Microsoft Project Reviews

We basically use the solution to get a clear sense of the project and break down everything into a schedule. If there are overlapping schedules, we plan everything out and add in all the information so the roadmap is clear. We often have different teams coming in at different times, so we need to ensure that our critical path is clear and that we are able to execute on the project from an agile perspective.

We need to be sure that we have all the backlogs and scheduling and can pull in the customer on the deliverable as necessary. We'll check with them and fine-tune everything so that we can run the sprints successfully and match them up with the project plan using Microsoft Project.

There are some valuable tools on the solution that are actually free.

The tasks are quite detailed on the solution.

You are able to easily manage other software, and, for a particular task item, you can schedule it however you like. It's quite flexible in terms of managing everything.

The solution is very complete. It makes it a great option for project managers and they can use it extensively in almost any organizational setup.

The mapping is pretty good and that's our primary requirement. Sometimes the customers and stakeholders have their own reports, but that's okay and it works for us. Most of our reporting is based on sprints and Microsoft Tool can help us map this. Most of our reporting is a combination of JIRA and Microsoft.

We can code it to JIRA and can see the total movement there as well. 

We can easily integrate it into Confluence. It's pretty seamless.

We need to know what third party solutions we want to integrate.  Microsoft by itself is a project management tool, however, if someone says they want to integrate with something else, there may be issues. Since we work on JIRA, most of the time that can satisfy our needs, as everyone has JIRA. They just update their task there and we can have full visibility.

Microsoft's solution isn't really a collaboration tool, however. If you need a collaboration tool, you can use Slack, which can be integrated with your JIRA. Any ticketing in JIRA can be integrated to Slack and you can get the messages there. 

I personally still need to compare the solution to other solutions. It would give me a better sense of if they are missing any features. Right now, without the comparison, it's hard to tell. They may need more security features, or better communication features. It's hard for me to say with my limited knowledge base.

We've probably used the solution for more than three years at this point.

The stability seems to be good. I don't recall facing issues. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's been good.

The solution is quite scalable, as far as I can see.

I've never reached out to technical support. We never reach to Microsoft support because we haven't had any problems as of yet.  Therefore, I can't speak to their level of support or responsiveness.

We also use JIRA and Confluence as part of our project management work. We usually practice agile.

The pricing is pretty reasonable. They don't seem to overcharge for their services.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using, or if it's the most up to date. 

We are using an on-prem desktop version. We are not using Ofiice 365. We use JIRA for project management, tasking and creating sprints. Most of the time, initially, we just create the Microsoft Project plan and then all those tasks and the PPS. We still try to deposit using Sprint. We plan it out and then run it as an agile sprint.

It's a good tool. Microsoft is quite a stable company and offers good solutions. Microsoft Project is a good solution overall. However, they can keep pushing it and offering even more features and functions in the future. It will help them stay competitive. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's my understanding that in their roadmap they may have a plan to bring in more collaboration capabilities. If they do, it will make a great solution even better. However, they may just end up buying a project management suite and keep everything in-house under the Microsoft umbrella. It's hard to predict.

The primary use case of this solution is to maintain projects within our enterprise.

The most valuable features of this solution are the scheduling, managing the resources, budgeting, tracking the progress, viewing the progress, reporting, and it is very easy to use.

This solution needs more customization.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

This solution is stable.

We have not had any performance issues within our enterprise with any of the scaling we have done.

We have more than 50 users and a team of six to maintain it.

At this time, we don't have the need to increase usage.

We have not had the need to contact technical support, as we have not experienced any down-time.

Previously, it was all manual work and wanted it to be on a digital platform and went with Microsoft.

The initial setup is straightforward.

This is a good product and I can recommend it to others.

I would rate this solution an eight out ten.

My primary use case is teaching technology students project management.

Students have benefited from learning the de-facto standard for managing projects used by all the major companies worldwide.

