In summary it all ends up being one the following approaches:

1. Two Steps Approach: where you go through the standard approach of collecting requirements, design, then develop and test.

Notes on this approach:

1. Perform the scoping exercise (or collecting requirements) doesn’t produce always an “Implementation Plan” (i.e. how the organisation is going about implementing the tool, what is the size and the shape of the change, what would the training required.
2. The organisation that doesn’t have a good Project Management maturity level, won’t know what it wants from the tool (i.e. unable to communicate the right requirements) and will start discovering more requirements as it start using the tool.

Conclusion here; Project Server / EPM brings a big change to the organisation, if the organisation is not in the right level of maturity to communicate the exact requirements, and manage the change the tool brings, there is a good chance of failure. However this approach if done well will decrease the organisation’s cost of implementation.

EPM or Project Server help organisations to enhance their Project Management maturity but is not a magical solution to resolve all your challenges.   

1. Agile Approach: where organisations install the software, then perform a number of sprints of:
   1. Introducing a functionality (by demonstration and basic configuration)  
   2. Usage with real data
   3. Issues fixing and stabilisation (further configuration and customisation)

Example: Introduce Resource Management as a concept; demonstrate the different ways how Project Server handles the concept, and apply basic settings. Then upload a team or a limited number of resources. Exercise the functionality through a pilot for a period of time (shouldn’t be too long) where you can stabilise the tool apply further configuration, fix any issues and document training documentation.

Conclusion here; this approach will bring the change gradually and will have a very good chance of increasing organisation’s maturity and decreases the risk of failure. However this approach requires long commitment and in many cases more investment. One the most common risks with this approach is the ownership of the change or the tool might change through the change lifecycle and the change losses its momentum.

Each approach has its own pros and cons, deciding what approach suits you best, is highly dependent on your organisation project management culture and maturity.

However most people I encounter look at that list and say; "What on earth is PerformancePoint?", so lately I had another opportunity to flex my PPS skills and thought I might share my experience to give you a taste of how powerful yet simple to use this new thing can be.

Creating a Dynamic Resource Utilisation Graph using PerformancePoint

I'm going to keep this very simple, as I find PPS to be very often quite mind-boggling, so to give you a taste of it what I'll describe here is how to create a simple equivalent to the old typical Data Analysis Resource Utilisation view.

So before you begin, make sure you have your Cube setup and built, the PerformancePoint service application setup and running in your SharePoint installation and some data to play with.

First step you need to get to the PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer, this is a nifty little web application (independent from the Office Web Apps) that is automatically installed and made available when you provision a PWA site.

To find it, open up the Business Intelligence site, and from there the quickest way to get to it is by hovering over any of the landing page images (Create Dashboards, etc) and selecting the 'Start using PerformancePoint Services' link.

You then have the icon to run Dashboard Designer:

This should download and install the designer for you, and assuming that you have all the correct permissions (and that PWA is in your Internet Explorer trusted sites), you will end up with a mostly empty designer window looking something like the image below.

Now you're ready to start creating those reports, first step setup your Data Connections by selecting the Create tab on the ribbon and selecting Data Source:

Select Analysis Services as the connection type, and populate the connection details and properties as required:

For Analysis Services datasources you should populate the Time tab to ensure that your Time dimensions are correct, something like this;

Finally when you are done, select save from above the ribbon to continue.

Note: This is something you will get used to with the Dashboard Designer, everything is automatically saved to the PWA BI site in their respective locations (dataconnections, reports or dashboards), with just one exception being the 'Workspace' which is effectively your configuration of Dashboard Designer (something I don't usually bother saving).

Now lets move on and create our report, select PerformancePoint Content and then from the Create ribbon lets select 'Analytic Chart';

Then select your datasource just created and hit finish, then your report will open in the designer;

Give it a name and then lets start adding content:

• First add some measures to the Series; Work and Actual Work. 
• Now add your Resource List dimension to the Bottom Axis. 

It should look something like this;

If you want to expand members of a dimension select the chevron (Down arrow next to the X), and select the members in the dialog.

