In the first installment of this series, you saw how you can make a quick and efficient start in project management with BrightWork.

You also learned that, along with the centralized BrightWork 365 software, you get continuous assistance from your dedicated BrightWork Customer Success Partner (CSP) to help you apply our proven Start-Evolve approach.

This approach prepares you for quick adoption and solid implementation of project management while enabling you with a flexible and secure ‘evolve’ of your PPM journey.

First Evolve – Sample Project Management Success Review

After your initial deployment of project management with BrightWork 365, it is important to pause and reflect on the progress with review and feedback.

Conduct a project management success review to assess how your centralized PPM solution doing so far.

Again, we have a template for conducting your project management success review with the assistance of your dedicated customer success partner at BrightWork. At this stage, you revisit and revise your project management success strategy.

Factors Influencing Your First Evolve

Your first evolve will also depend on:

• Your context
• Your organizational and,
• Project management goals.

 

What might your first evolve look like with BrightWork 365? The following sample of the first Evolve demonstrates (see video clip) three possible items from a sample feedback and backlog in a Project Management Success Strategy document.

• Project Standard Template for additional project management
• Project Structure Template for more advanced and complex projects
• Power BI Dashboards for a more interactive project report

 

 

Project Standard Template

The first thing you might want to do is add a project that involves more project management. From ‘Status’ in Project Lite, you can now add other project elements such as Status Reports, Actions, and Issues.

Expanding Project Management Features

Expand your project management capabilities at this stage by evolving the features and capabilities of your centralized PPM solution as your processes also mature.

You might ask, “Why didn’t you deploy this earlier?’’ Well, of course, we could. But the strategy we’re sampling here is to get project teams up and running quickly.

Let them adopt and absorb the necessary project management processes in a standardized way, then move to the next stage when your deployment is set up and the people are ready for more.

Empowering Teams with Microsoft 365 Integrations

While you add more functions to BrightWork 365, you also get Microsoft 365 integrations. Deploy it directly in Microsoft Teams to collaborate with ease, even with your remote project teams. In Teams, you have channels where you can add project-specific chat and communications.

If you go to Documents, you will see all the project documents in the SharePoint Online library. This centralized storage makes your documents easily and securely accessible. Once uploaded, your documents become live and editable.

Automating Workflows with Power Automate

To further streamline processes, you can use Brightwork 365 with Power Automate.

This allows you to create automated workflows, for example, to manage a formal project intake and approval flow or send notifications for overdue tasks.

These and other project management capabilities can be configured easily in the Project Standard Template without programming.

In the two examples above, you are setting up a centralized project portfolio system by leveraging the Microsoft 365 platform and familiar apps.

Project Structured Template

The Project Structure Template builds on the Project Standard Template with additional project management items such as Risks, Costs, Communications, Issues, Actions, and Status Reports.

The Costs list facilitates active cost management, enabling real-time budget tracking against actuals and providing the data needed to report on financial performance and project ROI.

Risk Management and Governance

Similarly, the Risks list supports a formal risk management process, where teams can identify potential threats and plan risk mitigation strategies.

This structured approach to managing risks and costs establishes stronger project governance, and stage-based templates can be configured to enforce required gate approvals before a project can proceed.

Advanced Scheduling with Gantt Chart

To check the performance of your projects, the template includes a Gantt chart for advanced scheduling. It allows you to define task dependencies (e.g., finish-to-start), which enables more accurate critical path analysis and helps you track major project milestones to ensure that your project tasks are delivered on time.

Customized Project Schedules

In Project Settings, you can update the schedule to include the working days and exclude any holidays or breaks. You can decide the working days of the week based on the needs of the project and the local calendar using the global settings.

Power BI Dashboards

The third item in your first evolve is Power BI. You have the option to add centralized interactive solutions, like attractive, visually interactive Power BI charts.

Immediate Visibility for Executives

These dashboards give immediate visibility to senior executives as they can see all the projects and programs of their project portfolio in one place. They can view the health and performance of projects with just a few clicks.

Extending Reporting Capabilities

Beyond project health, these dashboards support resource management by allowing executives to visualize resource allocation across the portfolio.

This insight helps identify over-utilized teams to prevent burnout and uses resource usage data for future capacity planning.

You can also give them Power BI reports with data-rich insights to guide project and business decisions. These insights improve project prioritization by ensuring strategic alignment with business goals.

Unified Project Solutions

Because it’s Power BI, you can add your own and extend that level of reporting, creating a powerful PPM BI system.

