A business’s success largely depends on how efficiently it navigates projects, timelines, and budgets. Your project management needs to keep clients in the loop throughout the process, offer details about project costs, risks, and team members. As well as give you an image of the status and cost of a project.
This blog post is sponsored by Brightwork.
According to Inc.com, project management has changed significantly in recent years. Project management is no longer just for those specialized in software, but increasingly it is becoming the responsibility of different teams, not just one group of specialists. The tools and processes used to deliver projects have also changed, with more light-touch and easy-to-use applications becoming more popular.
Project management solutions
There are many ways to manage project management – one of which is using Excel spreadsheets. Another way is implementing complex solutions, like the project management solutions offered on HelloSign. The third way to do this is with DIY projects, which have disadvantages and challenges including requiring resources to maintain it.
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets aren’t flexible enough or can be too difficult to work within. They provide very limited visibility into projects, making them hard to share and edit.
DIY project management tools
Some businesses consider building their own project management system, but they often find that it’s not as easy as they’d hoped. Tools like the Microsoft 365 platform can help simplify the process.
Let’s take a closer look at how Microsoft 365 can help you manage your projects. BrightWork 365, a unique and advanced project management software, uses the Microsoft 365 platform to provide a lightweight and effective project management system. The key is that you can use the tools that you are already familiar with.
For Microsoft 365, our system to help you organize and manage your work, we provide a full set of customizable tools and options that can be used for project management.
Previously known as Office 365, Microsoft 365 is becoming the leading cloud productivity suite. Microsoft 365 offers a variety of tools, applications, and features that can enhance your ability to work on a project or communicate with others. It’s all based in the cloud so there is no need for legacy infrastructure like local servers.
Microsoft 365 has seen some significant growth in recent years, fueled in part by the pandemic. According to Microsoft Office Statistics & Facts, there are 155 million active Office 365 business users, 400 million Outlook.com users and 115 million daily Microsoft Teams users.
Microsoft Windows provides many tools that can be used for project management.
Teams helps teams collaborate
SharePoint can manage documents, whether they be digital or paper.
Power Automate can automate workflows
Power BI is a self-service tool for getting insight into how your business and operations are spending, which is essential for growth.
Microsoft 365 provides a wide range of software tools for project management and collaboration. In order to really leverage these individual tools into one cohesive process, you need research and experience with multiple technologies, as well as the necessary project management skills.
BrightWork 365 helps individuals and teams, such as photographers, founders, WordPress developers, stay on track and accomplish their goals.
BrightWork 365 is a project management solution that runs on top of Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform. It also provides templates, dashboards, reports, and collaborative features for your projects to increase their success rates. It gives you high-level visibility without overwhelming your team.
If you are one of the massive number of organizations using Microsoft 365, then you need to implement a project management solution. BrightWork 365 is agile and scalable, delivering projects across a range of platforms.
Let’s take a look at the main Microsoft 365 components that BrightWork 365 utilizes.
In Microsoft 365, there are a variety of components that have a number of roles.
Microsoft Teams is an excellent personal assistant for the business office worker. It’s a collaboration and communication hub which provides for a Team for each program, with channels to organize all your projects.
Microsoft 365 apps can be used to display project information in Outlook, Word, Excel, and OneNote.
Azure Active Directory and Groups deliver authentication, security, and hosting.
SharePoint Online provides project document management and powerful collaboration tool to help you with projects.
Prism is a program that comes in handy for all kinds of forms, reports, and dashboards.
Table 1: Why BrightWork 365 uses Microsoft 365
BrightWork 365 project management components
BrightWork is suitable for all project types. It has a smaller learning curve and you can use it right away (Start) or customize it (Evolve) to fit your business’s processes, rules, and project workflows.
Built-in dashboards and reports make it easy for projects to have visibility and information sharing. BrightWork 356 utilizes four main project management pillars:
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Templates
Project and portfolio management templates are an easy way to get your project started and keep the workflow organized. Project and portfolio management templates in BrightWork 365 help you create projects that record and track all of their necessary project information in one place.
BrightWork 365 provides the tools needed to easily build project templates using Microsoft Power Apps. You can see an example project created by a template shown in Figure 1 below.
Using the BrightWork 365 Standard Template for Projects
Figure 1: Using the BrightWork 365 Standard Template for Projects
BrightWork 365 comes with one-click templates that you can use to help make your projects more manageable. Project planning and invoicing is made easy with our user-friendly tool. Our templates are built for simplicity and feature the four steps in the typical project flow—Initiate, Plan, Execute, and Close Out.
