Prakash formulates his team

Using the new "Project Team and scheduling" found on the project form, Prakash fills out the roles he will require for his project, and puts the appropriate start date and end date. In this case, you can see he has four unstaffed roles in his project.

Prakash describes the requirements for each role on the project

Contoso have set up a number of standard roles from which Prakash can choose. Each role is a collection of skills and certifications that will help Reina, as well as the matching logic in AX, to find a good fit for staffing the project. However, those roles are just a starting point. In our example below, we see that Prakash is making more specific requests for specific skills -- in this case, the developer must have a competency in .Net development and have valid travel visas to do onsite work in France.

Prakash initiates the request to Reina

Once all of the roles, timelines, and skill requirements are described for the project team, he sends it off to Reina by attaching it to a case. This is done by clicking on the "New Case" button on the ribbon, shown below. Once the case is submitted, Prakash needs to submit it to workflow using the submit button on the case.

Reina takes the request

Reina will be notified via email or alert that there is a new request awaiting her attention. After locating it in the work item queue, she takes ownership, as shown below.

Take ownership in USSI/Home/Common/Work items/Work items assigned to my queues

Reina can track the stage of the case, record time against the case, and ensure she is meeting the SLA by using standard Case Management functionality. To find out the details of Prakash's request she can navigate through the associations to open the case and staff the requirements. She can review case log notes that were sent to her from Prakash, and can keep track of each interaction on the case by recording further details in the case log.

Reina finds an internal resource

When she opens the project, she sees the available resources ordered by the best skill match. Based on their availability or her collaboration with candidates or managers around the world, she is able to secure each of the required positions. She can also use the search criteria here to narrow her focus on specific geographies, departments, skills, or past experiences.

A case in Dynamics AX is defined as a check-list of phases and tasks that guide the resolution of an issue. In our situation, we'll build a case that will be initiated by project managers when they need to staff a position in a project. Our case will outline the steps required to fulfill the request and be tied to a Service Level Agreement, or SLA, which will help evaluate Reina's effectiveness at fulfilling the resource requests.

Create responsibilities

The first step is to create the right "Responsibilities" that individuals will have as they perform activities in resolving the resource request. Below, you can see two distinct responsibilities that Reina or others on her team may need to perform: Identifying internal candidates in response to demand (Search Internal), and finding contingent staff or vendor help in response to the demand (Search SubCon).

Responsibilities are defined in Sales and Marketing -> Setup -> Responsibilities.

Create a case process

Next, you need to define the "Case Process". This defines the flow of how the resource request is handled. This could conceivably be a fairly complex set of steps to search different organizations or tiers of vendors. The example below shows the phase "Formulate Requirements" which will be performed by Prakash, our project manager who is submitting the request. Next, you see the simple process outlined for Reina to fulfill the request. She has a 3 day SLA to perform the "Search Internal Candidates" task, and then based on it's outcome, she may advance to "Search Subcon Resources".

Case Process and Categories are defined in Sales and Marketing -> Setup -> Case.

Build a case category

Once you've designed your process, you need to build a case category which describes other aspects of the resource request. You can see below we have defined an email to be sent as a follow-up and will gather survey information using a questionnaire on the effectivity of Reina's selections and timeliness. The owning department, in this case, Human Resources, is also defined. The case process and SLA selection associate this category back to the process that was created before.

Case categories are defined in Sales and Marketing -> Setup -> Case.

Configure a work item queue

In the case that there are multiple resource managers working together to fulfill and staff projects, it is useful to use Work Item Queues in conjunction with the case. In this way, all new resource requests will be routed to a queue, and the individual resource managers can pick up and staff them after reviewing them and coordinating amongst themselves. This will also provide notification to Reina when new items arrive. In this case, you can see all of the resource managers have been added to the work item queue.

Work Item queue is built in Organization administration/Setup/Workflow/Work Item Queues

Configure a case workflow

Keep in mind that we've already defined the process (search internal, then external) in the case definition. However, since Work Item Queues only work with workflow, we need to build a simple workflow to place the case onto the work queue. Once this is done, cases will be "workflow enabled", and when they are submitted by a project manager, they will be placed on the queue for Reina to see. Following are the steps.

• Go to Organization administration/Setup/Workflow/Organization workflows

• Specify a "Case Workflow" when prompted

• Add a "Complete Case" step to the workflow and configure it's assignment to the queue you built above

At this point, your case process and workflow are set to go. In the next post, I'll walk through how this is used to meet Reina's needs.

1. Verify add-in install: Open Microsoft Project, and make sure that the "Dynamics AX" tab is present in the Ribbon UI. The add-in will be installed if you had the other Office add-ins installed at the time that you applied the CU7 update. If the add-in was installed, it may have been disabled. If this is the case you can re-enable it by:
1. Go to file->Options in Microsoft Project 2010 or 2013
2. Go to the "addins" tab
3. Click on "Go" next to "Manage COM Addins"
4. Enable the "Microsoft Dynamics AX add-in for Microsoft Project
2. Verify the path: All MS Project files for "linked projects" are stored in a location specified in "Project Management and Accounting Parameters". This can either be in SharePoint or in a share referenced by a UNC file path. The UNC file path needs to be accessible from the AOS as well as from the client machine where the file is being opened. To verify that the path will work:
1. Open Project Management and Accounting-> Setup -> Project management and accounting parameters.
2. Ensure that "Save Microsoft Project files to" is set to "Archive Directory"
3. Ensure that the value specified in "Folder for Microsoft Project files" is accessbile and writable from the client machine you are sing to open the project.

We'll continue to collect any issues we hear about and post them here as we update the more general documentation and address any issues you may be finding with the integration.

Good luck, and let us know on the forums if you are successful in using this new feature. 

Thanks,

Tom

In our scenario, Reina is a dedicated resource manager who is accountable for finding qualified staff to work on software implementation projects. She works with dozens of project managers around the world and finds available staff in 5 geographic regions. Each role in each project has specific skill requirements and may also have requirements for travel, visas, security clearance levels, certifications or language skills. In cases where there are no employees that meet the requirements for the engagement, she will work with contingent staffing providers to staff the project.

Reina needs to prioritize the requests from project managers and make sure she is meeting her commitment to quick turn-around with the project managers she serves. Case Management can help by:

 • Defining a standardized process for evaluating resources
 • Associating the case with staffing requirements in the new "Project Team" feature in CU7
 • Enabling notifications and queuing of requests from different project managers
 • Ensuring and tracking case resolution and comparing it to agreed-upon Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Well, that's enough for my very first post in this blog. I'll be back soon with information on how to set this up on the Demonstration HyperV image and then eventually a walkthrough of how it looks once it is set up.

Thanks for reading,
Tom