Here for dynamic dimensions like the Resource list you are better off right-clicking and selecting one of the Autoselect Members, such as All Children, like so;

Which now looks like:

Finally we need our Time dimension, add it to the Bottom Axis from the right list and use the chevron to select the desired time periods (I'm selecting months by name here, however you can use something called Named Set's to do this dynamically for you - another blog article maybe). Finally I think it's best to move the Resource List to the top of the series Series list and apply some filters to filter out the blanks, to give us something like:

Don't forget the Edit tab on the Ribbon which has a number of settings that you'll find handy getting your report right.

Almost there now..

Okay so now we're ready to save and see this thing for real, so hit the save button, and lets minimise the designer and go back to our BI site in Internet Explorer.

If you open the default 'PerformancePoint Content' link, you should see your new report listed, select the drop-down to Display the report:

Final product:

Now this report is ready to add to any where in SharePoint using the PerformancePoint viewer web part, and the best thing is that all of the dynamic functions will be available to all users, so if someone wants to view this report in terms of Cost / Actual Cost, it's just a few clicks away:

Or maybe you want to see the breakdown of a particular person's activities using the Decomposition Tree?

I'd say this beats those old Data Analysis views!

That's it for this how-to, hopefully this scratching of the surface has shown you some of the potential of PPS, keep experimenting and you'll see very quickly how easy it is to replace those old Data Analysis views that are so 1990!

In the future I might come back and write a Part II to this one on creating your first KPI Scorecard in PPS, stay tuned..

Reprinted with Permission - Martin Laukkanen

My first impression is WOW!

This is a very simple way to create basic workflows using a simple Infopath form in PWA, the amazing thing is it handles the approvals so well with options that should cover most requirements, here’s a screenshot:

Using the tool is dead easy, just the following simple steps are required to create a new workflow in no time at all:

1. Once installed go to http://server_name/pwa_name/_layouts/WrkSetng.aspxon your server
2. Click “Add a workflow”
3. Create a new workflow based on the “DM DynamicWorkflow” template
4. Configure each of your phases/stages using all your pre-created stages with your approval requirements, then submit to finish
5. Now return to PWA and in Server Settings create or assign the newly created workflow to your Enterprise Project Type

There are some limitations of course, this really only does cover linear approval / rejection scenarios, if you need anything more complex like a return to previous stage on rejection from my testing it looks like you’ll still be needing your Visual Studio skills. But still I can see the majority of workflow requirements being met by this little gem!

Check out the CodePlex home here for downloads and installation details:http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/P2010SolutionStarter/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4631

Reprinted with Permission: Martin Laukkanen

Before I get into it don't forget that the OLAP connections are automatically created, so in many cases you can use those, but if you're like me and prefer direct reporting from the Reporting Database then you'll have to create your own connections.

Step 1: Start from an existing connection file

For this I am going to use "Project Server - Project and Task Data" from the default location "BC Center\Data Connections - English (...)\", find the existing file and save it somewhere locally using the Send to - Download a Copy option.

Now open that ODC file in Notepad and you'll see the XML contents and hopefully the important part the section labelled <odc:CommandText> where the SQL "SELECT ..." statement is, that's what we need to change to include our custom fields.

Step 2: Add your Custom Field details using SQL Management Studio

Using SQL Management Studio is the easiest way to confirm that you have the right field names to add to the query, to do that find your ProjectServer_Reporting database and in particular what you will want is the View named dbo.MSP_EpmProject_UserView (or one of the others if you want task or resource fields). Select the view and using the ‘Select Top 1000 Rows' option to generate a SELECT query returning all data.

