Project management for CEOs: Microsoft Dynamics SL

The CEO

As the City Power & Light project progresses, Karen, the CEO, needs an overview of all her projects for a monthly review of the business. Because A. Datum is using Microsoft Dynamics SL, teams are collaborating and running projects using components of a single, connected solution. That means Karen can review up-to-date and consistent information from all departments using nothing more than a Web browser.

Web-based applications that Karen uses:

Steps that Karen completes:

To prepare the monthly review, Karen opens Microsoft Project Web Access. The Project Center shows her a portfolio view of ongoing projects at A. Datum. It's important to keep in mind that this and other Web-based views have strict security controls. For example, if Steve, the project manager, were to look at this view, he might only see a list of those projects he manages. Other people may be able to see the same list of projects without specific fields of information, like cost or revenue.

In Karen's view, there are a few different ways she can quickly see meaningful information. For example, she can use the grouping feature to sort projects by location. This feature also shows the rolled up budget and revenue figures. From here, she can also group projects using manager, department, or other fields.

And because A. Datum uses of Microsoft SharePoint Team Services, Karen can also see any documents or issues associated with different projects.

Specially colored indicators allow Karen to immediately see the status of each project. In this "stoplight" view, she can see whether the projects are in trouble based on the color of the indicator. Green means the project is on track to finish on time; yellow is slightly behind schedule; and red means the project will finish late. Budget indicators are similar.

The City Power & Light project has a red light, so Karen knows it's running over budget. She decides to address this problem immediately. For a more detailed view of accounting-oriented project information, Karen opens the Web Project Analyst tool. Here she reviews summaries of time charged to specific projects and by whom, as well as other details about budgets versus actuals. She also sees the billed and unbilled revenue, including the amounts entered for the servers purchased and for the work that has been completed to date.

Next, Karen gets project details by clicking on the project name. She can now review the project's list of tasks in a Gantt chart. For example, one of the tasks shows the actual hours Jim, a field consultant, entered in his timecard.

In this view, Karen also sees where the problems are in this project, at a phase or task level. Since system analysts are responsible for the phase of the project that is delayed, Karen is alerted there might be an allocation problem in that department. To investigate the problem further, she uses the "Resource" page view to understand how system analysts are being allocated. From this view, Karen sees information about all of the resources in the company. She groups them by skill and then by location to see what's going on with the systems analysts in the West region.

By highlighting all the systems analysts matching these criteria, she can display a graph which tells her instantly these people have too much work. She can even drill into each resource individually to see what projects and tasks they are working on. Now that Karen is aware of the problem, she can discuss options with resource managers, such as moving some resources from other regions, training and repurposing existing resources, hiring new resources, or going to a partner for assistance.

Karen can also get a more detailed analysis of project data through the "Portfolio Analyzer" page view. She looks at resource utilization using a pivot table. The data can be displayed by region, skill, and even type of project.

Karen then looks at a report showing the relative size of projects by projected revenue and how they are performing against their budget. According to the data, it seems the smaller projects are doing well, but a few of the larger projects are in trouble. This trend is extremely important for Karen to identify since she may need to make some management changes or refocus her business on the smaller projects where her company appears to perform better.

Using all this information, Karen can now efficiently prepare her monthly business report.

Back to Scenario

Top of page