Lydon Solutions

Construction Project Management Software Solutions

How-To

Why You Need a Center of Excellence for the Power Platform

How-To |

The Microsoft Power Platform application suite gives  Microsoft 365 users a powerful platform for reporting, workflow, and form creation. Initially introduced in 2017 and significantly enhanced over time, Power Platform is arguably one of the most robust business automation tools on the market. As the adoption of Power Platform exponentially increases, companies need a way to scale solutions, enforce standards, develop and provide training, and maintain a centralized standard set of tools across the enterprise. In other words, organizations need a Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) to get the most out of these powerful tools while avoiding costly pitfalls.

What is the Microsoft Power Platform?

The Microsoft Power Platform, available as part of Microsoft 365, combines tools like Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Apps to let organizations build end-to-end business solutions. You can use the platform to analyze data, automate processes, create virtual agents, and more. Power Apps and Power Automate have achieved widespread adoption by giving power users configurable tools to automate company business processes integrating data from various sources. And since Power Platform is a "low code" solution, all of this is possible with little to no coding whatsoever.  

Why It's Critical to Create a Center of Excellence for the Power Platform

Creating a Power Platform CoE is an essential coordinating function that puts the “guard rails” around this technology and ensures that change initiatives are delivered consistently through standard processes by a competent and experienced team. Microsoft makes it very easy for users to jump in and start creating Power Platform solutions quickly, so applying control and governance is critical to avoiding ‘the wild west’ springing up in your tenant.  Without a CoE, companies risk data exposure to outside entities, inability to report data, unsupported and outdated solutions, inconsistent data, and rework that can result in thousands, if not millions, in costs to organizations.

What to Include in Your Center of Excellence for Power Platform

Here are a few things to consider when setting up a Power Platform CoE: 

  • Leverage the Power Platform Administration Portal as a critical part of your CoE. 
  • Make sure to use separate environments for development and testing versus production and ensure your solutions run in the most appropriate region for your users. You can also get a trial subscription to test if you have not committed to the platform.
  • Use analytics to understand how apps and flows created in Power Platform run and perform in your environment. Review errors, be sure to monitor what systems these tools connect to, and audit who has access to your solutions. 
  • Manage data policies to ensure compliance and control how your solutions access data. 
  • Ensure there is a process for users to submit and you to manage support ticket requests. 

As you start your Power Platform journey, work to establish tools and processes that will help nurture your internal development and user community: 

  • Create a dedicated place to help onboard new users and makers that quickly orients them in the Power Platform universe. 
  • Create resource pages to share best practices, templates. 
  • Encourage the sharing of common and reusable assets across your team. 

Need Help Creating a Center of Excellence for Power Platform?

A Microsoft Power Platform CoE should ideally balance investing in and nurturing organic growth while maintaining governance and control. At Lydon Solutions, we partner with your organization to stand up a CoE designed to drive innovation and improvement while enforcing standardized processes. We have industry professionals with years of experience building line-of-business applications in Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform.  As an extension of our Microsoft 365 Managed Services, our Power Platform Center of Excellence (PPCoE) services include: 

  • Information governance 
  • Requirements gathering and validation 
  • Information and data dictionary documentation and mapping 
  • Processes for efficient development practices and standards 
  • Security and compliance 
  • Data loss prevention (DLP) policy management and compliance 
  • Data integration and gateway management for on-premises integrations 
  • Admin analytics (to view capacity and activity on CDS, Power Apps, and Flow 
  • Audit and change control 
  • Training and implementation 

Let us help you achieve broader adoption, better security and governance, and greater ROI through business automation with our Power Platform CoE implementation service. Contact us today for a free consultation.  

If you need a turnkey construction project management solution for Microsoft 365, visit ConstructionViz.com and submit a demo request.  

Easily Build Web-based Construction Forms with Microsoft 365 Power Apps

How-To |

The day has arrived where you no longer need to be an IT developer to create easy-to-use web-based construction forms. If your company is already on Microsoft 365 and supports the Microsoft Power Platform, you can leverage Power Apps to build robust, feature-rich construction forms quickly.

