Planner Beyond Tasks: Building Enterprise Project & Portfolio Management with Erik van Hurck [MVP]

>> Yeah, welcome to back to the MC65 podcast, the podcast where we explore everything happening across the Microsoft ecosystem from Microsoft C65 and Power Platform to AI, Co-Pilot, Azure Security and Productivity. Today, we are diving into a topic that almost every organization is trying to work. How do you manage project without investing in an expensive enterprise PPM platform? Can Microsoft plan a evolved from a simple task management app into a complex project and part of your management solution?

Oh, our guest today, believe the answer could be yes. Join us this Eric Funderhook, Microsoft experts specializing in project and portfolio management using Microsoft technology, Eric helps the media with large organizations build practical planning solutions by extending Microsoft Planner with Power Apps and the Power Platform. Wherever you are a PMO leader, project manager, Power Platform devolves, simply trying to organize work more effortously today. Episodes, as practical insights.

Eric, welcome to the MC65 podcast. >> Well, Mirko, thank you very much for having me on the show. I'm excited, let's dig in. >> Yeah, awesome.

Can you, before we deep dive into the topic, I think we are interested to learn more about Eric. Can you tell us a little bit about your surf and your journey into the Microsoft ethical system? >> Absolutely. I am a Microsoft MVP based in the Netherlands and I work for a company called Context End.

We've been deploying project and portfolio management solutions for well over 25 years now. And myself, I'm a 17-year consultant, starting as a junior in a local branch of a local company and growing to implement enterprise solutions to a cross-to-glow. One of my current biggest customers is actually based in the US. And we're just implementing phase two, so it's always an exciting time.

Yeah. >> And what first attract you to the project and portfolio management? >> Well, it's funny, I'm actually supposed to be a marketer. From the college off, I did college for commercial economics.

And I'd or means that you go for marketer or sales. And it depends if you had any experience before you started working, right? And after college, did you have experience then you would go to a marketer's role? And if you didn't have any experience, well, the only place that you could land a job was in sales.

So I started in sales and I joined a local IT company, as I mentioned. As a sales representative, I made the statements of work, did enterprise tenors. And at some point, there was an issue with the consultants and not having enough people on board or having over or on their allocation. And I started investing in creating this huge Excel macro.

And that kind of worked really good. I pat on my own shoulder. But it was a good thing. And management saw that and they said, well, if Eric can do this internally, maybe he should be a consultant.

And we had a small group of very active Microsoft project consultants at that company. And I was put as a trainee for a mentor there. And he taught me the ropes of Microsoft project server. And that is just a world that is beautiful, right?

You go to a customer, you listen in what their issues are. You help them create this beautiful product that grows on you and that grows in the organization. Yeah, and that's 17 years now in the patch. But I've never looked back.

It's a beautiful job. Yeah. Awesome. And what are the - I think, Eric, we have these Excel and we have now - there's a lot of modern tools.

A little bit over the end with this. I'm using more DevOps for project management. But what are the biggest challenges you're seeing often inside organization in this time, especially in project management? Yeah, so the world is evolving.

And I'm more faster now than ever, of course. And we will talk about AI as you mentioned already. But I started off with Microsoft Project 2003. And at 1, 2, 7, and 13, 17, project online, project server.

Project server first and project online. The whole agile movement came up. That's probably what you would use DevOps because that is a more can-ban and agile way of working. Like you mentioned, there's a vast amount of applications available to us.

And if you Google Planning Software, Microsoft isn't even in the top five, right? Microsoft is very much a corporate application software ecosystem. But a lot of projects are managed outside of the enterprise. And that's where most of these search engines will find you, right?

So Trello might look at - show up at monday.com, the smaller companies. And I'm saying that with a lot of love for these applications. But what enterprises struggle with is one of the components within project management.

And at the first per organization. And that's the beauty of being a consultant. You face them all, right? One organization might have trouble finding out all the projects that they have.

They have no clue. Are we running 20 projects? Are we running 30? Or 300?

Or 5,000 projects? I've seen those projects as well. Or companies as well. Then another organization wants to get better grip on their portfolio on a financial basis.

Or - and this is the holy grail and something that most organizations struggle with is correct utilization of your resources. How difficult is it to say, OK, we have 200 people in our project management pool. How are you going to utilize them? What skills do they have?

Do we have enough project managers? Do we have enough developers? Do we have enough scrum masters? Whatever the case, this is a struggle.

And it's a struggle within an organization because there are so many dependencies. Because a project manager doesn't own a resource. The project manager owns the project - and not all in all cases even - but then you have the resource manager, or we sometimes call them line managers. And the line manager owns the resource, but they don't own the project.

And it's a constant battle between the project manager and the resource manager to utilize the resources. And that's enough, but don't overstress them. And the project manager to deliver on time on budget and with the correct quality. So those are the struggles that I see most within organizations when it comes to enterprise project management.

What my problem I often see is that companies have a lot of project teams, and sometimes they develop something similar, or steps of something similar, and then they develop the two times. And they have no communication or overview how this could happen. But before we deep dive into the topic, my last question about, I'd say, project management and your experience. And over two decades, you are now in project management.

