Lydon Solutions

Construction Project Management Software Solutions

microsoft 365

How to Start Managing Construction Projects in Microsoft 365 – Part 1

How-To |

This is part one of three in a series of blogs called How to Manage Your Construction Projects in Microsoft 365.

More and more construction organizations are moving to Microsoft 365 to manage their businesses and provide their employees with the tools they need to get work done. Logically, one of the first questions in a construction company is: "Can we run our construction projects from Microsoft 365?"

The good news is that Microsoft 365 has many features that are ideal for managing projects. The not-so-good news is that identifying the right mix of Microsoft 365 tools for your organization to use for projects can be overwhelming with so many service options available.

So, where do you begin? In this first installment of our latest blog post series, we will help you navigate your way into managing construction projects in Microsoft 365. In future posts, we will dive deeper into your options.

Five tips to get started managing construction projects in Microsoft 365

Do these things first to manage your construction projects with Microsoft 365 successfully:

  1. Start small and build on wins

We recommend starting small in your approach and focusing more on upfront planning. It's best to pick a pilot project and phase the work as much as possible.

  1. Plan, plan, plan

We always recommend spending as much time as you can in the "planning" phase before moving forward with any real development. If you have not already, check out our four-part blog series on implementing a Project Management Information System (Planning, Evaluating Technology, Implementing, and Supporting) to get the big picture.

To get started, consider the following:

    • Define the problem. Make sure to clarify what problems you are trying to solve. By documenting and agreeing to a problem statement, you will keep the team focused on solving that problem. You will also be able to develop a cost-benefit analysis for implementing a solution.
    • Establish the budget and schedule. Before embarking on your journey, make sure to set aside a budget and a deadline as to when you would like to have this solution in place.
    • Assemble your team. Identify and build a team of subject matter experts who will use the solution. It would be best if you involved this team to some level throughout the entire process, from requirements gathering to implementation.
    • Define your requirements. This step is the most critical in any software implementation. Take the time to document your as-is business processes (what you are doing now) and your to-be processes (what would you want to do). There are multiple ways of collecting requirements: interviews, surveys, use cases, etc. Check out our blog posts on requirement gathering in general, as well as how to use case studies.
    • Develop document controls processes. Invest in developing your document controls processes to ensure that you standardize the data you collect and how you use it for reporting and search.
  1. The best way to signup for Microsoft 365

If your organization is already using Microsoft 365, you are all set. If not, be wary of reaching out to third-party Microsoft 365 licensing providers to set up your environment. We have seen some providers lock down their clients' tenants and restrict access to many services available in Microsoft 365. Our recommendation is to contact Microsoft directly to set up your own Microsoft 365 company tenant. If you need help, check out our Microsoft 365 managed services.

  1. Research your options

Depending on your license, there are many tools and services available in Microsoft 365 (e.g., Teams, Planner, To-Do, etc.), some of which provide overlapping features and functionalities. If your organization prefers to work in one service over another, that service should be central to your design. For example, if your team likes to work in email, then explore forms, reports, workflows, and so on that can be made available within Outlook.

  1. Understand your licensing

Microsoft licensing is always changing and can be very confusing and potentially expensive. Ensure you have the right licenses to deliver all aspects of the proposed solution, from reporting to workflows. Make sure to monitor licensing continually to ensure you are paying for what you need.

One thing to note is that Microsoft 365 provides for guest licenses, which lets you provide limited access and share information with users outside your organization. Guest licenses can be handy when working with subcontractors that you wish to allow access to your projects. Allocating guest licenses does not incur a charge, but there are limitations to this feature. Also, make sure to document any access given using guest licenses to make sure internal or confidential information is not unwittingly shared.

Are you interested in managing your construction projects with Microsoft 365?

We will dig deeper into the Microsoft 365 services available to manage your construction project in our next blog post. Stay tuned!

If your construction organization needs help setting up your Microsoft 365 environment, you can request a free one-hour consultation. If you are looking for a turnkey construction project management solution or a specific construction app for Microsoft 365, check out ConstructionViz.com.

Check out more blogs from How to Manage Your Construction Projects in Microsoft 365

How to Use Microsoft Teams for Construction Timekeeping and Shift Management

How-To |

The Microsoft Shifts add-in for Microsoft Teams is a no-frills time management tool. If you need a simple way to manage your small construction team's actual time worked, Shifts offers you a straightforward solution. Here are some things to consider when evaluating this tool for your team.

Microsoft released the Shifts add-in for Microsoft Teams as a simple schedule management tool for first-line workers in 2019. Shifts enables workers to track their hours and tasks right in Teams and even supports features like requesting time off and balancing workloads with the "move to open shifts" option. The add-in has a clean and intuitive interface, with daily, weekly, and monthly views. You can add users, groups, and shifts in just one or two clicks. The tool works with Excel, letting you import and export schedule data.

The Shifts add-in integrates tightly with Teams. You can pin the Shifts icon to the Teams navigation, making it easy to access and update. Each Team can have a Shifts schedule associated with it. If you have downloaded Teams for your mobile device, you can also access Shifts from inside the app.

