Dynamics 365 Project Operations latest Release Updates

Discover the latest updates in Dynamics 365 Project Operations – How to Plan and Prepare for Dynamics 365 Project Operations. In this blog, we share the latest release updates from Microsoft to help you to plan and prepare for D365 Project Operations – with planned release dates from October 2023 through March 2024 and beyond – enabling you to transform your Project Operations.

What is Dynamics 365 Project Operations ?

Now more than ever in todays ever growing multi-faceted business environment, project-oriented organisations are faced with multiple challenges from winning new business to resource optimisation to simplifying time and expense processes, streamlining project financials and more. Project-centric organisations need to continually look to news ways to optimise the Project Operations processes.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations enables you to connect resourcing, project management, finance and sales teams in a single centralised application to enable you to win more business opportunities, fast-track project delivery, and optimise the profitability opportunities. 

• Stakeholders get business insights to increase visibility across all teams, data, and processes, plus AI capabilities for better and faster business decisions.
• Sales Teams are enabled to win more deals and accelerate the sales cycle with fast and accurate quotes, flexible pricing, and seamless transitions from estimate to execution.
• Resourcing is set up to optimise resource use by aligning the right people, with the right skills, to the right projects. This alignment improves quality and helps to retain top performers.
• Project managers can accelerate project delivery with state-of-the-art, built-in project management that uses familiar, easy-to-use Microsoft Project capabilities.
• Team members can improve productivity, collaboration, and visibility with integration to Microsoft Teams, and submit time and expenses from anywhere.
• Finance teams can simplify project accounting with time and expense tracking governance, project costing, budgeting, invoicing, revenue recognition, compliance, and visibility into key business health metrics.

Project Operations is a powerful tool on its own, but can be expanded by clients who require more capabilities and functionality from Dynamics 365. These capabilities include Marketing, Human Resources, Customer Service, and much more.

What’s New & Planned for Dynamics 365 Project Operations? 

Dynamics 365 Project Operations enables you to easily connect your sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams so they can win more deals, accelerate delivery, empower employees, and maximise profitability. The application provides the necessary visibility, collaboration, and agility across the project lifecycle to drive success for project-centric businesses. Powered by Microsoft Power Platform, customers are provided with an unmatched set of capabilities that enable everyone to analyse, act, and automate across their organisation to transform their services business. D365 Project Operations provides you with everything you need to run and deliver on all your project operations – from the deal management to financials and all in one application.

For 2023 release wave 2, Microsoft are delivering functionally rich experiences in the following areas:

• Increase WBS task limits to 1000.
• Improvements in pricing for labour using cost-plus and contribution-margin-based models.
• Copy quote, contract, and opportunities across Legal Entities
• Improvements to project budgeting to support revenue forecasting and summarization options when importing from estimates.
• Progress-based billing projects.
• Subcontracting to Purchase Order integration that will light up vendor retention and Pay-when-paid functionality.
• Support for prospects on quotes.
• Support for intercompany vendor invoice.
• Integration of Print management for billing schedules using “Post invoice automatically.
• Improvements in usability and performance in specific areas across Project Operations.
• Investments in generative AI to help with core operational workflows like time and expense entry creation and submission.

Check out this short video

Some of Microsoft Key Investment area highlights:

Optimise project operations
In one application, Dynamics 365 Project Operations connects your sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams so they can win more deals, accelerate delivery, empower employees, and maximize profitability. In 2023 release wave 2, Project Operations continues to invest in capabilities to improve usability, performance, and scale across critical areas of the product like project planning, invoicing, time entry, and core transaction processing flows.

The core functionality is getting the spotlight with enhancements to service procurement scenarios with integration to Purchase Order, support for vendor retention, pay-when-paid, intercompany vendor invoices, and 3-way vendor invoice match functionality in Dynamics 365 Finance. Project contracting and pricing models will see new scenarios enabled with progress-based billing and contracting models, cost-plus and contribution-based pricing models. Intelligent resource recommendations will make project staffing easier by providing resource suggestions using past experience and a multi-dimensional prioritisation of criteria like costs, utilization, skill match, and availability.

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged “Users, automatically” in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged “Users by admins, makers, or analysts” in the release plan.

This topic lists features that are planned to release from October 2023 through March 2024. Because this topic lists features that may not have released yet, delivery timelines may change and projected functionality may not be released. For more information, go to Microsoft policy.

For a list of the previous wave’s release plans, go to 2023 release wave 1 plan.

In the General availability column, the feature will be delivered within the month listed. The delivery date can be any day within that month. Released features show the full date, including the date of release.

This check mark ( ) shows which features have been released for public preview or early access and for public preview, early access, and general availability.

How to Optimise project operations? 

Dynamics 365 Project Operations features optimise project execution operations from ideation and sales to invoicing and accounting.

Description of Enabled for column values:

• Users, automatically: These features include changes to the user experience and are enabled automatically.
• Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically: These features are meant to be used by administrators, makers, marketers, or business analysts and are enabled automatically.
• Users by admins, makers, or analysts: These features must be enabled or configured by the administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users.

For a list of the countries or regions where Dynamics 365 business applications are available, go to the International availability guide. For more information about geographic areas and datacenters (regions), go to the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform availability page.

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