organization. View resources proposed and committed across all projects. Need to make changes? Easily substitute and balance resources with drag and drop re-assignment.

Visual Resource Scheduling – Schedule resources and equipment with a high-level overview of your team’s allocation. Use graphical visuals to tell the full story of resource scheduling and gain meaningful insights into overall resource over/under allocation.

Resource Reporting and Analytics – Unlock new insights into your business with visual reporting and analytics. Real-time reporting allows you to make the right decision every time and allows you to monitor utilization within your team to help with capacity planning enabling you to monitor and improve efficiency and compliance.

OnePlan Resource Capacity Planning Overview

Interested in a simpler way to manage resources and learn more about OnePlan? View our on-demand webinar and request a free trial to get started today!

You won’t be shocked to hear that digital transformation – or transformational business initiatives – are not altogether new. It’s fair to say that the transformational possibilities of today’s technology are exceptional. What has not changed is that the chance of achieving greatness is higher with a comprehensive approach and inspired delivery: strategic execution. Today, we can transform by borrowing some things learned from the past – the practice of program management – and also add some new things into the mix. While using technology to transform is not necessarily new, the things we do to realize its full potential should be.

To access the full white paper including a Telecommunications managed service case study and the top benefits of managed services, fill out the form below.

OnePlan’s Financial Planner (FP) module was designed to meet this challenge.

OnePlan FP handles the complete cost management process used by the customer organization, beginning with the annual budgeting cycle and preliminary budgets for each known project and support/operational activities. A typical Preliminary Budget for a project is shown in the screen above. As projects get closer to the detailed planning as required by the IT Governance process, the FP module can initiate and enforce the requirement for a more detailed Approved Budget as shown below, where Labor, Hardware, and Software is broken down further.

And:

The system provides a comprehensive administration function which permits the organization to configure multiple types of costs (like the Preliminary Budget and Approved Budget in the above example), and Forecasts Costs and Actual Costs. The overall cost structure (your Code of Accounts) is also easily configured.

Financial management flexibility and configurability is one of the most critical functionalities required in PPM. Cost management affects not just significant projects but also the support and operational efforts which consume the majority of an IT budget for many organizations. In many cases, some form of budgeting is required long before a project starts execution, sometimes before the responsible project manager is assigned. The latter is one reason why many PPM tools cannot handle cost management properly; project costs are not tied to detail project scheduling tasks.

OnePlan FP was designed to meet the situations identified here. And have the capability to integrate with other corporate financial systems such as accounting. And of course, OnePlan FP provides comprehensive reporting and analysis functionality.

OnePlan Financial Planner Overview

More details on the financial management features of OnePlan to follow in future blog posts! Can’t Wait? Try OnePlan Today!

Unlock the Benefits of OnePlan Financial Planner

Strategic Financial Planning –Extend finance-focused planning to include capital investment initiatives while allowing operational managers to model capex to capital projects over multi-year period. Anticipate how the money you spend will translate into value for the company by connecting spend to both cost center and value delivered.

Advanced Portfolio Analytics and Status Reports – Know the health of your portfolios through slick reports & dashboards, that allow you to drill into the detailed data driving your performance analytics. The robust dashboards and reports integrate data from multiple sources allowing you to view Portfolio data in different, more-applicable ways using visualizations, charts, and highlighted key metrics for success.

Full Portfolio Planning and Execution – Input demand details, including benefits, estimated costs, required resources, and business drivers impact to gain immediate insights into benefits, costs, and resource needs of individual to all portfolios. When a detailed plan may not be necessary, keep the planning at the portfolio level.

Robust Portfolio Analytics – Drive business value by gaining insights at the portfolio level. Through modelling portfolios and analyzing risks, you are able to determine the best strategic path, considering cost and resource constraints, to maximize ROI and business strategy alignment.

OnePlan Financial Planner Overview

Interested in a simpler way to manage resources and learn more about OnePlan? View our on-demand webinar and request a free trial to get started today!

Understand What It Means to Your Organization

For a limited time, Wicresoft is offering a free one-on-one customer immersion migration event to lead your organization through the first and most difficult steps of Project Online migration – Cloud readiness. Our migration experts will walk you through every step of the migration process from best practices, risk considerations, and readiness, to completing the first and most critical deliverables of every migration – current configuration documentation and environment set up. Reserve your session today!

