In part 2 of this mini series of blog posts we will look at the configuration on the Project Sites to support projects and programs. For those of you that missed part 1, see the post here: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2018/09/19/projectonline-supporting-projects-and-programs-part-1-ppm-msproject-office365-pmot-pmo/
As the Project Site are SharePoint sites, this also has many configuration options but this needs to be considered careful based on your reporting requirements. Whilst all of the data in SharePoint is accessible for reporting not all data on the Issues and Risks lists is available in the Project Online OData Reporting API. Only the data from default list columns Microsoft include on the Issues and Risks are included in the Project Online OData Reporting API. Other data from custom columns on the lists is accessible but only via the SharePoint list REST APIs but this can be tricky to report on for a cross project report. Here is an example for accessing this data in Power BI reports: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/want-to-query-cross-project-site-sharepoint-lists-in-projectonline-projectserver-powerbi-powerquery-bi-office365-excel-ppm/ As we want to keep this as simple as possible, we will ensure the data we need in synchronised to the Project Online OData API. The Category column on the Issues and Risks lists is the ideal default column to use for our requirements. By default this contains the following values:
(1) Category1
(2) Category2
(3) Category3
We will update these values for the Category columns to match the lookup table values we created for the Project Plan Type and Escalation Level PWA custom fields:
1_Program
2_Project
This is done on each list, for example access the Risks list, click the List tab then List Settings. Scroll down the page to the columns and click the Category column and update the values. Repeat for the Issues list then repeat for the other project sites. You need to be careful updating some of the default Issues and Risks columns as you can break the synchronisation processes to the Project Online reporting schema which the OData Reporting API uses. If you do break this sync, you will see queue errors in the PWA Manage Queue page. Changing just the choice values as I have will be fine and not cause sync issues but fully test changes to ensure the data syncs as expected with no queue errors. As the Issues and Risks use a list content type, these change need to be made in the site template so new project sites get new values and manually or via code in the existing project sites but that is beyond the scope of this post but here is a post that might help get you started: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2016/07/08/access-projectonline-project-sites-using-powershell-and-sharepoint-csom-office365/ or https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/projectonline-projectserver-project-site-provisioning-using-office365-pnp-remote-provisioning-sharepoint-powershell/ When updating existing project site lists, you will need to consider existing data on those lists as they might be using values you are wanting to remove.
Now our project sites have the correct Category values for Issues and Risks, we can tagged the items as needed as seen below on an example project:
Issues:
Risks:
You could also update the Risks and Issues view to and views that filter to just Program or Project or group by Category etc. Now the project sites are updated, when Issues and Risks are created these can be tagged with the correct category to make these visible in Program level reports.
In the final part of this blog post series we will look at using this data in example Power BI reports.
Modern Work Management - Project and the Power Platform blog 