You'll end up with something like this:

/****** Script for SelectTopNRows command from SSMS ******/
SELECT TOP 1000 [ProjectUID]
,[ProjectName]
[ .... Snip lots of built in fields....]
,[ProjectBaseline10Duration]
,[Project Departments]
,[Sample Business Need]
,[Sample Areas Impacted]
,[Sample Proposal Cost]
,[Sample Compliance Proposal]
,[Sample Assumptions]
,[Sample Goals]
,[Sample Post Implementation Review Date]
,[Sample Post Implementation Review Notes]
,[Sample Proposed Start Date]
,[Sample Proposed Finish Date]
,[Sample Approved Start Date]
,[Sample Approved Finish Date]
FROM [PWA_ProjectServer_Reporting].[dbo].[MSP_EpmProject_UserView]

The nice thing is in the views all the custom fields are listed last, as you can see from above the out of the box ‘Sample' fields are all there to see. So next you just have to copy those field names into the ODC file opened earlier and save your changes.

Step 3: Update the ODC file

The only catch with updating the ODC file as you probably noticed is the format includes the view or table name prefix, such as:

MSP_EpmProject_UserView.ProjectBaseline10FinishDate as [ProjectBaseline10FinishDate],MSP_EpmProject_UserView.ProjectBaseline10Duration as [ProjectBaseline10Duration],

So all you need to know is that unless your changing the name you don't need the bit after ‘as', so if you search and replace to prefix each of your custom fields to add the "MSP_EpmProject_UserView." before the "," so you end up with something like:

,MSP_EpmProject_UserView.[Sample Business Need],MSP_EpmProject_UserView.[Sample Areas Impacted],MSP_EpmProject_UserView.[Sample Proposal Cost]

Now the last step is to paste those lines into the ODC file in Notepad, but note that the commas are at the start not the end, so you just need to make sure that when you paste the new lines that you have just one comma between each line except for the last line before the "FROM". You should end up with something like this:

MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskBaseline10Duration as [TaskBaseline10Duration],MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskBaseline10DurationString as [TaskBaseline10DurationString], MSP_EpmTask_UserView.[Health] as [Health] ,MSP_EpmProject_UserView.[Sample Business Need],MSP_EpmProject_UserView.[Sample Areas Impacted],MSP_EpmProject_UserView.[Sample Proposal Cost] FROMdbo.MSP_EpmProject_UserView INNER JOIN dbo.MSP_EpmTask_UserView ONMSP_EpmProject_UserView.ProjectUID = MSP_EpmTask_UserView.ProjectUIDORDER BY MSP_EpmProject_UserView.ProjectName,MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskIndex, MSP_EpmTask_UserView.TaskName</odc:CommandText>

Step 4: Upload the new ODC file to your Data Connection library

Now your just about done, save the file and back in your BI Center upload the file to a new location, make sure that you don't try to overwrite the default file as those may be replaced by future service packs, I upload them directly into the Data Connections library.

Once uploaded you can now use them in Excel as normal. You might want to update or copy the existing templates and edit the data connection properties to point to this new ODC file, or otherwise just add them in as you normally would and carry on..

The error message "Project Server encountered a problem with this error code:9000" occurs when attempting to save a project in Project Professional 2007 client:

Additionally you may receive a blank "Job failed" window when trying to check-in a project:

This problem is caused by an Internet Explorer login session to Project Web Access expiring and as a result the project client is forced to re-login, however this re-login only seems to be supported in Project Professional 2010 and not 2007 client running in backwards compatibility mode.

This only applies to Project Servers / SharePoint configured to use Claims authentication, or when Project Professional 2007 is using Forms authentication to logon to PWA. (I assume Project Pro can re-authenticate easily using NTLM)

The best workaround to this is to not use the connect / disconnect and work offline options in Project Professional as this does not re-log you in.

Additionally perhaps avoid opening PWA in a separate Internet Explorer window so as to not logout inadvertently.

Performance problems also exacerbate this issue.

Hope this helps someone!

Annoying as it can be surprisingly hard enough to convince customers to install Windows 2008 let alone upgrade their SQL servers! Ah, well at least SRS can be separated from the SQL DB servers making it a bit easier.

Update 12/07: This has now been addressed by Microsoft in the SQL 2008 SP1 CU8 release which adds support to reporting services 2008 to work with the R2 add-in.

Access it directly here at the Microsoft Virtual Labs.

See the following blog link if you want some more info or are game to try your hands at the full Hyper-V version, even if you haven't yet installed Project Professional 2010 you'll find that link there also!