Mastering Agile Features in Microsoft Project

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amanda Matthews, and I'm the Marketing Coordinator here at AdviseCon. I'd like to welcome you all to today's webinar, Using Agile Features in Microsoft Project like a Pro. Here at AdviseCon, we are a group of authors, teachers, consultants, and technologists who are passionate about helping organizations learn, scale, and grow with a mix of methodology and technology to deliver results. We offer free bi-weekly webinars that we refer to as webinar Wednesdays in which we spend 30 minutes to an hour teaching topics ranging from Microsoft Project, Project Server, Project Online, Power BI, Visio, and SharePoint to project management and methodology approaches. With attending any of our training sessions, we offer PDUs as we are a registered education provider with the Project Management Institute. At the close of today's session, I will give some instructions on how you can claim your PDUs and how to contact AdvisorCon for any questions you may have. And now before we get started, I'd like to go over a few things so you know how to participate in today's event. This webinar will be recorded and uploaded on the AdvisorCon YouTube channel for those who could not attend today's session live. Please note that any questions or comments submitted will not be displayed in the recording, nor will any of your personal information be shared. And if you could please review the control panel, that should be on the top right of your screen. This control panel gives you the option to adjust your volume and most other settings. The audience is muted during today's session, so in order to ask a question, you'll need to submit them in the questions window of the control panel. And it is now my pleasure to introduce Michael Rimmer, AdvisorCon's project scheduler. So without further ado, I'll hand this presentation over to him so we can get started. Thank you very much, Amanda. Like she said, my name is Michael Wimmer. I'm a project scheduler here at AdvisorCon. I'm a Microsoft Certified Professional and Microsoft Project and an experienced trainer. I've had the pleasure and the opportunity to work closely one-on-one with people and train them in technology and software. That is one of my passions. I really do love working with technology and one-on-one with people. And one of the... pleasures that I've had working here at AdvisaCon is diving deeper into Project Online and Power BI deployments. And without further ado, I'd like to go on to today's agenda. So for today, I'm going to go over a light overview of Agile in key terms and how Microsoft Project supports Agile features. I'm going to do a demonstration of Agile features within Microsoft Project, and then I'll give a quick summary and we'll have some time for Q&A. So first off. What does Agile mean? Agile is an umbrella term for many different approaches to delivering results, all of which are iterative and highly focused on producing customer prioritized results. These are the three major terms that Microsoft Project within Agile really focuses on, which is Kanban or planning boards, which is a methodology used to progress tasks from the left side to the right side of it. incomplete to complete using buckets or columns. And then there are sprints, which are periods of time that are boxed to ensure delivery results within a specific time frame. And then backlog, which are reprioritized tasks where features and requests go to be scheduled for later. And so how does Microsoft Project support Agile features? Well. On September 24th at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft announced a new feature of Microsoft Project called the Roadmap. The Roadmap is a visually exciting way to combine information from multiple waterfall and agile projects and share it with coworkers. It's a new PPM tool, or Project Portfolio Management tool, that will be offered in the future and is currently being developed by Microsoft right now. This is a picture of it. Essentially, you can see each project, project manager. and project manager assigned on a timeline view. Another way that Microsoft Project supports agile features is the integration of Office 365 Planner. There's currently the capability to link tasks to individual planner boards using Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft is currently enhancing and improving the capability of that, where you can create a new planner board. straight from a project task instead of just linking a already created board. However, this feature has not been implemented yet. Another way that Microsoft Project supports Agile features is the use of Power BI, making data analysis easy and shareable throughout your organization with Office 365. With that being said, Let's dive into the project demo. And I'm going to pull up a project schedule that's already been created. So here is the project schedule. And I want to show you first the differences of the different agile methodologies and functions that Microsoft Project has implemented. The first things first is that. The only way to use the Agile features of Microsoft Project is if you have the click-to-run version of Microsoft Project Pro. That is the subscription model. It does not work with Microsoft Project 2016 desktop client. You have to have the project online desktop client. So if you are using an older