Is Microsoft Shifts a good fit for construction teams?

So how could you use Microsoft Shifts for construction? If you need a simple way to manage a small team's actual time worked, the add-in is a straightforward solution, providing a no-frills time management tool. It finds a sweet spot in making sure you have coverage on your project when needed while letting you visually see gaps where you might need to move resources around.

However, there are a few limitations to keep in mind:

  • Unlike Microsoft Teams, which stores data in a SharePoint site collection, Shifts data resides in Microsoft Azure. Therefore, you cannot directly access your Shifts data.
  • Hourly rates for cost projections and planning are not part of the current functionality.
  • There is currently no integration with Microsoft Planner or Project.
  • You cannot consolidate schedules created in Shifts from multiple teams.

If you are looking for a simple timesheet tracker for smaller construction projects or a simple time tracking solution for facilities maintenance, give Shifts a try. Just understand the tool's limitations.

On the other hand, if you need support for billing, cost tracking, Gantt scheduling, or the ability to customize forms and UI, I suggest considering other Microsoft 365 services and applications which would better fit your needs.

Want to do more with Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 is an incredibly powerful suite of enterprise tools. If you need help setting up your Microsoft 365 tenant for your construction organization, check out our Managed Services and submit a free consultation request.

Need a turnkey enterprise construction management solution? Check out Construction Viz and the available apps for Microsoft 365 at 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

Keeping you on track with Microsoft To Do

Microsoft News |

If your organization has transitioned to Microsoft 365, you are probably surprised at how many task management applications there are. From Planner to Outlook, each one has its own task management functionality for assigning tasks and alerting users when they need to take an action. What separates Microsoft To Do from the pack is the pure simplicity of the tool, its ability to focus on your specific tasks in an easy-to-use UI and having its own dedicated app available across devices. But To Do is much more than a simple task management app and Microsoft has bigger plans for To Do in the future. Read on to see what makes To Do so great and how it can be used in the construction industry.

First a little bit of history.

Microsoft bought Wunderlist in 2015 and subsequently retired it in 2020. Wunderlist was a great task management application that worked across OS devices from Android to even a Windows Phone. This Wunderlist acquisition gave Microsoft an "in" across OSs, an already established user base, and fit in nicely to Microsoft's broader app strategy for gaining traction on mobile devices. In the two years following the acquisition, Microsoft released its own task management application, To Do. Clearly, Microsoft learned from what worked and what didn't with Wunderlist and built their own task management tool that was more integrated with Microsoft 365. At the start, critics were harsh on To Do, as the tech was still being developed, but it has now evolved into a concrete task management product for users.

What makes To Do so great and how can I use it for construction?

Microsoft To Do:

• Is free. To Do is free with a Microsoft 365 subscription.
• Offers a single task management location. All your specific tasks across the suite of Microsoft 365 applications can integrate with To Do using Power Automate, the Microsoft workflow engine. So, while the tasks could be created in other Microsoft 365 applications, they can then be surfaced for the individual user to manage in their To Do application.
• Is an app that you can download to any device. To Do is an app that can be installed on any device so you can use online or offline for managing your task as you transition from the field to the office. Also, with a recent update, To Do will support push notifications on shared list activities.
• Offers a robust API. Microsoft released a new To Do Application Programming Interface (API). This allows other applications, including Microsoft Graph to integrate with To Do. So, if you have a PMIS (Project Management Information System) to manage your projects, you could use the APIs to connect tasks from other applications and systems with To Do. You would then manage your team tasks in your PMIS and let users manage their own tasks in To Do.
• Allows users to create and share task lists. You can create a task list in To Do, share with team members, and assign tasks to your team. The To Do task list resides in To Do and is managed by the owner of the list.

Are there any considerations to be made aware of?

While To Do is an excellent tool for user-specific Task Management, there are a few things to consider.

• Which Microsoft 365 task management tool should I use? Organizations need to evaluate the best software application to manage tasks. Microsoft 365 comes with many different task management applications. Outlook has its own ‘My Task’ functionality, the new Lists app for Teams may also be used as a task management tool, Planner has Plans for team task management (check out our Planner post), SharePoint has its own issue tracker, Microsoft Project tracks tasks in a Gantt chart, and you can also track tasks in One Note.
• To Do is not a consolidated task management solution. Since To Do is a user-specific task management application, you are unable to view all your team member’s tasks in one place unless you created the shared To Do task list.
• Its data is not available in Power BI. As of now, To Do data is not available for Power BI, so you would have to look for a third-party tool to provide that reporting. Another option would be to build a Power Automate workflow to send the data to a SharePoint list and then use that list to report against.

Task management is fundamentally at the core of most systems and most likely will not be replaced with another task management solution. With all the applications across the enterprise, users could easily be overwhelmed with having to log into those systems to update the status of their tasks. Separating creating a task, in the system of record, from the user disposition of their tasks with To Do, makes complete sense and could be a shift in your day-to-day work behavior. We will see where To Do fits as adoption increases with more companies transitioning to Microsoft 365.

