Project Management for Microsoft SI Partners - Resource Allocation and Visibility

As many Microsoft partners (particularly SI partners) organise their customer engagements into short to medium term projects, they may benefit from some of the capabilities provided by the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management solution. The purpose of this series of blog posts is to highlight a few key functionality areas of the EPM solution, and demonstrate how using Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 and Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 may help SI partners organise their own projects more effectively. This ultimately leads to greater ability to complete more projects within required timescales and budgets, allowing the partner to complete more successful customer engagements.

 

Microsoft Certified and Gold Certified partners can make use of their Internal-Use Licence allocation (use this reference on the Partner Portal to check how many server, CAL and client product licences you are entitled to) to deploy the EPM solution (Microsoft Office Project Server 2007, Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007).

 

If you would like any more information or advice on how Microsoft partners could use the EPM solution internally, please feel free to email me.

 

This first video shows how the EPM solution can be used to store a central resource pool of employees. By combining this with saving project plans in one central location on Project Server, a partner could have visibility over resource allocation throughout the organisation. This allows the partner to make informed resource allocation decisions, whilst having visibility into allocation demand from other projects. The EPM solution combined with SharePoint also enables visual reporting of resource allocation and capacity over the entire organisation.