Microsoft Power Apps is a “low-code” or “citizen developer” platform for building web-based applications in Microsoft 365. It provides power users with an intuitive interface to drag and drop form controls onto a canvas and then easily connect to different data sources. Power Apps has a similar feel as Excel, in that logic expressions are entered into a formula bar. In addition to an intuitive developer UI, users can choose which back-end database will store their data, such as Excel, SQL, or SharePoint.

One of the most impressive features of Power Apps is its ability to integrate data. There are hundreds of pre-built data connectors available out of the box to get you on your way. You can connect to SharePoint Online and on-premise (using a gateway), SQL, NoSql, SAP, and even Excel. Power Apps puts data integration in the hands of a power user without having to build custom APIs.

Power Apps is a powerful tool for realizing greater workforce efficiencies. Its low-code nature makes it perfect for developing solutions specific to how your construction projects and programs work. Power Apps is one leg of the Microsoft 365 Power Platform, which also includes Power Automate (workflow management) and Power BI (reporting).

Get started with our free RFI Power App

To get you started in your journey with Microsoft Power Apps, we are giving away a custom Request for Information (RFI) application. The solution, created entirely in Power Apps, includes a Microsoft Excel back-end, providing easy installation into your Microsoft 365 tenant and the ability to share with project team members.

power app 1

Our custom RFI Power App has a navigation menu for a contractor and a manager with the following workflow:

  • The contractor completes a simple data entry screen, selects the project and a manager, and clicks submit to save the form to the RFI log.
  • The app notifies the manager through an automated email that an RFI is in their queue and is available for review.
  • The manager can then open the RFI to review and respond and have visibility to all of the RFIs assigned to them.
  • Once the manager responds to the RFI, the app generates an automated email to the contractor alerting them of the update.
power apps

The RFI App is configurable, so power users can customize the tool to extend the functionality to their needs, including:

  • Creating additional custom fields and navigation to the app
  • Adding automated emails on form save
  • Connecting to a SharePoint list
  • Integrating with your company databases via a gateway

If you would like a copy of our free RFI Power App, submit your request via our Contact Form. Make sure to add a note in the comments that you would like the free RFI App, and we will email it to you with instructions on how to set it up in your own Microsoft 365 tenant.

Lydon Solutions is here to help

Lydon Solutions has been providing construction owners, construction management firms, and contractors with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint based solutions and services centered around how you work and delivered on the software you use every day. Contact us today for a free consultation on how we can help you better manage your projects and information. And if you are looking for a turnkey Project Management Information (PMIS) system for Microsoft 365, visit ConstructionViz.com.

Plan the Work and Work the Plan with Microsoft Planner

How-To |

Microsoft Planner is a task management application that is part of Microsoft 365, both as a desktop and a web app. Like SharePoint and Teams, Microsoft designed Planner for team collaboration. Where Planner shines is the board view, which uses a Kanban-style UI to manage tasks. Kanban is a visual signal to trigger an action and translates literally to "card you can see." Kanban is used heavily in software development as part of the Agile Project Management process but can also work well for construction projects. Let's take a look at how you can use Microsoft Planner for your projects.

How Microsoft Planner Works

When a user creates a new plan, either from Planner directly or within Microsoft Teams, the applications automatically includes prebuilt tabs for a board, chart, and schedule views. It also offers the ability to add other related tools such as a OneNote notebook. You can even add your plan to Outlook or export it to Excel. Also, each plan you create has an Office 365 group automatically created. To find out more about Office 365, groups read our prior post – "Office 365 Groups - What are They and How Are They Used?"

The board tab is where you define buckets, which are logical groupings of work for your project. This view is where you will spend most of your time. Within each bucket, you add tasks, set due dates, assign the responsible people, track progress, and establish sub-tasks with the checklist functionality. Once created, each task stacks under its associated bucket, but you can quickly drag and drop items between buckets to reorganize, as needed. You can even move tasks between statuses and the responsible person when you change the board's groupings, which is pretty powerful. Tasks get a visual strike through as they are marked complete.

MS Planner

The charts view displays the progress of the tasks in a straightforward and easy to understand dashboard. You can use this view for load balancing to see which resources are assigned more tasks than others and adjust accordingly. You could also see all open tasks' status, click through to see the person responsible, and make updates all from the same chart view. The schedule tab displays tasks in a calendar view by week or month. You can edit or even add new tasks easily within the same calendar view.