For example (see clip), if I’m a senior manager and I click the yellow status on the dashboard, it immediately drops down to the three projects marked yellow or in danger, including the red ones that signal serious risk.

I can then get straight into those to view the details. Similarly, I can filter to see what projects are not yet started, and I have slicers up here, and so on.

Advancing Your PPM Strategy with BrightWork

We just saw an example of how a project team or PMO can gradually evolve their centralized PPM system with BrightWork 365 on Microsoft 365, progressing toward true portfolio optimization and successful adoption.

Support the first evolve by gathering feedback and conducting regular project management success reviews to refine your strategy.

Our sample introduced three key elements: the Project Standard template, the Project Structure template, and Power BI Dashboards, addressing the needs of project managers, teams, and senior leaders alike.

Prepare for the Next Evolve

In our next and final installment of this series, we will explore a sample second evolve, where we will be targeting the same audience: project managers, project teams, and senior managers.

This continued evolution aims to enable a long-term objective of evolving the PPM solution to a point where the data supports advanced techniques like what-if analysis for strategic planning.

Ready to take your project portfolio to the next level? See BrightWork in action to support your PPM journey and boost your project success.

​In this three-part blog post series, you’ll learn how to implement a centralized project portfolio management (PPM) solution using Microsoft 365 and BrightWork 365, designed for organizations seeking a robust Microsoft PPM system.

In this first installment of the series, we will guide you through ‘Start’ as the first step in introducing and adopting a centralized Microsoft PPM solution for project management.

Revisiting SharePoint and the Microsoft 365 Ecosystem

In BrightWork, we have previously created a PPM solution on Microsoft SharePoint. When we explored the Microsoft platform, including Teams, SharePoint Online, Azure, and more, why not make a similar infrastructure for a centralized PPM platform within the Microsoft 365 tenant, which many of you are already familiar with?

 

Applying the Start-Evolve Approach

What we decided to stick with was what has worked over the last number of years: our project management success approach, Start-Evolve.

We noticed that while most PMOs and project teams have the technology and tools, including project management software (and many might have even searched for a Microsoft PPM free download, hoping for a quick fix), they often lack the right approach or methodology to create a centralized project portfolio management system.

Regardless of the software solution you use, whether it’s various Microsoft PPM tools, you need a clear project management success strategy aligned with key strategic business drivers, as well as the best-suited approach to adopt a project management solution.

Introducing BrightWork and Start-Evolve Together

On your project management journey, BrightWork comes in on the software side by introducing ready-to-use, best-practice templates. On the deployment and adoption side, we introduce the Start-Evolve approach to help you begin with a sufficient level of project management.

The Start-Evolve approach demonstrates how to teach project management incrementally, enabling your teams to absorb it and grow at a pace that suits them and your organizational processes, ensuring the approach can meet your organization’s needs.

Promoting Adoption Across Your Organization

Successfully rolling out this methodology might even involve some internal promotion, perhaps drawing inspiration from the communication strategies found in a PPM advertising tutorial, to highlight the benefits to users.

 

Start-Evolve Phases for Centralized Project Portfolio Management on Microsoft 365

Here’s how you can set up a centralized project management system on Microsoft 365, using the Start-Evolve approach in the following three phases:

1. In the first phase, you have Start, where you quickly get the first part of the project management processes up and running, and then let them settle.
2. Then, consider a first evolution to mature your processes based on the feedback, and then let your teams settle into this approach.
3. Your second evolution is the next level of project management for your teams, who are now familiar with the project management solution, processes, and the overall project lifecycle.

​

 

Start of Your Microsoft PPM Deployment

The first phase of your Microsoft Project Portfolio Management (PPM) deployment begins by building a focused project management success strategy.

Using BrightWork 365 and the Project Lite template, you can quickly create a structured starting point to manage and track work.

This early step emphasizes portfolio optimization while keeping the scope intentionally limited to ensure fast adoption and measurable impact.

Creating a Project Management Success Strategy

Choose two or three key starting elements to guide your strategic direction. For example:

• Identify current pain points in project execution.
• Prioritize high-impact projects for early wins.
• Establish baseline metrics to track progress.

 

 

Portfolio Optimization and Project Proposal Evaluation with Project Lite

With BrightWork 365 and the Project Lite template, portfolio optimization and project proposal evaluation become more structured and transparent. Each project includes six foundational elements:

• A project charter that outlines objectives and expected outcomes
• A current status indicator to track progress
• A team roster listing assigned contributors
• A Gantt chart or project schedule to organize tasks and timelines
• A personalized “My Work” view that shows each team member their responsibilities
• A centralized document repository for storing all related files

 

These components help standardize the assessment and management of project proposals across your Microsoft 365 environment.

