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)

In part 3 of this mini series of blog posts we will look at a basic report example to support projects and programs making use of the configuration changes in part 1 and 2. For those of you that missed part 1, see the post here: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2018/09/19/projectonline-supporting-projects-and-programs-part-1-ppm-msproject-office365-pmot-pmo/ and part 2 here: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2018/09/21/projectonline-supporting-projects-and-programs-part-2-ppm-msproject-office365-pmot-pmo-sharepoint/

Now that we have done some very simple configuration changes in PWA and the Project Sites and then populated some example test data in the PWA instance we can look at example reports. We won’t cover creating these reports from start to end as this isn’t the purpose of the post, it is purely to highlight how to make use of the configuration changes to give to the program level reporting. These reports are also not engaging or showing casing Power BI, so you will want to create much better looking reports as these are just used to show examples of the data!

Firstly, lets look at the Project Center so you get an idea of the Project data I have in this test instance:

Notice I have two projects tagged and 1_Program projects but one in each program. These are the projects that will provide the data in the first page of my Program report:

The slicer is using the Program custom field:

To limit the data on this page, I have added page filter using the Project Plan Type field and filtered to “1_Program” projects:

So this page shows data for the project tagged with “1_Program” in the Project Plan Type field and in this case, the project tagged with “IT Transformation” which in my data set is the “IT Change Program” project. I don’t have much data on this page but this is just to show the data is for the program level project.

The next two pages show similar details for the program, one shows the details and the other shows some charts (just to add some colour!) but they both work the same way in filtering data that is only relevant at the program level:

On these pages there are no page level filters set, the tasks, risks and issues visualisations all have a filter applied to only display tasks, risks or issues that are requiring attention at the program level. On the tasks visuals we are using the task level “Escalation Level” field and filtering to only include tasks tagged with “1_Program”:

On the risks and issues visuals, we do the the same but use the “Category” field and filter to only include risks or issues tagged with “1_Program”:

This provides quick access to data relevant to the program. As we can see, these are very simple examples but the concept can be applied to larger datasets with more fields and data but the first page / report example will only work providing you one have 1 project plan per “program” value tagged with “1_Program” in the “Project Plan Type” Project level field.

That’s it for this short series – I hope that you found it useful!