version of Microsoft Project, you can just follow along here and look at the differences. As you can see, within this view, there is, on the view ribbon, you can see there's a new task board view. If I click on here, it'll take me to the Kanban board, which I described earlier. Here you can see all of the tasks that were within the Gantt chart view, and you can easily drag and drop them around. You can set percent complete. For not started, I'm going to put zero. Next up, I'll put zero as well. In progress, I'll do 25, and I'm going to create a new bucket or column. I'm going to call this complete. And if you want to rename any previous column, you can just right-click on it and rename it. I'm going to rename this one to nearly complete and change the percent complete status to 95. Set the complete one to 100%, and there we go. It's very easy to navigate your tasks and set them up in the task board view by easily dragging and dropping. As you can see, when I dragged and dropped the Deliver Proposed Project Plan for Approval task over to the complete bucket, it gave me the checkmark that this task has been complete. If I want to right-click on this particular task, I can go to the Task Information box and see that it automatically updated the task to percent complete. And this is actually reflected back on the Gantt chart as well. As you can see, the deliver proposed project plan for approval has been completed. I'm going to go back over to my task board view and get rid of that timeline there. And as you can see, you can easily tell which resources have been assigned to which tasks. Now, this is a really cool feature that has come out in a recent update where you can click on the format ribbon and customize these cards. As you can see, I have the ability to show the task ID or the resources or show the checkmark when 100% is complete. Microsoft has also recently given us the capability of showing which fields we want to see on these particular task cards. So let's say we wanted to see the baseline finish, the amount of work, not actual work, the deadline date. And we'll just keep it for those three right now. I click OK. It updates all the task cards. Very easy to maneuver and to see the data that you really want to see. Another thing is the filter option. If you click on this little icon here, you can see that you can filter by summary task. So if I click on concept approval phase, it'll show me only the tasks within there. This is a and or feature. So if you click on multiple, you can see it will filter. just all the ones that have been clicked. You can also filter by resource. So if I wanted to see all of Tim Runcie's tasks, I will have that capability. And you can always click here for clear all. If you wanted to search for a particular task, so say I wanted to install and load, it helps if you spell correctly, it will easily populate with that. If you prefer an Excel-like or Microsoft Project sheet view, you have that capability by going up here and clicking on the sheet button. This will show you all of the tasks that have been already implemented with the ability to organize them in a way that you want. This was a project that was originally created in a waterfall view, so it's kind of messy here and not designed in that way for this particular project. Let's say that we wanted to create a new project. You can click on File, New, and you can see that we have this new option here called Sprints Project. Previously in the Click to Run version, They have two options here. You can click on Kanban or Sprint or Scrum. Sorry. Now we have Sprints and Waterfall. If I was to create a new Sprints project, it automatically takes me to the new Sprint planning board. Now, this is a really cool feature that has Microsoft's implemented and it's been more seamlessly. Previously, if you clicked on if you wanted to change a schedule to a Sprint schedule. or to an agile schedule, you would have to select which one you wanted, whether you wanted a Kanban or Scrum, and now you have the ability to have all of them within one project schedule. So as you see, I created a new Sprint schedule and I'm currently in the Sprint Planning Board. So if I go to the Sprint Tools Sprints ribbon, I'm under Sprint Planning Board. If I wanted to, I could make this back into the Kanban style and have the task board here. So these are my current sprints. I've created a new sprint project. Let's go ahead and manage my sprints. Here you can see that they're all set at a two-week basis, starting at today's date and going two weeks from now. It's very simple to add more sprints. You just click on the Add Sprint button. If you wanted to change the duration, you can easily do that as well. I'm going to click OK, and you can see that they're all here. It's very easy to create new tasks. So let's write, let's make a design task, a development, review, and complete. You can easily drag and drop them just like in the task board view. Design, development, review, and complete. You can go up here to the task board tools format and also customize these cards in the same way that you could for the task board view. So if we add the same deadline, baseline, finish, and work, all of those will populate. Now, once you've created your sprints and you've planned out which tasks you attribute to each individual sprint, you can actually operate into or move your view to the current