The most valuable feature is the Auto resource leveling tool because it shows students that often, expert resources get over-scheduled, and that dealing with the issue by just using the auto-resource leveling tool would have a large impact on the delivery date.

The critical path analysis reporting and tools are helpful because they show students the importance of understanding which tasks are on the critical path, and how a delay in any of those tasks would impact the overall schedule. It also shows where tasks that were not on the critical path had some buffer, and resources on those tasks could be re-allocated to other tasks.

I would like to have more access to templates and tools that could be used to teach project management best practices.

I have been using this solution for twenty years.

We use this solution for project management, resource scheduling, earned value and benefits realization.

This solution has improved our planning, scheduling, resource optimization, and financial reporting.

The most valuable features of this solution are dependency management, milestone progress, multiple resource rates, and RAG views.

I would like to see the inclusion of multi-currency support.

We use this solution with CA Clarity PPM.

With well-constructed templates that include milestones that allow upper management to effectively measure progress, the dependencies between project and external activities that often diminish project success can be mitigated.

Dependencies (not typically effectively used in "Agile" techniques) allow understanding of actual project status and challenges.

This solution needs more templates focused on types of projects to ease setup.

We actually help and assist organizations in implementing their processes, and workflows to this particular product. Suppose you want to go on the enterprise environment, then you have your own process flows, your own workflows, your own forms and configurations, your user set and your resourcing. With this solution, we can help you configure the system.

We have implemented four domains like telecom, construction, banking, insurance, health sector and pharmaceuticals. We have worked, to some extent, in each of these domains. Of course the customization, configuration and implementation varies from user to user requirements as to how they want to, and to what extent they want to do it. For example, currently I'm working for a manufacturing domain. They wanted to implement this particular thing because they want me to monitor their projects, which is running into multiple verticals within the organization and we're unable to gauge as to exactly where we are with the project status, and how we are aligned with the resourcing and the costing part.

They have their own set of workflows and processes. We help them create that within the Project Online environment, configure their process, their workflows, their information, and all the project related documentation. It's based on the SharePoint environment.  Everything that you can do within the SharePoint environment is available here as well. So content management can be configured, as per the needs and configurations and workflows.

Of course, the reporting part is a key essential for any organization. You can build your dashboards, your reports, you have a support of actual reports. You have support for PowerPoint reports, power builder. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but all of this is supported by the environment. So you can have all the dynamic reporting and dashboards as per your requirements.

Most importantly, there are three aspects that I have seen most beneficial:

• Project tracking: This really helps the users as to where they are with each of the projects, and what are the satatus details within those projects. 

• Resource utilization: Most of the time you do not know how your resources are aligned. You cannot take up projects because you do not know whether this set of resources are available to you within that particular time frame. If you have all your resources within the enterprise environment, just one click and you are able to see that this resource is available during a specific time. So, I can pick up this project and assign this resource.

• Cost: Most of the time, we're unable to note exactly how much cost has gone into the project, because some of the numbers go into the documents that we put in, but the real numbers are really not captured all the time. Here, you will be able to capture your manpower cost, your material costs, your travel costs, and any other costs that's associated with your project and see that as direct impact on your project progress. Half of the time you might have a certain budget for it, but because of mismanagement within the project, the increase of scope and other such reasons, you end up spending more than what the budget really was approved for you. You are able to capture and see: financial status, usual status and project status.

So far I haven't faced any issues with scalability because everything that we have wanted to achieve, we've been able to. It is a scalable product. I've worked in multiple domains, and each domain has its own set of requirements.

We have close to like 5,000 all users. That was a really huge implementation, and we had to get into a firm deployment and that went on to like 14 servers also, because there were so many services and so many other things that you needed to put in place, and of course give it to high availability and high performance also.

