Get recommendations on best resources for your project

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to Project Operations updates. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans.

Enabled for Public preview General availability
Users by admins, makers, or analysts Mar 1, 2024 -

Business value

This feature helps make the role of project managers easier by understanding the status and challenges of a project at a specific time and recommending staffing choices for resources. Recommendations are provided after the application analyzes the cost, availability, experience, skill match, and utilization of employees and subcontractors. Each proposal is assigned a score that helps project managers understand each choice's pros and cons and helps make staffing decisions easier.

Feature details

Finding the right team continues to be one of the biggest challenges for Project managers in nearly every project-based organization across industry verticals. At a generic level, availability and skill match are challenges that apply to any resource scheduling problem. With resource talent distributed across employees and contractors, the problem exacerbates and requires Project managers to balance the concerns of cost and utilization with availability and skill match. This may pose conflicting priorities when each becomes more important depending on the status of the project at that point in time. Specifically, in project-based organizations, making the choice between an employee or an external resource can deeply influence the viability and profitability of the business. Also inherent to project-based work, because it requires close collaboration, is the need to have smooth working relationships among team members.

Project Operations will have a combination of an AI-powered and heuristics-based recommendation engine that takes into account these considerations and recommends the best resources for the project. With the use of AI, for the first time, the experience level of a resource will be part of the factors considered by staff team members on a project. The vision for this engine is to learn over time to correlate the successful completion of projects and the resources that worked on that project to suggest a specific mix of people for a project based on the type of work it involves. The engine leverages the AI infrastructure in Microsoft Power Platform and the rich project and resource data in CDS to drive resource recommendations.

Screenshot introducing the resource recommendations feature.

Screenshot showing the Suggest Resources button on the team member page.

Screenshot showing recommended resources displayed for a team member requirement.

See also

Get recommendations for a project team member (docs)