MS Planner 2
MS Planner 3

Reasons to Use Microsoft Planner for Construction Projects

Microsoft Planner offers several compelling benefits for construction project teams:

  • It's free. Your Microsoft 365 subscription includes the Planner App.
  • Share plans with your team. You can determine who has access to your plan so you can share it with your entire project team.
  • Add your plan in Teams. You can easily create or add an existing plan to a Microsoft Team to track and share all of the tasks with your project team(s).
  • Collaborate in SharePoint. If you are using SharePoint Online to manage your projects, you can quickly add your plan to a SharePoint web page to track your tasks and collaborate with your team(s).
  • View all plans and your tasks. If you create a new Team for every project, you may be assigned tasks in many plans. It seems like this would be cumbersome to manage, but Planner includes a "My Tasks" view where you can see your specific tasks across all plans and even update those tasks in your board, charts, and schedule Views, which is quite handy.
  • Do more with Microsoft Power Automate. Plan data is accessible in Microsoft Power Automate flows. So, you could build a workflow that alerts users when they have a new task, when approval is needed, or even send Planner data to another application that you frequently use, like Excel.
  • Mobile app. There is a Planner app with all the features of the web version.

Some Limitations of Planner to Consider

While Planner is an excellent tool for task management, especially if you are using Teams, there are a few things to consider:

  • Which Microsoft 365 task management tool is best for you? Organizations need to evaluate the best software application to manage tasks. Microsoft 365 comes with many different task management applications. Outlook has a "My Task" feature, and To-Do is a stand-alone app for task management. The new Lists app for Teams may also be used as a task management tool, while SharePoint has its own issue tracker. Microsoft Project tracks tasks in a Gantt chart, and you can also track tasks in OneNote.
  • Planner does not link tasks to forms or documents. There is typically content in construction, such as a form or a document, that stakeholders need to review as part of an assigned task. Unfortunately, Planner is a stand-alone application that does not natively link tasks to forms and documents. To achieve that capability for a Planner task, you will need to configure or customize a solution using the Power Platform or SharePoint.
  • No consolidated plan. There is no consolidation of plans across your project teams to allow you to view all your team members' tasks in one place. You can view your tasks across all the plans but not each team member, creating additional steps for overall project/program management. You could create a single plan and use it for all your teams so that there is a consolidated view across all of your projects, but you will have to assign it to every user, and there is no metadata to relate it to a specific project or team.
  • Planner data is not available in Power BI. As of now, Planner data is not available for Power BI, so you would have to look for a third-party tool to provide that reporting or build a Power Automate workflow to send the data to a SharePoint List for reporting.

Microsoft Planner is an interesting task management and collaboration tool with a lot of great functionality. Like most Microsoft products, it will continue to become more robust with new features over time.

Get Help with Microsoft Office 365 for Your Organization

If you need any help with Microsoft 365, check out our Managed Services and sign up for a free consultation. If you are interested in a prebuilt enterprise-ready construction project management solution integrated with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, Construction Viz is our offering. Find out more about Construction Viz or submit a demo request.

Supporting a new Project Management Information System

How-To |

This is part four of four in a series of blogs called Tips on Deploying Construction Project Management Software for Your Organization.

In prior posts, we outlined the best practice to follow when rolling out a new Project Management Information System (PMIS) at your organization. Refer to the previous three articles for planning, evaluating technology, and implementing a PMIS. Now comes the often overlooked part of your journey: support.

Off-the-shelf solutions are pretty standard. Pay the monthly service level agreement fee, and off you go. The system dictates how you use it, requiring you to adjust your processes around it accordingly. You will need to monitor technology changes such as browser and device issues and storage, but for the most part, you should expect a consistent experience until you no longer do.

But what happens when you customize a solution? Or when your processes need to change after the system has been deployed? Over the past 11 years, we have seen this scenario play out in most, if not all, of our clients since our solutions can be highly configured and customized. There are some considerations to plan for before and after you implement a custom solution.