Usually we have this onsite and offshore supports in place. At the onset we prefer an onsite support because that's more like filling in the knowledge gaps that the users will face, because they do not know the environment, they do not know the working of that environment. Then with the stability as the time moves, like a month or two months down the line, we turn it into an onsite offshore support with reduction of resources. That's totally based on your other kind of user base you have. Like for example, currently I am catering to a user base of approximately 1,000 up people and we are doing an onsite offshore support. A few people are placed on site to help the user immediately take care of their concerns, and some people are working at the offshore to take care of whatever comes into the hill test environment and then manage that. This depends on the organization's requirements, but you have both the models available. The response has been really wonderful.

It's a straightforward deployment. If you're going into a Project Online, you don't have to do any setup. It's just the basic configuration, which I will be connecting to your active directory to pick up your resources, and I will be configuring the environment for role security permission and stuff. Then of course, the custom information like your verticals, your divisions and stuff that you want to align your projects with. So the configuration is very easy. Of course, only if you want to bring your own workflows and customization into the environment. That's the development rule, but even those development periods are not very long. Like four months, five months is max that we get into. After that, just mostly support and enhancement.

There has been a lot of improvement in terms of the return on investment for ordinary resources, as well as the costing. We were able to see that the same project which they completed earlier in six months, now they could timeline and complete within like three and a half months time, or four months time with the better utilization of resources. Along with that, they were able to have their projections also in place, that pipeline also in place. Like you don't just have the projects in here, you also have the concept of proposals in here. So automatically, you know that these products are in the pipeline in form of proposals, and they will be executed within the timeline. 

The standard diversion of Project Online or Microsoft Project, is that it automatically has so many built in features that you really do not need to invest much in terms of trying to configure it to suit your requirements. It has all the standard practices, built in practices, all the pin book concepts already aligned within the product.

There are some serious competitors in this sector. For instance, there is Clarity from CA, Planview and  HP PPM. These are some of the other competitors that you have on the market. I think the Microsoft products are very user friendly, the ease-of-use is an asset.

The only drawbacks are the customization. Generally what happens is everybody wants it to be an automation tool, and this is not the use case for this solution. It is a platform for project management. You don't want an automation to be in place.  The system does not do it automatically because you as a project manager are expected to see that the input received, the status received from your team members is correct and accurate. Then that information is available for the rest of the team. You don't want that to be automated. So when the user comes back from this kind of mindset that everything should get automated, then no. I will not suggest that because this is management, this is project management.

This is not an automation tool, although to a very large extent, a lot of things can be automated to workflows in other ways. If that is your requirement, might as well go and build a custom tool yourself if that's what you're looking for. Then even that won't help you because project management is so related to so many other things that you'll not be able to encompass that all within the environment. You won't be able to think of that. I have been working with Microsoft for 18 years now. Obviously, their experience and understanding of project management would any day be more than any other solution.

My primary use case is distribution projects.

It is a user-friendly solution that we can easily understand. We can analyze a critical task, create a mitigation plan, add different calendars, control entire projects, scheduling and the like.

I find the planning features the most valuable to me.

I find that MS Project has limited control in comparison to other solutions in the same sphere.

We have had some crashes in the past. 

Tech support is quick to respond to our inquiries.

I have previous experience with Primavera. 

We have our own implementation team that took care of the setup. I was not personally involved. I know that the deployment time takes roughly three weeks.

They have moved from a paper to a project management tool. That's the big change. Earlier, they were using papers and then they started using Project Professional to run their project server, it's a huge change and a huge transition.

I think they've begun to improve with the new cloud integration. Previously, this was an issue. Now, I don't think there are any further changes that need to be done for the cloud issue.

There needs to be better integration between SharePoint and other Microsoft platforms and this solution. Furthermore, there should be a better integration with the use of the cloud and mobile devices.

For individual users, I don't think there is a stability issue. I've not really seen any performance issue with that.

The tech support needs improvement.

The setup was straightforward. It took us about three hours to do so. 

I do not have personal experience with pricing or licensing of this product.