The company, a major financial institution in the Spanish market, with a presence in nine countries, will benefit from the possibilities offered by Microsoft Project Online.
Abanca is reinforcing its commitment to Microsoft and continues the transformation of the business model within its commercial network.
Abanca has chosen Microsoft Project Online, the PPM (Project Portfolio Management) of Office 365 for managing their portfolio of projects, with the aim of providing a centralized management of its corporate portfolio. The financial institution, present in eight other countries (France, Mexico, Panama, Portugal, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Venezuela and Germany), has a strong commitment to a service model that reconciles the best of traditional banking with the attributes of a bench edge.
The ultimate goal of Abanca is to offer a uniqueservice to its customers and therefore needed to strengthen the alignment of its portfolio with strategic objectives, improve visibility of the execution of portfolio for informed decision-making at the right time, increase the productivity of project teams and rationalize the use of resources.
With that premise, Abanca, which already manages its project portfolio through Microsoft Project Server on-premises, decided to take advantage of the management capabilities provided by the latest version of Project Online. This has allowed Abanca to improve management of its portfolio of services and operational. Abanca opted for this solution as a logical step in its growth that also meets the objective of facilitating the integration of the service with other bank systems.
During the second half of 2015, supported by Aula Informatica Complutense, a Microsoft Partner, it began the implementation of Microsoft Project Online in Abanca. The project was carried out in phases during which users were adapting to the different capabilities of the solution gradually. All this thanks to the creation of two associated sub-implementations: one for parameterization and configuration of the tool; and another to update the interfaces with other systems in the bank. This has allowed no breaks in the daily operations of the organization during transition.
Abanca also expressed their willingness to continue working on this tool in order to reach a comprehensive solution for managing the corporate portfolio, from which an initiative is born until it closes, certifying the return on investment.
“A great advantage of Project Online is that senior management can have an updated each project report, obtaining a global view.” said Juan Manuel Sánchez-Quinzá, director of the Project Office. “Before we invested considerable time and resources in creating these reports. Now the address information is quick and agile without forgetting safety for us is key.” he stressed.
Microsoft Project Online: flexibility, immediacy and safety
Microsoft Project Online is a flexible, cloud solution for managing project portfolios . Project Online, available through Office 365, enables organizations to get going, plan their activities, prioritize investment project portfolios and deliver the expected business value from virtually anywhere and on almost any device. All this with the benefits of not having to undertake an investment in infrastructure.
In addition, Project Online offers a level of security and privacy to respond to organizations of any size, with support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and compliance with a growing list of certification standards such as FISMA, ISO 27001 and HIPAA.
Microsoft are just rolling out some changes – and they should be hitting all Project Online tenant sites by now – which allow for Project notifications and reminders to be sent to accounts outside of Exchange Online.
As long as you have a ‘Work email’ configured with the desired address for the user they can get alerts for new task assignments and various levels of reminders. There is a setting that governs notifications working even if you do have Exchange Online – and this would need turning on too – so I’ll start with there.
Go to PWA Settings, Additional Server Settings and scroll right down to the bottom – and the Turn on notifications option will be found. Check the box if it isn’t already checked.
It was an exciting week for Project at Ignite 2016. We had some great sessions, which are now available online. If you were not able to attend Ignite, these online sessions provide a great overview of the latest happenings in the Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management space.
Learn about the future of Microsoft PPM—A view of modern intelligent Project and Portfolio Management, made possible through the cloud based Microsoft PPM solution working seamlessly with various other Microsoft technologies such as Power BI, Internet of Things, bots and machine learning. We also announced a series of updates to the Project Online cloud service as well as the Project desktop client.
Manage projects and portfolios in the cloud—A demo-rich look at the end-to-end PPM experience provided by our solution. This session featured several first-time demos such as support for sharing with external users, enhanced support for team tasks and multi-assignment, Project Desktop enhancements and our new Time Reporter apps.
Create powerful reports in Microsoft PPM—A deep dive into all the reporting capabilities of the Microsoft PPM solution. Alongside exciting improvements in Excel, Power BI and Cortana integration, this session also featured a first-time demo for PowerApps with Microsoft PPM solution to create engaging mobile experiences.
Deploy and manage Microsoft PPM—Based on partner experiences, this session provides wisdom about real-world considerations while deploying our PPM solution.
Along with these sessions, we also had engaging discussions with several attendees at the Project booth. We take all the feedback and use it to improve our product. As always, please continue to engage with us and provide feedback through our UserVoice site.
Did you know that we have a vibrant Project Management community in the UK? Microsoft and its Partner Network actively collaborate to provide you with a series of interesting initiatives.
We are sharing our specialized Project Management knowledge, along with our technological expertise, to help you adopt better Project & Portfolio Management processes and leverage the full potential of Microsoft’s PPM solution – Project Online.
Register for an upcoming session or view on-demand content
The Office 365 Project Time Reporter iOS app announced last fall is now available in the Apple Store. This app enables team members to submit timesheets and report progress on tasks tracked in Project Online.
With the Office 365 Project Time Reporter on your iPhone, you can add new assignments or non-project work to your timesheet or create new personal tasks in the Timesheet view. Timesheets can be saved, allowing you to return later and send in for approval. You can also keep track of your current or overdue tasks in the Tasks view, filter and sort tasks to find the right ones, and submit status updates.
As enterprises are benefiting from individual agile teams, the question now is how do we scale these practices across teams and gain a portfolio view of the progress of agile teams throughout the enterprise? To address these needs, many businesses are using the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe™).
If you’re interested in using SAFe, you can configure projects created with the Scrum, Agile, or CMMI processes to track SAFe criteria. Moreover, just as your Agile tools support Scrum and Agile practices, it can support SAFe and large numbers of teams to work together on epics that span releases.
In this article you’ll learn how SAFe concepts map to your Agile tools, how to plan and track SAFe projects using your Agile tools, and how to configure your Agile tools to support SAFe.