Tips to Better Support a Project Management Information System

Here are some things to keep in mind when planning support for your PMIS:

• Finalize business processes. You should revisit the business requirements documents and update them to represent the processes currently being used. Include adjustments as needed during the change control process. These documents feed training and are crucial to establishing scope management controls after implementation.
• Establish a ticketing system. Make sure to establish a ticketing process for collecting system and user issues. Ensure the ticketing system has enough data points to analyze the trending of requests by functionality, category, time to respond and close tickets, responsibility, and severity. This data will help target future enhancements, drive accountability, improve training and documentation, and ensure the users get the most out of the PMIS.
• Develop a knowledge center. Identify information and resources that you can provide for users as a ‘first port of call’ for support, such as FAQs, how-to videos, and training documents. Consider establishing a Center of Excellence and encourage key users to make themselves available to their colleagues for community support and knowledge sharing, helping triage many issues without opening a ticket.
• Implement change control. A change control process will be essential to prioritize new enhancements and fixes, update training material and requirements, and schedule future migrations and implementations.
• Develop a roadmap. Develop an enhancement roadmap for the system based on priority and cost-benefit analysis. Also, evaluate related technologies affected by the PMIS roadmap, such as versions of Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, browser versions, etc.
• Simplify where needed. Frequently, the implemented PMIS can be overly complicated for the users. After using the system for six months or so, pause to assess usability. You may need to swing the control pendulum back to provide flexibility in what the system needs to track versus what you can handle using other legacy applications, such as email and Excel. Also, consider minimizing redundant functionality that may exist across your portfolio of systems or that your new PMIS can replace.
• Survey users. Reach out to users to find out what works and what does not work in the PMIS. Capture lessons learned and any suggestions for improvement. Surveys will help identify opportunities to adjust training based on responses.
• Communicate to users. Ensure regular communications with the users about system issues, changes to their processes, planned enhancements, and upcoming training sessions as needed.

We hope these tips will help you with your PMIS journey. Make sure to check out the prior articles of this series detailing upfront planning steps, technology to consider, and implementation strategies. In future posts, we will provide management tips for construction organizations to ensure the entire process stays on track. Stay tuned.

Get Expert Help Deploying the Right PMIS for Your Construction Organization

Implementing a construction Project Management Information System (PMIS) for your organization can be extraordinarily complex and costly without proper planning and management. If you have any questions or are looking for help implementing Microsoft 365 for construction, contact us for a free consultation. Alternatively, if you prefer a turnkey solution, checkout Construction Viz, our innovative app-based construction project management software solution powered by Microsoft Office and SharePoint.

Check out more blogs from Tips on Deploying Construction Project Management Software for Your Organization

Beware of Phishing Attacks This Holiday Season

How-To |

We are all somewhat distracted and more prone to rush to get tasks completed around the holidays as we focus on family and friends and the season. This year with the increase in working remotely and the rapid adoption of Office Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Teams, attackers are increasingly leveraging these platforms for phishing attacks.

We wanted to highlight a new type of threat occurring more, especially this year, in the hope we can alert you to the risks associated with using cloud services.

A New Phishing Threat to Cloud Services


With this new phishing threat, an attacker compromises a user's account, gains access to their contacts and sends malicious links from legitimate domains. The email may contain an invoice, voicemail, or similar legitimate communication that mimics regular business practices and misleads you into thinking the message has come from a colleague or partner.

After an attacker compromises a SharePoint or OneDrive account, they upload a malicious file and change the account's sharing permissions to "public" so that anyone can access it. This malicious link is then shared with the compromised users' contacts or other targeted individuals. Sometimes the link is a unique redirect URL and so it can be difficult to detect, as it would not appear on any URL reputation repository.

Some attackers have strategically placed malicious content in one compromised account while using a second account – perhaps one belonging to an important or credible individual that one might expect communication from – to send the link. Even if the second tenant's compromised account is discovered, the malicious file hosted in the first tenant would not be taken down. And so, the attack would persist.

Other similarly abused cloud-based services include Sway, Dropbox, Google APIs, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Box.

Be Careful of Phishing Attacks this Holiday Season


These types of scams are difficult to detect and even harder to block or mitigate. Please make sure to remain vigilant and question before trusting any communications, especially during this holiday season. If you have questions about phishing attacks or online security threats, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.

Eight Tips to Successfully Implement a Project Management Information System

How-To |

This is part three of four in a series of blogs called Tips on Deploying Construction Project Management Software for Your Organization.