 

Project Governance and Stage-Based Task Management

There are also Project Settings, Approvals (which can be configured as gate approvals), and related items for the project manager; these elements contribute to effective project governance.

You now also have “Stage.” You can click each task to view the child tasks underneath the parent task and see if each stage of the task is complete, often managed with stage or phase checklists.

You get a glimpse of a sample project in a Project Lite template, which is an easy and standardized way to get projects up and running and to launch multiple projects simultaneously.

 

Stay Focused with Personalized, Actionable Task Views

With personalized task views and real-time updates, team members can easily track progress, manage priorities, and stay accountable for their tasks.

It’s relatively easy to provide feedback on the project, indicating what has been done and what remains to be done. You’ll also see that My Work includes not just tasks, but other elements of a project, such as Risks, Issues, Actions, and so on.

These items can have tasks, for example, a risk-related task that you can monitor to take action on the contingency and mitigate the risk, so that it may not come to fruition.

Accelerate Project Startup with Lightweight Microsoft PPM Templates

We now have numerous projects up and running in our Start, utilizing something like Project Lite, a lightweight template that enables quick start-up with standardized Microsoft PPM practices.

For project managers and project teams, the BrightWork 365 solution features a “My Work” area, which makes their work visual and provides actionable insights.

 

Portfolio Dashboards for Executive Visibility

BrightWork 365 portfolio dashboards offer senior executives real-time visibility, efficient reporting with Power Apps, and proactive resource management across Microsoft 365 project environments.

Centralized Views for Executives

For senior managers who must manage multiple projects and require actionable data insights, some dashboards provide a centralized view of all programs, helping to aggregate portfolios and understand the overall status.

Real-Time Reporting with Power Apps

BrightWork 365 utilizes rich, interactive dashboards for immediate visibility and reporting, leveraging Power Apps to transform project data into actionable insights.

These dashboards can often be configured to display an interactive roadmap of key initiatives.

Efficient Setup for PMOs

Power Apps come with a lower licensing cost and a lighter touch, a good choice for project leads and PMOs who want a quick and efficient start.

●       Visibility Into Resource Usage

These dashboards are essential because they can be configured to show not just project status but also key metrics related to resource allocation and overall resource usage, helping to identify potential resource constraints before they derail projects.

Advanced Resource Monitoring

Some advanced reporting views might even offer resource heat maps for quick visual assessment of team capacity.

 

Flexible Project Views and Export Options

Another thing you can do with projects and a list of all the projects is to have different views on these. Or you can export those projects to Microsoft Excel and then circulate them that way, for offline analysis or to model different portfolio scenarios.

So, your senior managers have several options from a visibility point of view, very quickly.

 

Take the Next Step with BrightWork 365

This is what a sample start looks like when you deploy BrightWork 365 along with its templates and dashboards, powered by a Microsoft tenant on the Power Platform, utilizing Microsoft 365 apps.

BrightWork 365 provides a solid foundation, but you can also customize your portfolio management approach as you evolve, enabling you to run your business your way with tailored project management.

 

For the next instalment of this series, subscribe to our blog and find out how you can move to the next stage of your project management journey: First Evolve, enabling your teams to work flexibly within a structured framework.

Effective project portfolio management (PPM) is crucial for organizations to align projects with strategic goals, optimize resources, and maximize ROI. In today’s fast-evolving business environment, deploying modern PPM solutions helps companies gain real-time insights, streamline workflows, and improve team collaboration.

Read ahead for actionable strategies to modernize your PPM approach using cutting-edge data tools.

 

BrightWork 365 PPM Software and its Components

BrightWork 365, a Microsoft 365-based PPM tool, allows you to manage new project requests or project intake, portfolios of projects divided into programs, and the project details themselves. So essentially, there are Project Requests, Projects, and Portfolios (including programs).

Project Requests

In BrightWork 365, Project Request Management streamlines the process of capturing and evaluating new project requests. The system enables you to gather critical details like project intent, scope, alignment with business objectives, and strategic fit with organizational goals, all within a structured form. You can categorize requests by portfolio and program, ensuring all relevant information is easily accessible. The customizable workflow guides request through review and approval stages, with designated approvers and their tasks identified. This ensures that each request undergoes the necessary evaluation process, tailored to your organization’s specific needs.

