Microsoft Project Server – Benefits of MS Project (+ Download) (2024)

1. Transparency and Good Bases for Decision-Making

Using Microsoft Project Management as the enterprise-wide portfolio and project management solution, you will achieve one thing above all: transparency in the multi-project environment. This transparency will become the basis for correct decisions at all levels.

Dashboards will help you to identify variances in the current portfolio. The central overview takes you to the relevant projects via drill-down.

There, status reports and various graphical representations will inform you about the reasons for the current status of every single project.

Your advantage over the standalone tool: you have a complete overview of all running projects, deadlines, states and responsibilities. Therefore, you have the best possible decision-making basis available at all times.

2. Central Project List

As a project manager, you work with the Microsoft Project desktop application as usual. But you save your projects in Project Server or Project Online rather than as files. This provides all stakeholders with a central project list. Depending on permissions, this list is easy to access via the Project Web Appand only shows the projects the user is authorized to see.

Administrators can create additional user fields for projects. This makes it possible to display further information such as the project status, the site, developed product, name of the customer, budget, total costs, risks etc.

A current and meaningful project list is the first and most important step in multi-project management. It is the perfect basis for all evaluations and decisions in portfolio meetings and steering committees.

Your advantage over the standalone tool: you identify critical projects and make necessary decisions early across your portfolio. This allows you to interfere in the right places in a timely and circ*mspect manner.

3. Workflows and Portfolio Planning

Depending on the company organization and the type of project, it can make sense to divide the project initiation into steps with different authorization levels and permissions. You define this process in Microsoft PPM with workflows that can be started directly from the Project Center.

As a rule, it is also very important to select the projects in line with corporate strategy. Microsoft PPM allows you to assign strategic drivers to the projects. Through the specification of budgets and available resources, Microsoft PPM suggests which projects you should select with due regard to the priorities. And which ones could be started later or not at all.

Your advantage over the standalone tool: you are equipped with the capability to prepare the selection of projects centrally. Objective investment decisions mean that you work only on the right projects.

4. Shared Resource Pool

Microsoft PPM features a central resource pool. All project managers have access to it. This comes with the following related advantages:

• You ensure the central and correct maintenance of capacities and qualifications
• All resource assignments are visible across projects
• In contrast to Project Standard, you have a functioning basis for your multi-project planning – even with hundreds of projects and several thousand resources.

You can also represent the company organization in the resource pool. Enterprise custom fields allow you to maintain skills, sitesand other information. Calendars, vacation and cost rates are also stored centrally. In accordance with the access permissions, these data are available in the Project Web App for evaluation. You can see the cross-project workload per staff member. And what tasks the latter are working on.

Your advantage over the standalone tool:at all times, you have the complete and enterprise-wide overview of the resource utilization and deployment. You can see if staff members are over-allocated. And if there are remaining capacities for new projects.

5. Personal Responsibilities and Time Tracking

Via the Project Web App, your team members can see all projects to which they are assigned. Likewise, they can record their actual hours and add comments. This is how the status of tasks and work packages can be documented in a transparent and direct way.

If you are using a standalone tool without connection to Project Server / Project Online, the exchange of information between project manager and team is more cumbersome. The project manager has to:

• Collect the actual hours of the team members
• Enter the data into the project plan manually
• Inform the team members about their individual resource utilization (e.g. via PDF).

In addition, you cannot create an overall report on the resource utilization across different projects at the push of a button. Microsoft PPM on the other hand transfers the entries the staff members made in the Project Web App into the planat a click. And the generation of reports aggregated across all relevant projects is possible.

Your advantage over the standalone tool: the project managers are relieved from manual information collection and data entry. Staff members can see their individual tasks and are able to report actual hours or the progress made.

6. Project-Specific Workspaces

Besides the project plan, you tend to require various other documents and lists during project execution. In the standalone tool Project Standard, it is necessary to create additional folders in which you save the documents.

What is more, they are not automatically linked to the corresponding project. In this case, lists usually consist of Excel files, which cannot be edited simultaneously and do not have a history.

Microsoft PPM, on the other hand, is a tool already running in the Microsoft SharePoint environment. Therefore, it provides all advantages for team collaboration.

From different templates, it is possible to create a project website automatically for every project. This website already contains documents and lists. SharePoint makes lists available to all authorized team members for simultaneous editing.

Project managers are the administrators of their project-specific websites and can edit them as required. In this activity, they are independent from internal IT.

In the Microsoft App Store, they can also obtain suitable extensions from a range of offers for their project website, for example: Risk analyses, Milestone Trend Analyses, WBS charts, etc.

Your advantage over the standalone tool: the central storage of documents for each project in one database means you have fewer losses due to internal friction. And your communication becomes much more efficient.

7. Handling Cross-Company Projects

Many companies are working with external partners and contractors. In most cases, you will not want them to access your internal infrastructure. Project Online offers a modern solution for this business case.

Depending on permissions, every stakeholder gets access to a joint planning environment in the cloud and therefore outside of your company. Thereby, you avoid potential security risks and reduce the effort for your own IT’s digital rights management.

What is more, you are flexible timewise in making the environment available to the participants. This is possible at a reasonable price, and accounting is transparent.

Your advantage over the standalone tool: even outside the company, you handle your projects securely with the aid of a transparent permissions system.