The menu across the top displays information about several different aspects of your project, including your project’s name, a brief description, number of users currently signed up, and how much they would pay.
A project has a lot of information attached. One of most important pieces of data is the description that lets you know about all the high-level fields, including information like the program, milestone dates, and more.
Team—Ensures the project is well-managed and the right people are carrying out the task assigned to them.
Stages is a project-management solution that understands and teaches a unique process.
Gantt – Projects help you better manage tasks, individuals, and communication for your team.
My Work will help you keep track of all the work you’re assigned to for this project.
When you’re working on a project and you have status indicators available, it’s important to use them in order to get your work done efficiently.
Documents – Displays different documents created throughout the project.
Actions is a tool that helps small businesses to assign and track action items in one convenient place. With Actions, you can assign tasks as simple as linking to another website or file, labeling people throughout the company or sorting emails.
Issues – The project dashboard gives you the ability to document many issues related to the project, such as pulled resources and changed order.
The risks section of your proposal provides an opportunity for you to alert the team about project risks.
Costs – Shows the budget assigned to the project, budget approved, and projected costs for the remaining duration of a project.
Our communications center enables you and your team to stay connected with each other.
Project Settings – Show the backend details of a project like what type of template was used to create it.
In the lower portion, we’ve included a project management dashboard to visualize the schedule dates along with the current project status.
You can use the templates we have built-in, or you can edit them to meet your own project management needs by modifying them to fit the way you work.
- Requests
Projects can be created by project administrators or by team members submitting project Requests. BrightWork 365 offers an easy way to manage a project request program. You can fill out and submit a Request form that then goes through the approval process outlined in Figure 2.
The new project proposal is now submitted.
Once the request has been submitted, you’ll be notified with an email.
Reviewed — The reviewers or management will decide about the proposal with a notification sent to the relevant teams.
The request is welcomed if approved, and a new project will be created.
The request intake form can be configured to match your local requirements and ensure that users are submitting the information you need them to. Requests are built using Power App forms and Power Automate for the workflow.
We offer seven different project types for you to choose from.
Projects are collections of work items, and the Project view enables you to list them. You can also edit and update project information from this page.
When using Affilimate, you can approve and assign budgets, as well as track individual cost items and vendor information. You can also log various actions, decisions, resolutions, approvals, and notes during the life time of a project.
Microsoft Project service provides a number of powerful features that make your life easier and help you save lots of time. Projects are set up in Microsoft Teams, they can be driven by Power Apps, and collaboration is overseen by SharePoint Online.
- Portfolios
When you create a portfolio, you can select any number of projects in your BrightWork 365 account. These will be connected to either business units or work types , which allows you to build customized portfolios that highlight several programs at a time.
Portfolios bring together projects for an insight into your work.
Figure 3 – Portfolios provide an overview of multiple Projects
Portfolios are designed with the goal of providing visibility into the status of multiple projects. Dashboards allow project statuses to be more visible and optimized for business decision-making. Power Apps give you the dashboard displays so that you can drill down into portfolios, programs, and related projects for more details.
Prefer to manage your projects within the Microsoft 365 platform with Excel? That’s fine – because reports use Power BI. They offer a unique, insightful visual that helps illustrate trends and information that can be used to make better decisions and decisions. Connectors from all over the world can pull data from on-premises sources and hundreds of cloud sources in one place, so you won’t need to worry about bringing your data together yourself. Reports can also be delivered to on screen through Outlook email as well.
Built-in security, data management, and mobile support are the impressive features offered by this toolkit.
Your BrightWork 365 account is managed using Azure AD security. There are several roles from the beginning that come with the service, including:
BrightWork 365 is built on Microsoft Dataverse as the underlying datastore to allow for enterprise integration. The Microsoft Connector technology enables you to access several of your systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365.
BrightWork 365 utilizes a mobile interface to make it easy for project managers and users to access their system on the go. They also take into account data security concerns by controlling access to your system with biometric verification and other technologies.
A project management solution based on Microsoft 365 gives you flexibility and high performance to complete your work.
With Microsoft 365, BrightWork provides a complete and effective project management solution. It’s easy to adopt as it is designed using the Microsoft 356 tools that you’re already familiar with. Businesses don’t have to worry about costly setups or complicated tasks, because our software is built right into the Microsoft 365 platform.
There’s nothing wrong with a simple solution. With the intuitive Microsoft 365 platform, your project management needs are taken care of with BrightWork 365.