sprint board. And this will show you for this week. or these two weeks which sprints are where and you can set this up just like you did in the task board view so we'll set the not complete not started to zero next up to zero in progress we'll do 50 and done is 100. you can always create a new column just like i showed you previously and drag and drop you can easily go to the next sprint by clicking on the sprint view tab and going to sprint number two and navigate it that way. You can also see the current sprint sheet, which you can see I only have one task in here, which is design. Now what if you already have a project schedule and you want to implement agile features within that project? Well let's go back to the Gantt chart view of this. project I showed you earlier. And as you can see, I have some waterfall tasks and then I have some development sprints that are assigned here. Well, I can easily go to my project ribbon and click on manage sprints. If you were using an older version of the click to run version of Microsoft Project, this used to be called Agile. You would click on this and you'd have to do a radio button select of whether Agile or waterfall. So if I click on Manage Sprints, it brings up that Sprint Management box. I can add multiple sprints however much I want. I can also rename them. So let's say if I wanted Sprint 1 to be Sprint 0 and start from 0 instead of 1, that is an easy functionality to do. Click OK, and this now gives me the option to access the Sprints ribbon. If I go to the Sprint Planning sheet or board, as you can see, this has all the tasks here. I can go to the Sprint Planning sheet and organize my sprints in a way that was never available previously. As you can see, there are new columns here. There's the Sprint column and a Show on Board column. If I obviously change this to No, it's not going to show on my Sprint Planning board. You also have the capability of adding new columns that weren't available, like Sprint Finish. and type what day that sprint will finish. as well as Sprint Start. So as like I said, you can go back into your current Sprint Sheet and organize it in that way. Right now, this particular project schedule does not have any Sprints within the current time frame. But if I moved them over, I could easily make that happen. So I've gone over the Agile features when starting a new project, showing you the different task board, which is the Kanban methodology, and the Sprint board view. the sprint sheet board view, and how to set up a new project using Agile features. Are there any questions before we continue? Yeah, we have some coming in, and I encourage the audience to keep sending them in while we continue. So we have a couple of people wondering what version of... Project 2016 you're using? Oh, yes. Like I said previously, I'm currently using the Click to Run or the subscription model version of Microsoft Project. This is the only version of Project which you can use the Agile features. So if I go back to Project Professional, if you're using the standalone version or client, you won't be able to see this button here to manage your sprints or to use any of the agile features. This is only available if you're using the click to run version. Great. We have another one here. It says, how do I find the sprint option to use with my current schedule? Sure. Yeah, that's perfect because I'm right there. The manage sprints button under the project ribbon tab. gives you the option to change your current waterfall schedule to an agile schedule. Actually it doesn't change it, but it incorporates the ability to use the agile features within there. So if I click on that, you will have to add some sprints based on what you want. You can click OK, and it will then give you that sprint tools ribbon. I guess one of the things that you can look at here is that it's really easy to delete a sprint. You just have to right click on the selection right next to it and you can delete one if you've accidentally created too many. All right. Are there any other questions? Yes. There's one here that says, how do I apply Agile views? to my existing non-agile projects? That is a great question. So one of the things that you can do is you can click on View, and you can go to Tables. And if you are using the up-to-date version of Microsoft Project, you can click on More Tables and have the ability to select the table that you want that can bring in Sprint. So if I click on Sprint Planning Table, it will change this to give me more of a view that I want, which you can edit all of the information that you need for your project to populate within on your Sprint board. So on this board status, this is the task board. You can click on next step, in progress, nearly complete or complete the four that I created previously. I can also edit which Sprint that these are on. So for Sprint 1, this would be very simple. I can just make sure that I have these all selected on Sprint 1. and do that for each individual task that needs to be on a sprint. The other capability is you can change the table to the Task Board Tasks table, and this will give you the view based on using the task board. With that, you can always go to the Sprints ribbon and change your view. to the planning board, the sprint planning sheet, or the task board. view or the task board sheet. With the current version of Microsoft Project Click to Run, there's