Portfolios

In BrightWork 365, portfolios are designed to help you organize and manage groups of related projects. For example, you can create a portfolio dedicated to “Customer Success Projects,” which may include various programs like customer onboarding or product deployments. Within each portfolio, programs serve as sub-categories that group related projects together. This structure enables you to efficiently manage and track multiple projects aligned to specific business functions or goals, ensuring better visibility and control over your project landscape.

Projects

In BrightWork 365, projects are managed within programs, which are part of broader portfolios. Each project can be built using best practices to capture essential information, such as project objectives, priority, exit criteria, approval requirements, and any potential risks or impacts. You can track key project details like the project manager, sponsor, and portfolio. Integration with Microsoft Teams allows seamless collaboration, and documentation can be managed through SharePoint.

Projects in BrightWork 365 can also manage various elements, such as status updates, project stages, schedules, and risks. You can track Actions, Issues, Costs, And Communications, including emails and meetings. Projects can follow a predefined process with stages, and gate reviews can be applied to specific milestones for better control and governance.

BrightWork Deployment Approach: Start-Evolve

Imagine your organization has invested in the Microsoft 365 platform, and now you’re ready to leverage it for managing project requests, projects, and portfolios in a standardized way, aligned with project management best practices. You also want to ensure that all key personnel are trained in the smooth operation of this project portfolio management (PPM) solution. These PPM goals need a clear strategic deployment and adoption approach.

At BrightWork, we apply a “Start-Evolve” approach to help organizations successfully deploy their PPM solution on Microsoft 365. This methodology enables you to start with immediate visibility and control, and then scale as your organization grows and can adopt more advanced processes. BrightWork 365 has customizable templates designed to fast-track deployment and ensure you begin with standardized processes for managing projects and portfolios.

Start Phase (3D): Quick Initiation and Immediate Control

The Start phase accelerates your initial deployment by implementing configurable, best-practice templates. These templates standardize your project management processes, allowing you to track all projects in one place. With this foundation, we help you quickly adjust the templates to fit your specific needs, getting your organization up and running with minimal delay. This approach gives senior management immediate visibility and control over the entire project portfolio, enabling quick decision-making and oversight.

To ensure the deployment is aligned with best practices, we use a process called 3D: Design, Deliver, and Deploy. This structured change management process ensures that your PPM deployment focuses on your group’s unique project management requirements.

Design: Laying the Foundation

The design phase of the deployment includes four key elements:

1. Capture the Project Management Vision: Understand your organization’s project management goals, both short- and long-term.
2. Prioritize Requirements: Determine which requirements to include in the initial Start phase and which will be addressed later during the Evolve phase.
3. Establish a Success Strategy: Create a high-level roadmap to ensure success, outlining desired outcomes and expected value.
4. Design Best-Practice Templates: Customize templates to manage projects, programs, and portfolios effectively, ensuring senior management-level visibility and control.

 

Deliver: Building and Adjusting

During the deliver phase, we configure the templates and build out real projects for your team. The next step is to review and verify that the templates are meeting your needs, making adjustments as required. This iterative process ensures the templates are fully optimized for your specific project management needs before moving on to deployment.

Deploy: Training and Go-Live

Once everything is configured, we design and deliver role-based training programs tailored to your project management processes. This allows your teams to start using the solution as soon as possible. After the system is live, feedback sessions help determine if any immediate adjustments are needed. Upon achieving all the Start deliverables, we update your project management success strategy to move into the Evolve phase.

The Evolve Phase: Scaling for Growth

After successfully completing the ‘Start’ phase, your organization is up and running, but as your project management processes mature, you’ll likely see the need to build more capability into your solution. Whether it’s expanding to other departments or implementing more complex features, the Evolve phase addresses these new priorities.

During this phase, we implement the backlog of requirements created during the Start phase, following the same 3D methodology: Design, Deliver, and Deploy. Each cycle focuses on delivering the next phase of your project management success strategy, ensuring continuous improvement and growth.

Continuous Review and Improvement

To maintain ongoing success, it’s essential to periodically review your project management processes and their alignment with your success strategy. This review typically takes place every six to twelve months and assesses whether the solution is delivering the desired outcomes and value. Any necessary adjustments are made, and new goals are set for the next Evolve cycle.

Summary

A clear approach to successful project management

By leveraging the Start-Evolve approach in BrightWork 365, you can quickly deploy a centralized PPM solution that provides immediate value and control over your projects. As your organization grows, the solution evolves with you, ensuring that your project management processes are always aligned with your strategic goals. Periodic reviews ensure that your PPM solution continues to support both your project management success strategy and overall organizational objectives.

