Jan 7, 2021
Now more than ever, operating with the speed needed to deliver successful project-based services requires that everyone involved—from leaders to team members and contractors—can predict, adapt, and rapidly respond to change, all while practicing social distancing and with teams working remotely.
Our vision for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is to connect teams across the project delivery lifecycle and unlock the business agility and resilience needed for success. Today, we are announcing the next milestone in achieving that vision and invite you to participate in the Dynamics 365 Project Operations Preview Program.
Get more accurate quotes and perfect sales to delivery hand-offs
Your sales team will provide the best customer experience from the first touch point by creating project proposals that outline scope and provide more accurate quotes. Be sure to take the time to create a full client proposal, including delving into the flexible and multidimensional pricing capabilities, as well as the project planning functionality, that is key to nail the hand-off from sales to project delivery teams.
Optimize resource scheduling with accurate demand forecasting
People are the cornerstone of your project-based services businesses—making it imperative to retain top performers. Project Operations helps you take better care of your people by making the best use of their time and skillset, while providing insights on resource utilization across the business. Explore how you can match team member skillsets with project demands. And don’t miss the advanced scheduling engine that simplifies resourcing processes. Increased awareness of how you are utilizing your resources allows you to make better workforce decisions, resulting in better quality of work and higher customer and employee satisfaction.
Improve collaboration across all team members
With your teams operating remotely, it is important to keep everyone connected and working efficiently. While evaluating Project Operations, we suggest you dig into the forecasting and dashboards that will ensure team members have the data they need to make confident decisions. Also, check out Microsoft Teams to keep everyone connected, as Project Operations will allow for Microsoft Teams integration to facilitate world-class collaboration and teaming. In addition, keep in mind that Project Operations is built on the Microsoft Power Platform and you can expand your team’s access to business intelligence with Microsoft Power BI.
Deliver projects on-time and on-budget
Empower your project teams to be responsive by enabling consistency in practice and procedures with true process governance. Explore Microsoft Project for the web project management tools that are embedded in Project Operations. Take a look at the project planning capabilities, Kanban board, and Gantt charts that let users see project timelines in relation to one another. The rise in the need for enhanced mobility among your project team members and delivering an outstanding customer experience is more important than ever, so ensure you explore Project Operations from your mobile devices.
Drive financial performance and increase project profit margins
Last, but definitely not least important, delve into the comprehensive project costing and accounting capabilities of Project Operations. You will want to take the time to look at budgeting, forecasting, time and expense tracking, project costing, and billing capabilities. And don’t forget to dig into the financial insights and metrics that will keep profit margins front and center.
Get everything you need to run your project-based services business—quotes, resourcing, project delivery, time and expense, project accounting, and business intelligence—all in one solution for better insight, collaboration, and visibility. Project Operations ensures you can deliver exceptional services to your customers on-time and on-budget, every time.
Dec 11, 2020
Microsoft has developed new capabilities in Dynamics 365 to discover email messages, meetings, and
phone call activities related to an opportunity, and then to factor these signals into the score.
Capturing activities to determine opportunity health
A healthy opportunity will usually have activities happening in it like email messages, meetings, and phone
calls.
Many of our predictive opportunity scoring customers were gathering these signals manually to determine
opportunity health.
Microsoft has replaced the need for customers to manually track activities by using AI to gather activities,
approving prediction accuracy, and compensating for cases where sellers do not diligently update the
opportunity fields.
This can help the seller make more educated choices about what the best next action might be.
For example, a high level of activity may indicate that the opportunity is heating up and is worth attention.
Likewise, an opportunity with where the activity level is low may need immediate attention.
Here’s an example showing the opportunity score improving
Here's an example showing the opportunity score declining:
Connecting opportunities with activities
In addition to activities that are explicitly connected to opportunities, an algorithm is developed to infer
indirect connections between activities and opportunities, using Contact and Account activity timelines.
Since these are not trivial connections (for example, an account may have multiple opportunities), AI is
assigning them appropriate predictive weights.
How the predictive opportunity scoring model is trained
First, we make sure, automatically, that the data we have is meaningful and contributing to the prediction.
Then we look at each recent activity level of every opportunity and try to find a correlation between this
signal and the likelihood of winning the opportunity.
After the model is trained, we can view the open opportunities in the system and give them a score based
on past examples.
What the AI does is learn how recent activity level affects the likelihood to win an opportunity in your
organization.
Nov 24, 2020
On November 1, 2020, Microsoft released Dynamics 365 Project Operations offers and removed Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation (PSA) for commercial customers.
What is changing?
DYNAMICS 365 PROJECT OPERATIONS
New application came on October 1, 2020. Going forward, all roadmap investments for the PSA software market will be done through this application.
DYNAMICS 365 PROJECT SERVICE AUTOMATION
There will not be any immediate disruption. Microsoft will work to transition you to at your pace. This service will continue running for customers on CSP until October 1, 2022 and EA until October 1, 2024, or until current contract ends, whichever comes first. Contract renewals will continue until October 1, 2021. Microsoft will offer a migration path to Project Operations. Current customers will be grandfathered into the new SKU and pricing.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND ACCOUNTING (PMA)
There will not be any immediate disruption. Microsoft will work to transition customers. SKU adjustments and entitlements for new customers will go into effect on October 1, 2020, moving from Finance to Project Operations. Microsoft will offer a migration path to Project Operations. Current customers will be grandfathered into the new SKU and pricing.
MICROSOFT PROJECT
Will be continued to be sold as PM and PPM solutions and common core capabilities Project for the web will incorporated natively into Dynamics 365 Project Operations.
Oct 15, 2020
Customer Voice offers a comprehensive means to capture, analyze, and act on customer insights. Easily integrate Customer Voice into your everyday applications or workflow using the built-in integration. Capture feedback instantly with ready-to-use templates, and respond quickly using real-time update and text analytics.
Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is an enterprise feedback management solution that empowers everyone in the organization to develop enterprise-grade surveys to collect timely feedback from the customers and employees. With point-and-click simplicity and AI-assisted features everyone has the tools to create, send, and analyze custom surveys that integrate directly into the workflows and the organization’s business system.
Customer Voice License:
Oct 2, 2020
A new Application is currently available starting October 1, 2020.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations connects sales, resourcing, project management and finance teams with a single application to win more deals, accelerate project delivery and maximize profitability.
The Project Operation New License offer:
- The Base License Cost:
- 120 USD Per User Per Month
- The Attach License Cost:
- 30 USD Per User Per Month
- Purchase Requirement:
- Entitlements per Tenant:
- Database Capacity
- Log Capacity
- File Capacity
Sep 28, 2020
Dynamics 365 Human Resources helps businesses empower and engage their workforce, provide modern benefits packages, and stay compliant. It provides a comprehensive personnel management solution, including performance, leave and absence, and payroll integration. Self-service programs help HR professionals and employees manage time off and benefits. Human Resources connects people and operations data to help you optimize workforce costs and take better care of employees.
For the 2020 release wave 2, we’re focused on the following areas to help you expand your offerings and extend your solutions:
- Transform the employee experience: Manage leave and absence directly from Microsoft Teams, along with full enhancements to employee and manager self-service.
- Build an HCM ecosystem: Enable streamlined integrations to recruiting and payroll partners.
- Optimize HR programs: Continue from wave 1 with additional enhancements in leave and absence and benefits management.
- Unlock your HR data: Modify existing reports and build custom reports using Azure Data Lake and Power BI Pro.
- Enrich your existing Microsoft solutions with HR data: Integrate directly with Azure Active Directory, Outlook, and other Dynamics 365 applications.