always this new button here with the under the view ribbon, which is task board, where you can always just see the task board view. Did that answer the question? Yes, I believe so. Another one here, it says, how do I create a custom group for burndown? Oh, that's a great question. If you wanted to create a custom group for burndown, you would have to go to the Sprint Planning Sheet. And you could, I believe that you can create a new column for burndown, or you can just go to the Gantt chart view. go to tables and you can actually go to the burndown table view. Well I guess you could always create a new group like as you see here we have created a group for burndown and do it custom. create the view the way that you want it to. Whoever sent that question in, I can send you an answer on an email that's more descriptive. So thank you for that question. Yeah, and we have one that's along the similar lines. It's asking about creating custom filters. Sure, absolutely. So if you want to create a custom filter, you can just click on the filter drop down, create your new filter, insert the rows that you want to see, the field names, and apply and save. If you wanted to create one, this would be a good opportunity to create one that is very specific for your Sprint planning board, where you can add all of your Sprint. fields. So if you have the sprint number, your sprint start date, your sprint finish date. So if you want to create your filter where you can only see all sprint value of one. very easy to do so. Obviously, I didn't name my filter, but that would be the way that you would do that. Great. And jumping back to that burndown section, someone's wondering, is there a burndown report? Oh, that's a good question. In the reports, there... I don't think that there's a specific report for the task boards burned down, but that does, I'm sorry for not answering your question in the way that you are asking for the burned down report, but you did remind me that if you wanted to look at reports for the task boards or the sprint boards, you do have that capability now as well. So you can look at the task status for the task boards that you've set. So as you can see here, these are the task boards here for if you wanted to see a different report, you could go to task boards and look at your current sprint task status or work status. All of these features have been implemented by Microsoft Project in the latest release. Great. Yeah, it looks like you answered that question. For the burndown one, if you go to dashboards, you can select the burndown report. This is, however, the standard burndown for Microsoft Project. It is not newly implemented with the task board update. Sorry, Amanda, I cut you off. That's okay. I was just complimenting you on your great question answering skills. So we'll take this last one and then I think I will wrap this up and we will address any further questions directly. So this one, it's a bit of a story. So to summarize, this person's agile team is constantly adding, removing and reprioritizing. And they are wondering if there's a way to change all backlog tasks at the same time. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So if you go into the view and you go into tables, go to more tables, there's a backlog table. If you click apply, you'll see all of the sorry, you'll see. Apologize for the software malfunction. There we go. So as you can see, this will give you the table. Let me change out my group real quick. You can sort by all of your backlog. If you wanted to, you could create a new column or custom column and organize all of your tasks that are within backlog and then change them that way. Or create a new filter and filter all your backlogs and then change them that way. But if you're looking at a particular sprint. planning board and let's say you had a new sprint and you named it backlog. So let's change sprint zero to backlog. So that was actually a really good question that I hadn't explored, which is changing multiple tasks that are associated to a specific sprint at one time. thinking that if you're within the sprint planning sheet and you organize or filter or view this sheet by the backlog group or your backlog filter, then you could change them all once in that way. Does that make sense? So right now we have these four that you could alter in whatever way that you wanted to. Yeah, that's great. I love that there are so many different avenues to get to the same results. So we will wrap this up now. So I want to thank you, everyone, for attending today's webinar. Michael, if you want to flip back to your PowerPoint and we'll put that summary slide up so they have our contact information. We welcome your questions, suggestions and feedback. For more information, you can email us at contact at advisecon.com. Once you exit today's webinar, you will receive a survey on the presentation. You will need to complete and submit this survey in order to receive your PDUs. From there, I will email you within two business days with your PDU information. If you're watching this recording on YouTube or another social media platform, please be sure to like and subscribe so you don't miss out on any future uploads. On behalf of Advisicon, Michael, and myself, thank you for joining us today, and we hope to see you participate in our future webinars. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you.

