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)

This is a supporting blog post for a new Project Online Power BI Report Pack that I have published. This report pack provides examples for a project compliance / audit type check to ensure your projects follow certain planning standards. This follows on from the previous report packs that I published: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2017/10/31/projectonline-ppm-powerbi-report-pack-v2-bi-reporting-powerquery-dax-office365/ This new report pack follows the same theme / styling. The compliance report pack can be downloaded from the Microsoft Gallery, the link to download the report is here: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Online-Power-BI-Compliance-b45b657c

The report pack consists of two reports, a summary report for project level checks and a detailed report for tasks, risks and issues checks. These can be seen below:

Summary Page:

Project Details (Select a Project from the filter):

Same report but with a different project selected:

These reports only use default intrinsic fields so it should work for all Project Online deployments.

Once downloaded, the report pack data sources will need to be updated to point to your target Project Online PWA instance. To do this you will need the Power BI desktop tool installed. This can be downloaded here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop

Open the downloaded PWMatherProjectOnlinePowerBIAuditComplianceReportPack.pbit template file in Power BI Desktop and follow the steps below to point the data sources to your Project Online PWA instance:

• In the parameter window that opens, enter the full Project Online PWA URL without the /default.asp – such as https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa
• Click Load
• The data will now start to load and you will be prompted to connect
• On the OData feed window, click Organizational account and click Sign in and enter credentials as required
• Click Connect
• On the Privacy levels window set the privacy as required
• Click Save
• The data will load – this may take a few minutes depending on the dataset size in Project Online
• Access the Project Details page and select a project from the project filter
• Save the report

Please note, some of the steps above might not be seen if you have connected to the Project Online instance from Power BI Desktop previously. This file can either be emailed around to colleagues with details on how to update the credentials to their own or what would be better is to create a Power BI app workspace and give users access: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-create-workspaces

The checks in this pack are just examples and might not be applicable to your organisation but it will give you a good starting point it you do not have any compliance / assurance type reports today.

I will plan to update this in the future, so feel free to add comments for any suggested project compliance checks, provided they are generic enough and possible using only intrinsic fields, I will look to add these in a later release.

I hope you like it