Are you about to deploy a new Project Management Information System (PMIS) at your construction organization? Hopefully, you have done the upfront planning to ensure a successful project, and you have carefully evaluated the available technology platforms out there. Now comes the hard part: implementation.

Over my many years helping deploy multiple enterprise PMIS at various construction organizations, I have seen that the implementation phase is a big stumbling point for most teams. You can do all the right planning and select the best technology platform and still fail if you have an inexperienced or under-resourced implementation team.

What do I mean by implementation? This phase includes solution deployment, training, ongoing product management, organizational change management, scope change control, data migration, lessons learned, closeout, archiving, and making sure the ship launches without hitting an iceberg.

A Project Management Information System Implementation Checklist

Here are eight things to consider when implementing your PMIS:

1. Start planning for implementation on day one. Make sure you budget for sufficient resources to support implementation as this is the one area where you do not want to cut costs. Prepare an implementation plan that defines roles and responsibilities, timelines, scope, risks, and change processes.

2. Establish management support. Getting senior-level sponsorship from the initial planning stage through implementation and ongoing support is crucial to your PMIS deployment’s success. Construction organizations are typically matrixed organizations that are highly resistant to change. Having a senior manager as a champion for your PMIS will help cut through bureaucracy, gain buy-in where needed, and clear a path to success across your organization.

3. Address politics. Although a new PMIS should bring organizations closer together, they frequently surface the political strife within a company and expose inefficiencies and mismanagement. Deploying a new PMIS forces change, so prepare for the fallout. While a new system should make everyone’s life easier, it may also mean that some people, even whole departments, lose their power or their jobs. Have these discussions during the upfront planning so that managers have time to align their departments and express concerns.

4. Incorporate organizational change management (OCM). You can never over-communicate during a PMIS implementation, so be sure to incorporate OCM into your implementation strategy. Deploying your PMIS will almost certainly affect other processes, systems, and departments across your organization. And their processes might, in turn, affect your PMIS. Regular communication throughout the entire PMIS selection and deployment process will ensure that your users, and the overall organization, stay informed and aligned.

5. Plan for obsolescence. When I was a project controls manager, I always dreaded when a new senior manager came on board and decided to change everything in their image, which often meant switching to their preferred PMIS. The problem was that the incoming PMIS never dropped anything off our plates. The same processes continued but were now more complicated as the new systems required redundant steps because nobody had the authority to end-of-life the old PMIS. To gain more commitment from your teams, find ways to make their lives easier with the new PMIS by removing redundant tasks, re-engineering outdated processes and systems, and automating when possible.

6. Find the right team. Implementing a PMIS is complicated, and unless you have done it many times before, you should probably look for an external consulting company to support the effort. When selecting an external consulting company to provide implementation services, make sure that they specialize in the technology you are using. Many consultants claim to be experts in every PMIS, but they are just casting a wide net to get any business they can. Take the extra step to evaluate consulting companies; speak to clients that have completed an implementation with the vendor, and give the vendor a test so you can assess their approach as well as their general knowledge of the product. Then compare vendor responses.

7. Avoid staff augmentation vendors. If you choose to contract out your implementation team, avoid staff augmentation. While that may sound like a pretty bold statement, I have never seen a group of staff augmentation contractors pull off a successful implementation. Staff aug companies provide individuals with a limited skill set, and whether it is a successful project or not, they are getting paid. Service companies leverage a more comprehensive range of skills, and they typically structure their contracts around deliverables and milestones, which at least ensures some level of accountability.

8. Pilot first. We recommend this to every one of our clients. Start with one project and get a win before you roll out to an entire organization. Shotgun enterprise-wide deployments often fail. By piloting a single project successfully, you can get buy-in from the project team, who can then help promote it across the rest of the organization. You might also find that the software you chose or the team you selected to implement is not up to snuff during the pilot. Piloting gives you a chance to course-correct before you make too much of a time and monetary commitment.

Get Experienced Expert Help Deploying Your PMIS

I hope the tips above help you with your PMIS journey. If you have not already, be sure to check out our previous blog posts on pre-planning and selecting the right technology for a new PMIS. Stay tuned; in future posts, we will provide tips on best supporting a PMIS.

If you have any questions or are looking for an enterprise PMIS, contact us for a free consultation. Good luck!

Check out more blogs from Tips on Deploying Construction Project Management Software for Your Organization