This three-part series shows you how to set up a centralized PPM solution on your familiar Microsoft 365 platform, using the proven BrightWork approach: Start-Evolve.

In Part 1, you saw a sample Start – how to quickly and efficiently start project management with a single, centralized BrightWork 365 app. You get continuous assistance from your dedicated BrightWork Customer Success Partner (CSP), who will help you apply the Start-Evolve approach. This approach prepares you for quick adoption and solid implementation of project management. Our Approach is the result of close to three decades of collaborating with organizations, large and small across the globe, to improve their project management processes and practices.

Start-Evolve Approach is a core element in our: 

• Product design methodology – with best-practice, configurable templates
• Deployment process – for a quick and smooth initiation into Project Management processes and practices
• Services – Start, Evolve, and Augment- tailored to suit your Project Portfolio Management needs in alignment with your organization’s strategic goals

In Part 2, you saw a sample Evolve – ways project teams and PMOs can evolve their project management processes to match their maturing PPM needs. BrightWork 365 is a configurable, customizable app that enables organizations and teams to grow or scale project management flexibly and securely.

In this third and last installment of this series, let’s look at the stage likely to come after your first Evolve – A sample of the second Evolve.

By now, your project teams have settled with the increased level of project management and processes. You check in again with a periodic project management success review, where you revisit and revise your project management success strategy.

Sample Second Evolve

In this sample Evolve of the second stage, you can possibly choose to add three new items:

• Project Request Management (Project Intake Process)
• Resource Utilization
• Form Configurator

Project Request Management

With a project request management system in place, you’re essentially increasing governance and standardization. You want to make sure that the right projects get started at the right time with the right resources.

You can easily customize the forms to add in the fields as per how you want project managers or other team members to draft their new project requests. When a project goes through the approval stages, you will be notified at each stage. Once a project request is approved, you can see a new project site created with other details in tabs like who is the project manager, sponsor, what portfolio, etc.

There’s also a request app with this. If you want to have an app with just the request management piece, and you want to give that to lots of people, BrightWork enables you with a license to do that without a cost. So, lots of people can request projects which is what you want coming into your funnel, and then you decide which projects get accepted or rejected by going through a governance process like this.

Resource Utilization

The second thing you want to do is add another useful dashboard for your senior management that would give them a view of the resources.

If you go into the project calendar one first, you can see that some of them have a working week where it’s five days. And some six days starting on a Sunday, and that’s taken into account in the resource utilization reporting. You can easily get a week’s or a month’s view of your resource allocation and utilization through these dashboards. You can also see if your resources are over or under-utilized.

If I click F11, and if I have white space, depending on my screen size, I can get a better view there. So here I’m down to a month view – March and April.

We are looking at the various color schemes, as you can see in the bottom left whether someone’s under-allocated, unallocated, not allocated at all.

Under-allocated, which means it’s capacity, fully allocated, which means they’re a hundred percent or over-allocated.

You could have people on three, four, or five-day projects and their availability would be different. And that will filter through, to this as well. If you drill down a bit, you can go to this resource dashboard and say, for example, at Anne’s work, across the various projects that Anne is involved in.

The last thing in our sample evolve is maybe you go into the templates.

In the project, these are the various templates in this environment. You can see the three templates that move from simple to high complexity levels. You can see the Project Light template, Project Standard, and Structured that come out-of-the-box.

You can see if there’s approval required as you go from stage to stage, your project manager may do that manually. Or you may put in an approval process, like a stage gate, and you can set that up in the template as easily as this.

If you want to create a copy of this and change it, you go to ‘create copy’ – that’s how easy it is to get a new template.

​Form Configurator

Form Configurator in the Project Light Template, you don’t have Risks, Costs, or Issues. You don’t have actions but it’s that easy to configure the templates as per your project needs – no programming required.

If you look at stages and indicators, in the Project Light template, you don’t have cost because it’s just too much for a Project Light template.

In Schedule, you have complete, comment, current start, and current finish, so you are not worried about target starts and finish. If you click projects, this shows you the list of projects that were created by this template. If you have permission changing the configuration, you’ll know which templates, which projects, will be changed.

Conclusion

With the help of the earlier devised project management success strategy, we put in the start, the first evolve, and later the second evolve, and these were the items we put into the second evolve.

How did we decide?

We revisited and revised the project management success strategy as part of the project management success review. With each review in collaboration with your Customer Success Partner, you learn from the feedback, from the first, few weeks or months of adoption. You pour that feedback into your project management success strategy and come up with how we wish to evolve your processes.