Here at AdviseCon, we are a group of authors, teachers, consultants, and technologists who are passionate about helping organizations learn, scale, and grow with a mix of methodology and technology to deliver results. We offer free bi-weekly webinars that we refer to as webinar Wednesdays in which we spend 30 minutes to an hour teaching topics ranging from Microsoft Project, Project Server, Project Online, Power BI, Visio, and SharePoint to project management and methodology approaches. With attending any of our training sessions, we offer PDUs as we are a registered education provider with the Project Management Institute. At the close of today's session, I will give some instructions on how you can claim your PDUs and how to contact AdvisorCon for any questions you may have. And now before we get started, I'd like to go over a few things so you know how to participate in today's event.

This webinar will be recorded and uploaded on the AdvisorCon YouTube channel for those who could not attend today's session live. Please note that any questions or comments submitted will not be displayed in the recording, nor will any of your personal information be shared. And if you could please review the control panel, that should be on the top right of your screen.

This control panel gives you the option to adjust your volume and most other settings. The audience is muted during today's session, so in order to ask a question, you'll need to submit them in the questions window of the control panel. And it is now my pleasure to introduce Michael Rimmer, AdvisorCon's project scheduler.

So without further ado, I'll hand this presentation over to him so we can get started. Thank you very much, Amanda. Like she said, my name is Michael Wimmer.

I'm a project scheduler here at AdvisorCon. I'm a Microsoft Certified Professional and Microsoft Project and an experienced trainer. I've had the pleasure and the opportunity to work closely one-on-one with people and train them in technology and software. That is one of my passions.

I really do love working with technology and one-on-one with people. And one of the... pleasures that I've had working here at AdvisaCon is diving deeper into Project Online and Power BI deployments. And without further ado, I'd like to go on to today's agenda. So for today, I'm going to go over a light overview of Agile in key terms and how Microsoft Project supports Agile features.

I'm going to do a demonstration of Agile features within Microsoft Project, and then I'll give a quick summary and we'll have some time for Q&A. So first off. What does Agile mean? Agile is an umbrella term for many different approaches to delivering results, all of which are iterative and highly focused on producing customer prioritized results. These are the three major terms that Microsoft Project within Agile really focuses on, which is Kanban or planning boards, which is a methodology used to progress tasks from the left side to the right side of it.

incomplete to complete using buckets or columns. And then there are sprints, which are periods of time that are boxed to ensure delivery results within a specific time frame. And then backlog, which are reprioritized tasks where features and requests go to be scheduled for later.

And so how does Microsoft Project support Agile features? Well. On September 24th at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft announced a new feature of Microsoft Project called the Roadmap. The Roadmap is a visually exciting way to combine information from multiple waterfall and agile projects and share it with coworkers. It's a new PPM tool, or Project Portfolio Management tool, that will be offered in the future and is currently being developed by Microsoft right now.

This is a picture of it. Essentially, you can see each project, project manager. and project manager assigned on a timeline view.

Another way that Microsoft Project supports agile features is the integration of Office 365 Planner. There's currently the capability to link tasks to individual planner boards using Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft is currently enhancing and improving the capability of that, where you can create a new planner board. straight from a project task instead of just linking a already created board.

However, this feature has not been implemented yet. Another way that Microsoft Project supports Agile features is the use of Power BI, making data analysis easy and shareable throughout your organization with Office 365. With that being said, Let's dive into the project demo. And I'm going to pull up a project schedule that's already been created.

So here is the project schedule. And I want to show you first the differences of the different agile methodologies and functions that Microsoft Project has implemented. The first things first is that. The only way to use the Agile features of Microsoft Project is if you have the click-to-run version of Microsoft Project Pro.

That is the subscription model. It does not work with Microsoft Project 2016 desktop client. You have to have the project online desktop client.

So if you are using an older version of Microsoft Project, you can just follow along here and look at the differences. As you can see, within this view, there is, on the view ribbon, you can see there's a new task board view. If I click on here, it'll take me to the Kanban board, which I described earlier. Here you can see all of the tasks that were within the Gantt chart view, and you can easily drag and drop them around. You can set percent complete.

