Announcing Project Roadmaps
Published Oct 08 2018 01:27 PM 125K Views
Microsoft

On September 24th at Microsoft Ignite, we announced a new feature for Microsoft Project called Roadmap. Roadmap is a visually exciting way to combine information from multiple Waterfall and Agile projects and share it with co-workers.

 

Roadmaps are available directly on the new Project Home page that we released into production this Summer.

 

Check it out at project.microsoft.com

 

 

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They are easily created from the Project Home page and appear nearly instantly. Performance has been an important tenet of the Roadmap feature

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Once the Roadmap is completed, it provides a visual and interactive way to view project status across a program or portfolio.

 

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Building out a Roadmap is a fairly simple process. Merely add rows, connect them to projects and then choose what tasks, milestones, features or initiatives you want to bubble up to the Roadmap. After creating a row, pick a project type first. In our initial release, we will support Project Online projects and Azure Boards projects. Over time we will add different project types as we better understand what customer’s needs. We use the Microsoft Flow connector infrastructure for our project types, so it is a very powerful and flexible connection system.

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After choosing a project type, the user chooses a project and signs into that project. Microsoft Flow manages all the credentials in a compliant way.

 

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Once the tasks are on the Roadmap, they can be assigned a status by the Roadmap manager. This is independent of the backend project and can be managed by the roadmap owner for reporting.

After that, its merely a matter of choosing what tasks to show on the roadmap.

 

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If a task is marked as at risk, a user might need to drill through to the backing task in the original system. The Roadmap maintains a link to the original task so users can always click through to the ‘system of record’.

 

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In addition to including tasks from back end systems, users may also add Key Dates to the Roadmap. These dates show up at the top of the roadmap and provide a visualization of important dates that span across projects – like a launch date or big marketing event.

 

 

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Finally, after the Roadmap has been completed, the author will want to share the roadmap. Roadmaps are shared using Office Modern Groups. Once a roadmap is shared a Modern Group is created to back the Roadmap and provide additional collaborative capabilities. A user can also choose to share the roadmap with an existing Modern Group that they might be working with.

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That is a brief overview of the new Project Roadmap feature. We will be releasing the feature to our early adopter program shortly. When we all agree its ready for all our customers, we will begin rolling it out to the rest of our Project Online customers. Keep an eye out for the new Roadmap!

Cheers,

Howard

 

 

 

 

126 Comments
Microsoft

Nothing yet @Bryan Hughes - it was hoped we'd already be there but hit some roadblocks.

Copper Contributor

Hi @Howard Crow  -  When is the expected availablity of below functionality : 

 

Do all items on the roadmap need to be linked to underlying project plans/tasks, or is it possible to manually create items/tasks directly on the roadmap? Thinking of scenarios where full project plans might not exist, or do exist but are in a different (non-project/Azure) tool which doesn't yet integrate. It would still be valuable to be able to view the high level roadmap for those projects alongside the rest of the portfolio.

 

Thank you,

Stella

Copper Contributor

Any idea when we will see this capability in GCC-High? 

Copper Contributor

@Howard Crow @Brian-Smith My company is interested in rolling out Roadmap at an Enterprise level - it's a great product.

However, we are finding that the Essentials license does not actually have View Only access to Roadmaps which is a HUGE blocker to adoption - we can't afford to provide Pro licenses to everyone when don't need that level of access otherwise.

Can you please clarify that the Essentials license does in fact allow Read Only Access to Roadmaps? Do you have an official Microsoft reference that I can point to to verify this?

Iron Contributor

@Howard Crow This still isn't in our EDU tenant. 

 

Any thoughts on why?

 

Thanks

Adrian


Copper Contributor

Can you share the roadmap with all individuals in your organization or is sharing restricted to those individuals who have a project online licence?

 

Thank you,

Daniela

Steel Contributor

@DC-PMa Project Professional or Project Premium subscription is required.

Brass Contributor

I agree, if Roadmap requires Project Pro and not essentials it is not of value. 

Copper Contributor

Thank you Trutz.  Like one of the post mentioned above the licencing policy for Roadmaps is a major deterrent to adopting it at our organization.   Since project team members may be licenced with Project Essentials, wouldn't they need at least the ability to view Roadmap?  As a project manager, I would want to share the Roadmap with my team (at the very least the ability to view) but I wouldn't necessarily licence them all with Project Professional or Project Premium subscriptions. 

 

 

Brass Contributor

If Microsoft Expects Roadmap to be accepted they will need to reconsider the licensing requirements. If not they might as well give up on it. I have placed my deployment of Roadmap on hold because of this

Copper Contributor

@Howard Crow - Can you please provide an update when Roadmap is available for Faculty tenants?

Copper Contributor

hey,

@Howard Crow@ could you support please: is it possible to have a connection to multiple projects from Project Online in just one row of the RoadMap? Or is it possible to aggregate multiple rows of the Roadmap into one area ?

Thank you!

