15 favourite features in Project Operations in D365 Customer Engagement

Are you live with Project Operations (PO) in Customer Engagement? Here are 15 of my favourite standard and custom features that you may not be using yet which could provide a good return on your investment in a couple of hours or days.

1.??????Do you want to save time creating new projects? Use Microsoft Project to build project templates and then import them to Project Operations. Use MS Project to design complex work breakdown structures with dependencies. You can define a custom column and the import will create it as a P4W column in PO.

2.??????Do you want to create projects from templates without any code? Use standard ‘Copy Project V3’ action triggered from a Power Automate Flow to simply copy all the goodness from your project template to your new project. This includes not only the WBS but also generic resources, checklists, buckets, labels, and conditional colouring. Easily define what columns for project and project task tables will get copied using standard ‘Copy Project’ and ‘Copy Project Tasks’ views.

3.??????Are your projects fairly standard? Why not automate creation of your quote, quote line and project based on a project template? Project Operations comes with actions for creation of all these records including importing your estimates from the WBS as quote line details that can all be called from a Flow.

4.??????Do your users enter prices in text fields on quotes? Instead display price list data directly on quotes. Create quick view form for Price List entity with a sub-grid with Role Prices. Add lookup to Price List onto Quote and call it 'Last Price List'. Copy Price List from Quote Project Price List to 'Last Price List' using a Flow. Add quick view for Price List to Quote and use 'Last Price List' as a link.

5.??????Use a custom Project Category column. Typically most companies have different processes for client, internal and administrative projects. You could for example design a different Business Process Flow for each of these categories. Do not confuse Project Category with Billing Type (Chargeable, Non-Chargeable, Complimentary) defined by Role. A Client project may include time entries with all these Types that may also be set by PM during time entry approval.

6.??????Microsoft is showering us with new standard features from Project for the Web available in PO. Let’s use them! These features include Checklists, Buckets, Sprints, and Labels. How about using Labels for entering Resource Information e.g. add a Label called ‘PM’ and have a plugin create a Project Team Member and a Resource Assignment? Or maybe use a Bucket called ‘Budget approved’ and have a plugin automatically create a Booking on your Schedule Board?

7.??????Use ‘Transaction Category’ as a wildcard for passing additional information from Project Task to Time Entry to Actual to Invoice Line detail. Some companies use it to drive Billing Type (see above) or to pass additional information needed on Invoice Line Details. If you use a custom field on Time Entry instead, you will need a plugin to map it to Invoice Line Detail.

8.??????In the default Time Entry view, users will see only Projects that they are supposed to work on. How about allowing Project Management Office to choose a number of projects that all resources should have access to using a custom column? You can then define your custom view of Projects that also includes these ‘shared’ projects.

9.??????Do you have a PMO team that spends many hours each month correcting time entries? It is more effective to deal with a number of common issues at source. Use a workflow or a plugin to stop users from submitting time entries for closed months and for the future. But allow them to create these time entries as Draft and monitor them to make sure that you do not lose revenue. Consider how these users create time entries: on the form, in the grid, import from Excel etc.

10.??What are other Time Entry features that will make lives of your Resources, PMs, and PMOs a bit easier? Display remaining hours from task on time entry, allow resource to close/deactivate task from time entry and most importantly establish a regular process whereby PMs add new tasks, resources submit time entries and PMOs review them weekly.

11.??Automatically set actuals for approved time entries as 'Ready to Invoice' (unless you really have a role that checks their correctness after approval). Use a Power Automate Flow or an old-school workflow for this.

12.??Do you create invoices in PO? Maybe add columns to distinguish different types of invoices using Contract Type (work-based and item-based), using Has Corrections (standard and credit note), and using a custom Type column (partial and final).

13.??Do you also raise credit notes in PO? Learn about the standard Credit Note process in PO (draft invoice -> confirmed invoice -> draft credit note -> confirmed credit note). You may have noticed that on invoice line details for credit notes a standard system behaviour sets Quantity to 0. Use a custom Quantity column to display an actual negative value. This will help you when you want to aggregate values from all Invoice Line Details from standard invoices and credit notes.

14.??VAT handling. Standard PO comes with a number of tax-related columns from opportunity to contract to actual to invoice that might be filled in manually. My advice is to hide them all and only calculate VAT at invoice header level. Track VAT rate at contract level, map it to the invoice, and calculate it there at the invoice header level. Do not track it for all transactions unless you really have to (you might have to make an exceptions for expenses only).

15.??Have a strategy how you want to plan your resources in PO. I would advise a combination of assigning resources on the WBS and a custom Power BI report for checking how your resources are used on different projects. Most importantly get an agreement at what level you want to plan resources; otherwise you will never be able to reconcile various conflicting assignments made by one PM at hour level with other ones made by another PM at month level.

I have focused 100% on Dynamics Project Operations in CE since 2016 and I would be very keen to share with you all that I have learnt about what works and what does not. I am more than happy to hear from clients with existing Project Operations implementations or from companies that have decided to embark on a PO journey. Please feel free to comment, like, and share and also message me if you have any specific questions, suggestions or otherwise! I look forward to hearing from you.