Overall, To Do is a solid user-specific task management application, like most Microsoft products, it will continue to become more robust with new features over time.

Get Project Management Expertise from Lydon Solutions

Need help with Microsoft 365 for your construction organization? Check out our managed services and sign up for a free consultation. Or if you are interested in a prebuilt enterprise-ready PMIS for your Microsoft 365, learn more about Construction Viz.

Is Microsoft Yammer a Fit for Your Business?

Microsoft News |

Microsoft Yammer is an enterprise social networking service in Microsoft 365 for internal communications within organizations. Think of it like Facebook, but for your company. Read on to learn more about this communication tool and how you can best use it at your organization.

Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012 for $1.2B when the frenzy around social media was taking off. The thought was this technology would change how employees would communicate and collaborate across the enterprise. Fast forward eight years, and Microsoft Yammer is still a little-known Microsoft 365 service, at least among construction organizations.

In my opinion, the reason Yammer has not had mass appeal or adoption has nothing to do with the technology lacking. Quite the opposite, the service is very robust and wholly integrated across Microsoft 365. Yammer provides a range of open APIs for integration, many plugins, and options for importing and exporting information. It also offers role-based permissions control as well as to-do lists.

The issue is more with a lack of understanding of what Yammer is and how it differentiates itself from other Microsoft 365 applications. Specifically, two Microsoft acquisitions appear to be in direct competition with Yammer: Skype and Teams.

Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5B. Both consumers and businesses use Skype for video and voice calls, as well as instant messaging. Many companies use Skype for Business (the precursor to Teams) as their primary messaging app, perceiving it to be like Yammer conversations (the core feature of Yammer). With the release of Teams, Microsoft is deprecating Skype for Business in favor of this new universal communications app. Teams also includes chat functionality and is fast becoming the “go-to for everything” application in Microsoft 365.

What Are the Best Features of Microsoft Yammer?

Yammer provides an organized way of communicating with your organization as a whole. You can create conversation (chat) groups for team members to participate in addition to private messages. It allows you to share files from SharePoint Online or those uploaded from your computer. You can create questions, polls, announcements, live events, and even publicly praise your group members. It is, in other words, a very well-designed communications tool. But what stands out for me is Yammer’s ability to easily organize, search, and share all these conversations across your organization. It promises to keep engagement high and conversations flowing.

Ideal uses for Yammer include:

  • Delivering company training sessions
  • Distributing organizational announcements
  • Listing lessons learned
  • Capturing employee suggestions

For construction organizations specifically, you might want to use Yammer as a project-centric chat application because of its robust search and retention capabilities. You could also take advantage of Yammer as an announcement area for project progress and critical milestones, safety goals, value engineering ideas, safety training, and team-building events.

How Does Yammer Fit into the Future of Microsoft 365?

Teams continues to grow in popularity and reach. More and more functionality that was only in Yammer is starting to make its way into Teams. So could Yammer be wholly absorbed into Teams?  I don’t think so because there are some use cases that Yammer addresses that Teams does not. For example, messages in Teams (even public ones) are not searchable or discoverable until you join a team first, making them virtually invisible to non-members. Also, there is no tenant-wide discovery feature for popular or trending conversations in Teams, and even org-wide teams have significant membership limits for many organizations. Not even the new modern SharePoint Communications sites deliver the power of the Yammer conversation model.

I talked about how to select between the various Microsoft 365 collaboration tools in a previous blog post. As I explained, Microsoft structures collaboration in Microsoft 365 around “Loops,” with each application serving a specific communication purpose. If you look at the collaboration applications in Microsoft 365, you can start to see why a user might want to use one tool over the other depending on how you approach your work:

  • Content-centric – SharePoint
  • Organized team-centric – Teams
  • Task-centric – Planner
  • Conversation-centric - Yammer

Ultimately, all of these apps could come together into one collaborative platform, like Teams or SharePoint, but Microsoft announced a new Yammer at the end of 2019; it is the most significant update to Yammer since it launched ten years ago.

The new Yammer, now in public preview as of June 2020, boasts a thorough overhaul of the product. Communities replace Groups. The user interface is fresh and uncluttered, and there are plenty of new features too, such as pinned posts, conversations that can be closed, and the ability to push notifications for polls, praise, and question posts. There are revamped mobile apps for iOS and Android and a new app for Microsoft Teams, called Communities, that brings the full Yammer experience into Teams.

I encourage you to try Yammer out and see if it fits with the other applications you are currently using in Microsoft 365.

Do More with Microsoft 365

Lydon Solutions offers a full range of managed services for Microsoft 365, helping organizations implement and take advantage of everything the productivity platform provides.

If you would like a fully featured Project Management Information System (PMIS) that supports Microsoft 365, check out our flexible Construction Viz solution. You can sign up for a no-obligation consultation and demo today.