For not started, I'm going to put zero. Next up, I'll put zero as well. In progress, I'll do 25, and I'm going to create a new bucket or column.

I'm going to call this complete. And if you want to rename any previous column, you can just right-click on it and rename it. I'm going to rename this one to nearly complete and change the percent complete status to 95. Set the complete one to 100%, and there we go.

It's very easy to navigate your tasks and set them up in the task board view by easily dragging and dropping. As you can see, when I dragged and dropped the Deliver Proposed Project Plan for Approval task over to the complete bucket, it gave me the checkmark that this task has been complete. If I want to right-click on this particular task, I can go to the Task Information box and see that it automatically updated the task to percent complete. And this is actually reflected back on the Gantt chart as well. As you can see, the deliver proposed project plan for approval has been completed.

I'm going to go back over to my task board view and get rid of that timeline there. And as you can see, you can easily tell which resources have been assigned to which tasks. Now, this is a really cool feature that has come out in a recent update where you can click on the format ribbon and customize these cards. As you can see, I have the ability to show the task ID or the resources or show the checkmark when 100% is complete.

Microsoft has also recently given us the capability of showing which fields we want to see on these particular task cards. So let's say we wanted to see the baseline finish, the amount of work, not actual work, the deadline date. And we'll just keep it for those three right now. I click OK.

It updates all the task cards. Very easy to maneuver and to see the data that you really want to see. Another thing is the filter option. If you click on this little icon here, you can see that you can filter by summary task. So if I click on concept approval phase, it'll show me only the tasks within there.

This is a and or feature. So if you click on multiple, you can see it will filter. just all the ones that have been clicked.

You can also filter by resource. So if I wanted to see all of Tim Runcie's tasks, I will have that capability. And you can always click here for clear all.

If you wanted to search for a particular task, so say I wanted to install and load, it helps if you spell correctly, it will easily populate with that. If you prefer an Excel-like or Microsoft Project sheet view, you have that capability by going up here and clicking on the sheet button. This will show you all of the tasks that have been already implemented with the ability to organize them in a way that you want. This was a project that was originally created in a waterfall view, so it's kind of messy here and not designed in that way for this particular project. Let's say that we wanted to create a new project.

You can click on File, New, and you can see that we have this new option here called Sprints Project. Previously in the Click to Run version, They have two options here. You can click on Kanban or Sprint or Scrum.

Sorry. Now we have Sprints and Waterfall. If I was to create a new Sprints project, it automatically takes me to the new Sprint planning board.

Now, this is a really cool feature that has Microsoft's implemented and it's been more seamlessly. Previously, if you clicked on if you wanted to change a schedule to a Sprint schedule. or to an agile schedule, you would have to select which one you wanted, whether you wanted a Kanban or Scrum, and now you have the ability to have all of them within one project schedule.

So as you see, I created a new Sprint schedule and I'm currently in the Sprint Planning Board. So if I go to the Sprint Tools Sprints ribbon, I'm under Sprint Planning Board. If I wanted to, I could make this back into the Kanban style and have the task board here. So these are my current sprints. I've created a new sprint project.

Let's go ahead and manage my sprints. Here you can see that they're all set at a two-week basis, starting at today's date and going two weeks from now. It's very simple to add more sprints.

You just click on the Add Sprint button. If you wanted to change the duration, you can easily do that as well. I'm going to click OK, and you can see that they're all here.

It's very easy to create new tasks. So let's write, let's make a design task, a development, review, and complete. You can easily drag and drop them just like in the task board view. Design, development, review, and complete.

You can go up here to the task board tools format and also customize these cards in the same way that you could for the task board view. So if we add the same deadline, baseline, finish, and work, all of those will populate. Now, once you've created your sprints and you've planned out which tasks you attribute to each individual sprint, you can actually operate into or move your view to the current sprint board. And this will show you for this week.

or these two weeks which sprints are where and you can set this up just like you did in the task board view so we'll set the not complete not started to zero next up to zero in progress we'll do 50 and done is 100. you can always create a new column just like i showed you previously and drag and drop you can easily go to the next sprint by clicking on the sprint view tab and going to sprint number two and navigate it that way. You can also see the current sprint sheet, which you can see I only have one task in here, which is design. Now what if you already have a project schedule and you want to implement agile features within that project?