Hey @Tomasz,

It is one row per connected project, you can't have 1 row with tasks from both Project A and Project B - that would need two rows in Roadmap.

Paul

Copper Contributor

@Tomasz ,

@Paul Mather is right. However, you could try working around this limitation by using Flow to create and modify key dates (disconnected from Project tasks), you'll probably need some sort of convention for naming them since there are only a date and a title field available - something like <Project Name> - Unique Id. <Task Name>. These dates won't look like tasks but rather like pins on your Roadmap but if you want to sync major milestone dates form multiple projects, this may work out for you. In your Flow that can be triggered by timer or publish event you would collect the Major Milestones, search for them in your roadmap key dates and update their schedule (or create them if they were not created before).

If you like this approach, a good place for you to start is @Paul Mather 's great post .

Hope this helps,

Roy

Copper Contributor

Thank you @Paul Mather and @Roy Gilboa .

Well what I was after was simply another layer of grouping and functional workplace with nice visualization (exercise with MS FLow is a little bit to much for me :) )

My organization runs projects in Project Online already, we have our RoadMap for the next 3 years and 7 focus areas and we would like to have it all visible in one working place: Roadmap >>> 7 areas >>> projects connected to each area.

So in that case I would have to create like 7 separate Roadmaps...

Thank you

Tomek  

Hi @Tomasz 

How come you cant just create 1 roadmap with multiple rows on the roadmap for each project?

Copper Contributor

Hey @Paul Mather - off course I can create RoadMap with multiple rows, my problem is that 1 row = 1 project while I would like to connect multiple projects with one 1 row.

Microsoft

Hi @Tomasz - I understand what you are asking - but the design is that one Roadmap contains many rows depending on the source of the deliverable (individual Projects or Azure Devops).  This is one Roadmap.  So for you example you don't have 7 Roadmaps - you have one Roadmap.  The challenge with your suggested design is that you would then need some other indicator of the source of each plan if they were all adding elements into the same row.  I haven't tried - but if you have a master project aggregating your 7 areas - could you add rows from that master into one row in Roadmap perhaps?

Best regards,

Brian

Hi @Tomasz,

I've tried what @Brian-Smith suggested but I can't add tasks from the sub project once I've added the Master project to the row, you can only add tasks from the Master project or the sub project itself. I would recommend raising an idea on the roadmap user voice: https://microsoftproject.uservoice.com/forums/914203-project?category_id=358186 

Paul

Microsoft

Thanks @Paul Mather , and I did wonder if that would be the case.  Could you have a master project task that was driven by the sub project and use that maybe?  And yes, UserVoice is a great place to raise this.

Brian

Copper Contributor

Thanks @Brian-Smith and @Paul Mather - I have posted my suggestion on UserVoice, keep my fingers crossed!

Tomek

Copper Contributor

Hi. This announcement was made in October 2018 can someone from Microsoft please clarify when this will be available to Education Licenses as we are now Jan 2020?

Microsoft

I am trying to connect a 'Row' to the Azure DevOps instance that my team is using. However, when I try to connect a 'Row' to the Devops instance, even though it shows up in the drop-down, I keep getting an error saying 'Something went wrong. Please try again'. Which isnt very helpful.

 

I have searched online quite a bit but not able to find a solution. Does anyone have any recommendations?

 

 
Copper Contributor
Hi, we enabled the Roadmap features, but keep getting the following error -
We can't update your roadmap because your organization has a Power Automate DLP policy that prevents flows that use one of these connectors from running: Project Roadmap, Project Online. Please contact your admin to fix this issue.
We have one DLP policy and Project Online is allowed, there is no connector for Project Roadmap, so no idea what is getting blocked.
Steel Contributor

Hi @chriskowalski ,

We had a similar issue at a customer this week and the following returned it to a working condition for us.

 

You need to use the Power Apps Admin PowerShell commands as the "Project Roadmap" connector is still in preview and can't be selected in the GUI of the Admin center.

The documentation for Powershell is here and also specifies how to install it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/powerapps-powershell

 

Once installed and connected you can execute the following command to get the Guids of your DLPs:

Get-AdminDlpPolicy '<DisplayName>'

Note the Guid listed for the “PolicyName” property:

GetAdminDLPPolicyGetAdminDLPPolicy

 

 

 

Then add the “Project Roadmap” connector to the “Business Data” category using the following command:

Add-CustomConnectorToPolicy -PolicyName '<PolicyName>' -ConnectorId '/providers/Microsoft.PowerApps/apis/shared_projectroadmap' -GroupName hbi -ConnectorName "Project Roadmap" -ConnectorType "Microsoft.PowerApps/apis"

AddConnectorAddConnector

 

 

 

 

Afterwards, new connections can be created using Roadmap. For existing connections, the user that created the connection has to navigate to PowerAutomate (flow.microsoft.com) and reactivate the disabled flows.

Copper Contributor

Thank you @Trutz Stephani

 

We have added the custom connector and will test.

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‎Jan 15 2019 02:14 PM
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