Mojo Up directors Jean-Pierre Simonis and Daniel Buchanan say there is a compelling case developing for organisations to look at native Microsoft capabilities. Photo: Mojo Up.
Over the past year, Canberra-based professional services company Mojo Up has been working with public and private sector customers to assess the viability of Microsoft products to deliver Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) solutions and adjacent use cases.
This includes task and schedule management previously done in MS Project, Azure DevOps, or competitor tooling, but goes further to address PPM requirements such as RAAIDD (Risks, Assumptions, Actions, Issues, Dependencies and Decisions) tracking, project/program reporting using Power Platform, and associated business workflow.
The company says it’s found there’s a compelling case developing for organisations to look at native Microsoft capabilities as an alternative.
“This all started through our work with customers that did not have an existing PPM solution,” Mojo Up’s director Daniel Buchanan says.
“They used a myriad of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to capture and communicate project, program, and portfolio information.
“But consistency across these documents can vary and critically, with the information distributed across many documents and information stores, it is difficult, manual, and time-consuming to pull together reports and portfolio views.”
Daniel says the fact many organisations have not standardised task and schedule management solutions is exacerbating the issue – and they’re either using more than one toolset or the same toolset differently across business units.
“Complicating things further, when projects are outsourced the service provider may maintain yet another set of registers and documentation which is either not captured by the customer at all, is provided in another format, or needs to be manually duplicated for the customer’s internal recordkeeping and/or reporting purposes,” he says.
When Microsoft Planner was released, it focussed on task management for individuals and possibly small teams. But since its inception, Microsoft released new apps such as To Do, before deciding at the end of 2023 to consolidate these into Planner and Planner Premium.
“Many customers we speak to aren’t aware Planner Premium has evolved so significantly and it is now a legitimate option for projects of medium to high complexity,” Daniel says. “Its capability will only continue to improve as Microsoft delivers on its roadmap.”
Daniel says the biggest challenge customers face with Planner is understanding its capabilities and licensing.
“Because the product is mid-evolution, the licensing structure is not easy to understand and continues to change along with the capabilities.”
He says the biggest advantage of Planner is its integration with Microsoft Teams and the broader Microsoft ecosystem.
“Having a single pane of glass for project teams to work in just makes the user experience richer and more seamless. The other big bit of feedback we get, particularly from business users, is that it’s just much simpler to use than some of the alternatives.”
From an IT department’s perspective, consolidating to Microsoft simplifies its job because it’s one less vendor to support.
“Where it gets interesting though is when the Portfolio Management Office (PMO) gets involved,” Daniel says.
“When we start talking about rationalisation of tools and being able to capture and report on project and program information. This is where Power Platform takes Planner Premium from a respectable project management tool to a viable enterprise-grade option.”
Daniel says this provides the ability to capture project, program, and portfolio information alongside Planner in the Microsoft Dataverse, and use this to create rich Power BI reports, configure automated workflow, and establish approval processes.
He says this can then be extended with secure external collaboration to enable business-to-business (B2B) collaboration on projects. Examples of this can see multiple organisations working in real-time on a Planner Premium plan, or a service provider’s project manager maintaining their RAAIDD log.
In such cases, contributors can access shared plans and Power Platform capabilities using Microsoft’s external collaboration capabilities, thus providing a more seamless experience and keeping data within organisational boundaries.
“The other big win is security,” Daniel says. “All the Microsoft capability resides in your tenant. It inherits your approved Microsoft 365 and Azure security controls, and enables you to apply the broader Microsoft security capabilities such as data loss prevention to your Project Management and PPM solutions.”
He says organisations will still want to complete a security assessment, but this is much simpler when the solutions are sitting on top of Microsoft’s IRAP-assessed platform.
Going a step further, Daniel says Microsoft’s recent announcements at its annual Ignite technology conference regarding Copilot for Planner, the Project Manager agent, and the general ability to create customer Copilot agents, are game changers.