Well let's go back to the Gantt chart view of this. project I showed you earlier. And as you can see, I have some waterfall tasks and then I have some development sprints that are assigned here. Well, I can easily go to my project ribbon and click on manage sprints. If you were using an older version of the click to run version of Microsoft Project, this used to be called Agile.

You would click on this and you'd have to do a radio button select of whether Agile or waterfall. So if I click on Manage Sprints, it brings up that Sprint Management box. I can add multiple sprints however much I want. I can also rename them. So let's say if I wanted Sprint 1 to be Sprint 0 and start from 0 instead of 1, that is an easy functionality to do.

Click OK, and this now gives me the option to access the Sprints ribbon. If I go to the Sprint Planning sheet or board, as you can see, this has all the tasks here. I can go to the Sprint Planning sheet and organize my sprints in a way that was never available previously.

As you can see, there are new columns here. There's the Sprint column and a Show on Board column. If I obviously change this to No, it's not going to show on my Sprint Planning board. You also have the capability of adding new columns that weren't available, like Sprint Finish. and type what day that sprint will finish.

as well as Sprint Start. So as like I said, you can go back into your current Sprint Sheet and organize it in that way. Right now, this particular project schedule does not have any Sprints within the current time frame.

But if I moved them over, I could easily make that happen. So I've gone over the Agile features when starting a new project, showing you the different task board, which is the Kanban methodology, and the Sprint board view. the sprint sheet board view, and how to set up a new project using Agile features.

Are there any questions before we continue? Yeah, we have some coming in, and I encourage the audience to keep sending them in while we continue. So we have a couple of people wondering what version of...

Project 2016 you're using? Oh, yes. Like I said previously, I'm currently using the Click to Run or the subscription model version of Microsoft Project. This is the only version of Project which you can use the Agile features.

So if I go back to Project Professional, if you're using the standalone version or client, you won't be able to see this button here to manage your sprints or to use any of the agile features. This is only available if you're using the click to run version. Great.

We have another one here. It says, how do I find the sprint option to use with my current schedule? Sure.

Yeah, that's perfect because I'm right there. The manage sprints button under the project ribbon tab. gives you the option to change your current waterfall schedule to an agile schedule.

Actually it doesn't change it, but it incorporates the ability to use the agile features within there. So if I click on that, you will have to add some sprints based on what you want. You can click OK, and it will then give you that sprint tools ribbon.

I guess one of the things that you can look at here is that it's really easy to delete a sprint. You just have to right click on the selection right next to it and you can delete one if you've accidentally created too many. All right. Are there any other questions?

Yes. There's one here that says, how do I apply Agile views? to my existing non-agile projects?

That is a great question. So one of the things that you can do is you can click on View, and you can go to Tables. And if you are using the up-to-date version of Microsoft Project, you can click on More Tables and have the ability to select the table that you want that can bring in Sprint.

So if I click on Sprint Planning Table, it will change this to give me more of a view that I want, which you can edit all of the information that you need for your project to populate within on your Sprint board. So on this board status, this is the task board. You can click on next step, in progress, nearly complete or complete the four that I created previously.

I can also edit which Sprint that these are on. So for Sprint 1, this would be very simple. I can just make sure that I have these all selected on Sprint 1. and do that for each individual task that needs to be on a sprint.

The other capability is you can change the table to the Task Board Tasks table, and this will give you the view based on using the task board. With that, you can always go to the Sprints ribbon and change your view. to the planning board, the sprint planning sheet, or the task board. view or the task board sheet.

With the current version of Microsoft Project Click to Run, there's always this new button here with the under the view ribbon, which is task board, where you can always just see the task board view. Did that answer the question? Yes, I believe so.