Understanding Microsoft Project

With millions of users, the Microsoft Project community has grown to be one of the largest, most experienced PPM community in the world. Microsoft has relied on user feedback to shape Project into the tool it is today, by suggesting new features and even piloting releases.

Through their commitment to customers, user experience, and business productivity, one thing became clear – the next generation of Project needed to be simpler without sacrificing power and scalability. Instead of working on the next release of Project, Microsoft set its sights higher – a fundamental shift in strategy and product development.

The Rise of Project Service

The new Project Service, or simply put, Project, represents the future of Project Management. With a visual, intuitive, easy-to-use user experience, the ability to scale simple projects to waterfall and enterprise-wide PPM, and ability to connect with other Microsoft apps, like Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365, and Dynamics, the new Project is posed to be one of the most flexible business productivity solutions on the market.

For current Project Online customers, this innovation comes at the best cost – free! Every user will be enabled with the latest features and capabilities of Project Service to deliver greater business value.

What to Expect

Project Home – This new service is available now and allows you to see, create, and manage all your projects in one convenient location. In the future, look forward to Project Home being expanded to encompass all work types, including Azure Boards, Planner Boards, Roadmaps, and Dynamics.

Project Service – Scheduled to launch within the first half of 2019, Project Service will take the place of Project Online to provide a web-based experience targeted towards accidental project managers. The result is a solution that supports all roles, skill types, project types, and ideologies all within one easy to use tool.

Roadmap – In large organizations, it can be hard to keep track of all the work happening across the different work areas. Roadmap is a new service to provide a cross-functional, big picture view of all work across your organization, regardless of whether it was created in Project or VSTS/Azure DevOps. Want to easily visualize your upcoming workflow? Simply use roadmap to create a timeline view of your upcoming work, including key dates and milestones. In future releases, look forward to Roadmap supporting JIRA, Planner, and other popular work management solutions. Roadmap is taking the next step towards total connectivity and visibility for all work across the organization.

How Does This Impact Current Users?

The new Project, including the new features/services aimed at transforming your business productivity is available to current Project Online Professional and Project Online Premium users at no additional cost. The latest announcement of further extends the value of your Microsoft project management investment.

We are excited, as members on the Microsoft Project Advisory Counsel, for the latest advancements in PPM and strive to support our customers in this transition. Look forward to additional announcements on the upcoming features moving forward.  If you have any questions regarding Microsoft’s Project Service announcement or would like us to evaluate what it means to your organization don’t hesitate to reach out to for a PPM Health Check.

Project Online/Server Administrators may also use the MS Project ‘Organizer’ to copy elements from various project schedules to the Enterprise Global Template.

To use the ‘MS Project Organizer’ to share elements between project schedules (or the Enterprise Global Template for Project Online/Server) open the project with the desired elements to be copied (shared) in Microsoft Project (either ‘Read-Only’ or ‘Read-Write’ mode). Open the project schedule to receive the desired elements, also in Microsoft Project.

Please note – the ‘receiving’ project schedule MUST be opened in ‘Read-Write’ mode in order to copy the elements to the project and save the changes.

Open the MS Project ‘Organizer’ – Navigate to:  File >> Info >> Organizer (‘Organize Global Template’ dropdown menu) >> ‘Organizer’

In the ‘Organizer’Dialogue Box, ensure the ‘sending’ project schedule is selected in one of the ‘… available in’ boxes  (left or right), depending on the tab selected (i.e. ‘Views available in’, if the ‘Views’ tab is selected) and the ‘receiving’ project schedule (or Enterprise Global Template) is selected in the other.

Copy desired elements. Select the tab associated with the element to be copied (i.e. if copying a table, select the ‘Tables’ tab). With the appropriate tab selected, select the element name (i.e. Table name) from the ‘sending’ schedule. Click the ‘Copy >>’ or ‘<< Copy’ button (depending on which project was selected first, to copy the selected element to the ‘receiving’ project.

The direction of the arrows in the ‘Copy’ button (i.e. >> (right) or << (left)) determines on which project is selected first from the ‘… available in:’ lists.  The ‘sending’ project is selected first, which will direct the ‘Copy’ arrows to automatically point to the ‘receiving’ project.

