SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

Following on from the announcement that the Resource Management feature in Project Online was being rolled out (link below), my test Project Online tenant now has this feature.

http://bit.ly/1Fiq0Pc

In part 1 of this short series of posts i will provide some links for articles that explain this feature then I will look at enabling this feature on my environment and show you what happens once this feature is enabled. The later posts will look at using this new feature.

Firstly some links for this new feature:

http://bit.ly/1U0h1VO

http://bit.ly/1KBXljN – lots of useful links in the article

Once this feature is available to your tenant you will see the status banner like below displayed in the Resource Center page and the PWA Setting page:

On the Additional Server Settings page you will see a check box for Activate on the “New Resource Management Features Available” setting:

Part of this post will be to see how this changes existing resource plan data, so before I tick that setting I will just detail some of the test data I have so we can see the impact of this change.

I have a test project called “PM test project” – all these years of blogging and my imagination for dummy projects (and tasks) has not improved!

I only have one task on this project that the “Admin Admin” resource is assigned to, the admin admin resource is the only resource on the project team:

In the resource plan for this project I have two other resources with work:

The ProjectData APIs have the following data – quick example put together for this project in Excel:

Assignment and Assignment Timephased data:

The rest of the Assignment Timephased data:

I will now Activate the Resource Management features. Checking the check box gives this pop up:

Click OK then click Save on the Additional Server Settings page – only do this when your organisation is ready to use the new features. Fully test this on a test PWA instance first before production.

Whilst this processes, this setting in Additional Server settings will update to show the status of the resource plan data:

Once that has completed successfully the “New Resource Management Features Available” section will disappear, we can then see what has happened to that resource plan data.

Once the process is completed, the resource plan work will be deleted as can be seen in the example report from above after refreshing the data:

That resource plan work has been created as engagement requests, see the new example report below:

The rest of the Engagement Timephased data:

As you can see the data from the resource plan has been copied to the engagements data. The proposed resource plan work is only a proposed engagement. The engagements feature has the following endpoints for the ProjectData API:

• /Engagements
• /EngagementsTimephasedDataSet
• /EngagementsComments

We will look at these in more detail in a later post when we look at Engagement reporting.

A quick look in the “PM test project” in Project Professional 2016 and we can see these engagements, change the view to the Resource Plan then click the Refresh button on the Engagements tab to update the engagements:

The engagements can also be seen in the Resource Center, select the resources then click the Resource Requests button on the ribbon:

This will load the Resource Requests grid for the selected resources:

As well the resource plan data migrating to the resource requests / engagement some other changes happen. The old Resource Plan buttons are replaced with the new Resource Plan buttons, these just open up the project in Project Pro 2016 with the Resource Plan view:

A new resource attribute will appear on the edit resource page, this is called “Resource requires approval for all project assignments”:

With this set the resource will require an approved engagement request for project assignments.

Also a new category permission is available, this is “Manage Resource Engagements”:

This controls access to the resource engagements.

There is also a new Capacity planning feature accessed from the resource center, select resources and click the Capacity Planning button:

This loads a new page with some reports / views:

That’s it for the upgrade / activation part. Next up we will look at creating new resource requests and the process around that.