Another one here, it says, how do I create a custom group for burndown? Oh, that's a great question. If you wanted to create a custom group for burndown, you would have to go to the Sprint Planning Sheet.

And you could, I believe that you can create a new column for burndown, or you can just go to the Gantt chart view. go to tables and you can actually go to the burndown table view. Well I guess you could always create a new group like as you see here we have created a group for burndown and do it custom. create the view the way that you want it to.

Whoever sent that question in, I can send you an answer on an email that's more descriptive. So thank you for that question. Yeah, and we have one that's along the similar lines. It's asking about creating custom filters.

Sure, absolutely. So if you want to create a custom filter, you can just click on the filter drop down, create your new filter, insert the rows that you want to see, the field names, and apply and save. If you wanted to create one, this would be a good opportunity to create one that is very specific for your Sprint planning board, where you can add all of your Sprint. fields.

So if you have the sprint number, your sprint start date, your sprint finish date. So if you want to create your filter where you can only see all sprint value of one. very easy to do so. Obviously, I didn't name my filter, but that would be the way that you would do that. Great.

And jumping back to that burndown section, someone's wondering, is there a burndown report? Oh, that's a good question. In the reports, there... I don't think that there's a specific report for the task boards burned down, but that does, I'm sorry for not answering your question in the way that you are asking for the burned down report, but you did remind me that if you wanted to look at reports for the task boards or the sprint boards, you do have that capability now as well.

So you can look at the task status for the task boards that you've set. So as you can see here, these are the task boards here for if you wanted to see a different report, you could go to task boards and look at your current sprint task status or work status. All of these features have been implemented by Microsoft Project in the latest release. Great. Yeah, it looks like you answered that question.

For the burndown one, if you go to dashboards, you can select the burndown report. This is, however, the standard burndown for Microsoft Project. It is not newly implemented with the task board update.

Sorry, Amanda, I cut you off. That's okay. I was just complimenting you on your great question answering skills. So we'll take this last one and then I think I will wrap this up and we will address any further questions directly.

So this one, it's a bit of a story. So to summarize, this person's agile team is constantly adding, removing and reprioritizing. And they are wondering if there's a way to change all backlog tasks at the same time. Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

So if you go into the view and you go into tables, go to more tables, there's a backlog table. If you click apply, you'll see all of the sorry, you'll see. Apologize for the software malfunction.

There we go. So as you can see, this will give you the table. Let me change out my group real quick.

You can sort by all of your backlog. If you wanted to, you could create a new column or custom column and organize all of your tasks that are within backlog and then change them that way. Or create a new filter and filter all your backlogs and then change them that way. But if you're looking at a particular sprint.

planning board and let's say you had a new sprint and you named it backlog. So let's change sprint zero to backlog. So that was actually a really good question that I hadn't explored, which is changing multiple tasks that are associated to a specific sprint at one time. thinking that if you're within the sprint planning sheet and you organize or filter or view this sheet by the backlog group or your backlog filter, then you could change them all once in that way. Does that make sense?

So right now we have these four that you could alter in whatever way that you wanted to. Yeah, that's great. I love that there are so many different avenues to get to the same results.

So we will wrap this up now. So I want to thank you, everyone, for attending today's webinar. Michael, if you want to flip back to your PowerPoint and we'll put that summary slide up so they have our contact information. We welcome your questions, suggestions and feedback. For more information, you can email us at contact at advisecon.com.

Once you exit today's webinar, you will receive a survey on the presentation. You will need to complete and submit this survey in order to receive your PDUs. From there, I will email you within two business days with your PDU information. If you're watching this recording on YouTube or another social media platform, please be sure to like and subscribe so you don't miss out on any future uploads. On behalf of Advisicon, Michael, and myself, thank you for joining us today, and we hope to see you participate in our future webinars.

Have a great day, everyone. Thank you.

Transcript for:Mastering Agile Features in Microsoft Project

Transcript for:
Mastering Agile Features in Microsoft Project