Rename the copied element by selecting the ‘copied’ element from the receiving project, then clicking the Rename… and entering a new name for the element (i.e. ‘Enteprise Import Table’). Click OK.

Renaming is OPTIONAL if you are not copying elements to the Enterprise Global Template; however, renaming is MANDATORY if you are copying elements to the Enterprise Global Template.

‘Copy’, ‘Rename’ & repeat for remaining elements. Select the tab associated with the remaining elements to be copied (i.e. if copying a table, select the ‘Tables’ tab). With the appropriate tab selected, select the element name (i.e. Table name) from the ‘sending’ schedule. Click the ‘Copy >>’ or ‘<< Copy’ button (depending on which project was selected first, to copy the selected element to the ‘receiving’ project.

OPTIONAL: Rename the copied element by selecting the ‘copied’ element from the receiving project, then clicking the Rename… and entering a new name for the element (i.e. ‘Enteprise Import Table’). Click OK.

Close the ‘Organizer’ and Save your changes. After all of the desired elements have been copied, click Close, to close the ‘Organizer’ Dialogue Box. Test to ensure that the new elements are visible and available in the ‘receiving’ project. Save, close (and check-in, if an Enterprise Project) the ‘receiving’ project to save the latest changes. Close (without saving changes) the ‘sending’ project.

Want to learn more tips and tricks to manage tasks in Project Online? View our free on-demand webinar now.

The Approval Center page provides a place for Project Managers and Status Managers to view, preview and accept or reject task changes submitted by resources.  Once the task updates are processed, the associated Microsoft Project schedules are updated on the next publish. The Approval Center page in Project Online/Server provides an approval gateway for Project Managers and Status Managers, allowing them to check task changes submitted by their resources before they are synchronized with the Project schedule as part of the updating process.

Please Note:  The timesheet approval process (for Resource Managers) and the task update approval (for Project/Status Managers) processes are mutually exclusive. As a result, if a Resource Manager rejects a timesheet, then the affected tasks do NOT affect the task update processed by the PM.  In addition, a PM can process task updates on a timesheet that has not been submitted or approved by the Resource Manager. However, when the Team Member updates a rejected timesheet, to satisfy the Resource Manager, the PM is unaware and the project schedule updated ONLY if the user sends the updates to the PM, via the “Send Status” button. Otherwise, the PM will not be aware of the changes.

Navigate to your Project Online environment. From the Quick Launch Menu, click the My Approvals  link (or ‘Approvals’) to access Project Online’s ‘Approval Center’.

Review recently submitted task updates. The Approval Center page displays the current task updates submitted. Review additional task update information. Scroll to the right side of the table to view the additional task update information.  Information in RED indicates the items that have been updated by the Team Member.

Previewing Task Updates in PWA

To Preview Task Updates in PWA, access the ‘Approval Center.’ Navigate to your Project Online environment. From the Quick Launch Menu, click the My Approvals  link (or ‘Approvals’) to access Project Online’s ‘Approval Center’.

Select the tasks to be previewed. Select the checkbox next to the task(s) which you want to preview.

Click the ‘Preview Updates’ button. Click Preview Updates on the Approvals tab, located in the ‘Actions’ section of the Approvals menu ribbon.

Review the Preview page.

A new tab will open displaying what the project schedule will look like if the task updates are accepted. The Preview page shows what the plan would look like if the task update(s) were accepted.

The following variances are highlighted:

• Duration (Previous Duration vs. (Current) Duration)
• Start Date (Previous Start vs. (Current) Start)
• Finish Date (Previous Finish vs. (Current) Finish)
• % Complete (Previous % Complete vs (Current) % Complete)

The Gantt Chart is also updated to reflect variances:

• Previous Gantt Bar = Grey vs. Current Gantt Bar = Blue
• Previous Milestone Diamond = Grey vs. Current Milestone Diamond = Black

The Summary Bar will be extended to reflect the changes of its sub-tasks.

Updated tasks are highlighted with a yellow background. Task names with associated task updates will rendered as a blue hyperlink.  To get details of the task update, click the associated link (task name).

To change a view, click on the View dropdown box.

Accepting and Approving Task Updates

From the Quick Launch Menu, click the My Approvals  link (or ‘Approvals’) to access Project Online’s ‘Approval Center’.

