Project Online is a premier application designed to provide a complete solution for project, program and portfolio management. While it is used primarily as an online program, the data you have in Project Online can also be manipulated in a desktop-based application.
Many organizations manage project timelines with tools like Excel. But as these become more complex, it soon becomes apparent that you are better off using a scheduling-based, time-phased tool like Project Online.
Project Online allows for some key functionality that is unique and absolutely required when looking at time-phased tasks, costs, or effort planning, including demand and capacity planning; resource workload forecasting; cost modeling and forecasting; and portfolio management.
Project Online allows you to surface work across all your projects and understand workloads for resources, including over- and under-allocation, all while giving users the flexibility to update their activities in one place.
Project Online links activities and deliverables so that as you adjust the duration of a task, it cascades and moves the related and dependent work activities forward and backward in time. This makes managing simple or complex schedules of work and resource assignments significantly easier than if you used less complex tools.
Project Online also allows you to rate, rank and prioritize your new proposed projects and compare them to your existing work portfolio to see what the downstream impact is to your existing work portfolio and resources before you approve the new projects. This provides the freedom to resolve any resource overallocations before they occur.
Project Online integrates with Power BI, Microsoft Planner, SharePoint Task Lists, and other tools to help people or organizations plan work, deliverables, and resource capacity in alignment with the work being scheduled.
If you use Project Online, you will also be able to leverage Agile and Kanban/Sprint Planning boards to help map work and connect your schedules. You can also leverage SharePoint and Power BI reports for displaying powerful heat maps and dashboards representing where your portfolio stands from one to all projects in the environment.
Resources
- Project Blog [Microsoft]
- Project Roadmap [Microsoft]
- Which Tool When: Microsoft Project or Office Planner? [Matt Wade]
Similar applications
Feedback
- Project UserVoice [UserVoice]
- Project on TechCommunity [Microsoft]
Author
- Tim Runcie, Project MVP and PMP