Select the tasks updates to be accepted by checking the box next to the relevant tasks.

Click Accept on the Approvals tab, located in the ‘Actions’ section of the Approvals menu ribbon.

Optional: Add comments for the team members in the Confirmation dialog box.

The approved task updates will be applied to the project schedule the next time it is published.

Rejecting Status Updates

From the Quick Launch Menu, click the My Approvals  link (or ‘Approvals’) to access Project Online’s ‘Approval Center’.

Select the tasks updates to be accepted by checking the box next to the relevant tasks.

Click Reject on the Approvals tab, located in the ‘Actions’ section of the Approvals menu ribbon.

Optional (but recommended): Add comments for the team members in the Confirmation dialog box.

Rejected task updates will be returned to the respective Team Members along with the comments entered.  The Team Member will clearly see which task(s) have been rejected in their Timesheet and in the Task Center (‘Process Status’ column).

Resource’s Timesheet

Resource’s Task Center View

Want to learn more tips and tricks to manage tasks in Project Online? View our free on-demand webinar now.

Not Your Typical Staffing Company

Tailored staffing services, such as Wicresoft, are vastly different from a typical staffing agency. And of course, you can find your next dream job while partnering with a staffing company – it just needs to be the right one. There are plenty of options so make sure you are looking for the partner that’s right for you. Take the time to evaluate your qualifications and experience. If you have experience as a Project Manager and are a certified PMP, you don’t want to select a company that typically works with retail or customer service professionals. Choosing a specialty staffing agency aligned to your experience will help ensure you are placed in an ideal position.

Staffing Beyond Temporary Positions

Temp staffing agencies are the exception in the industry, not the rule. Most staffing companies focus on permanent positions. If you’re looking to find a job to stay in on a long-term basis, a staffing company can help provide you with that solution. If you haven’t had success finding a company who specializes in finding long-term positions, expand your search and do some research – temp agencies only make up 20% of the staffing industry.

Finding Your Dream Job

Reputable and experienced staffing organizations will know how to place candidates into qualified positions they will love. This happens more often than you think. When selecting your perfect staffing company match, take a quick look at the reviews and testimonials. A company with good placements will be established and have positive reviews.

Including Staffing in Your Game Plan

Quality staffing companies provide unique opportunities that provide value to the candidate and the client. Staffing is becoming the preferred method for employers to find skilled professionals. Over 12 million people worked for staffing companies last year, and 9/10 said their experience made them more employable. These numbers are no surprise – companies need assistance filling positions, and individuals want help finding the best role for them.

Personalized Staffing

Wicresoft leads the market with staffing solutions specializing in IT, PMO, Project Management, and Telecom. As a trusted staffing company, we support the entire United States, from coast to coast. Our team of experienced recruiters is dedicated to providing employers with qualified professions and prospective candidates with their dream jobs. If you’re seeking a perfect match, contact us through our talent center to learn more. Don’t put it off any longer.

The Benefits of Project Teams

Communication and Collaboration – Hosting all project documents on a project team site enables collaboration among team members. When work is happening on the project, a team member can identify a roadblock and needs assistance teliminates the need for lengthy emails and ensures all progress is captured in one single location. Similarly, when a team needs to come together to work on a lengthy document, SharePoint can allow different authors to edit the content at the same time. This is collaboration at its finest. Furthermore, hosting your documents on your SharePoint site ensure that the file being used is always the most up to date by keeping documents in one location and granting team members access.

Transparency and Insights – When teams struggle, it’s often due to a lack of transparency within the project. Team sites are the solution. Team sites enable team members to have access to key project metrics in real-time, such as current budget projects/utilization, the number of roadblocks and live status updates. SharePoint team sites provide insights into the project when you need it most without the need for status meetings or confusing email chains. Ensuring all team members have insights into the project, from the timeline to the budget, ensures that everyone is on the same page and helps to avoid any surprises as the project progresses.

Collaboration, communication, transparency, and insights are only a few of the countless benefits of a SharePoint project team. As with most technologies, the key is continued use and team adoption. Get the most out of your SharePoint team

Interested in learning more about the full capabilities of Project Online? Watch our webinar on the benefits and outcomes of Project Online here.