How have project management changed over the two decades? So the scenario that I've seen is project management maturing a whole lot. There is a sea there's an ocean of knowledge available to everyone. And in my experience, the project manager wants to learn.

These are eager people that want to have their project succeed. So these are highly trained professionals that sometimes might struggle with the tool choice that you do, but they have expert knowledge on the methodologies. They know what a resource management needs to be like. They know the budgeting.

They know what IRR stands for, net present value. They know what a baseline and a critical path is. So project management, as a profession, has grown since recent years. The past 20 years has seen a huge upside on the skills that project managers have, where the issue is the layer above where program management becomes a profession or portfolio management becomes a profession.

And these are different colors of a same kind of beastie, a portfolio is not a project. A program is not a project. And in most organizations, these are pulled under the same rug. And even project online and project server doesn't have a program entity or portfolio entity.

So that's one of the first things that we did with R2 is create that layer. Let there be a separate ownership of that record in data versus as you're familiar with. You have these enterprise, these entities, and you can pull relationships in there. So you can now have a program with five or six or eight projects underneath and have its own budget, its own risks, on lessons learned and the whole shebang.

So project management is evolving very quickly and is a mature profession in that sense. I think the next big step for learning is is program and portfolio management. See that bigger picture. And I wanted to tag along with something that you said earlier is, and I lost my train of thought.

Sorry. We'll probably pick that up later. But yeah, that's the thing with learning, portfolio and program management in next in line. Then we'll look a little bit into the Microsoft ecosystem.

And I think like me, many people are confused by the Microsoft planning tools they have. I think they are its planner, OK? Microsoft project. Then we have DevOps, what I use, but I does more for the technical guys.

And then we have to do. So let us start with, I think, Will's planner. Can you describe what is planner to someone who never used it? Yeah.

So let's do a little bit of a history lesson with planner, because planner is quite a new application. Where Microsoft project is as old as I am. I'm not going to give you my age, but is as old as I am. And has been around for a very long time in perfecting project management.

It is by far a beautiful application of running a single project. Planner is very new and really took storm during the pandemic of COVID-19, where offices were empty, and everyone needed to jump on Microsoft Teams to communicate to each other. And there was planner, this lightweight application, that was capable of creating a can-manboard, light progress, checklists, the ability to communicate and tag people within a specific team. So Microsoft Planner was one of the most popular Teams applications when Teams took off.

And planner really piggybacked on that popularity. But it wasn't the only Microsoft application that could do something with project management. The eternal - yeah, I like to call it a parasite. The eternal parasite called Microsoft Excel went in building again, chart, right?

It doesn't do product management, but people tend to use it a lot. So you have Excel and you had Microsoft Project. And there's a steep learning curve when you start working with Microsoft Project. And as you mentioned, then we have Devolves, Nymor Agile, Nymor TextHavvy, Project Management System.

So where does planner fit in? And when it was introduced and when it was put to marketing, the most often use case you would hear is the marketing team. The market needs to have a new campaign. The marketing team isn't per se a project management savvy, organizational structure, or department, right?

So the marketing for planner aimed for the lightweight project manager, the project manager, but not by name, right? So these aren't the people that studied it. These aren't people that I meant when I mentioned that project management has evolved, right? So Microsoft had a challenge because where does planner fit in with project?

So what we get is we create it for planner premium. And planner premium is an application that has more capabilities. It gives you the ability to create a Ganshark, right? So with the more with the dependency, it now has baseline capabilities.

It can create that critical path. And like I mentioned, Microsoft Project is as old as I am. They haven't changed a lot to the base core competence, right? The basic software is still the same.

And we added on top of that and made it improved it, but the base functionality is still there. So Microsoft created planner premium to be a modern counterpart. It will never be similar to Microsoft Project in all its extent because Microsoft Project is a desktop application very powerful. So that cannot run fully on a browser interface.

But you have planner, lightweight projects, and you have planner premium where you can have full blown schedules, real projects. You would maybe even be able to build the pyramids with it. I don't know why you would because they're already there. But yeah, you could do real project management with planner premium.

And then there's another tool called to do. Yeah. Is your personal - I like to call it a grocery list application. It's by no means demoting the application because it's a very powerful tool for note taking and toss taking on a personal level.

So you have to do planner premium. Well, Microsoft said during last Ignite session is we're combining it. That is going to be the future. There's going to be one planner for everything related to task management.

And that's where the division comes from what our organization does, context end. And what Microsoft is doing. So here's the deal. Planner is a task management solution.

It does that very well. All tasks live in planner. And that will be the future of what Microsoft has seen, right? At least how I envisioned that.

But it's not an enterprise project management solution. And that's where the Brenham Butter is for our organization. We surface the PMOs, the enterprise project and portfolio management offices. And planner can be a component in that.

But again, no program level, no risks, no lessons learned, no financial component. And that's where we bring that into the system using dataverse and the power platform, because that is a very flexible application. Well, platform, right? So you have power apps, you have power automate, you have Power BI.

And the whole deal there is that you can build that out. And yeah, it's almost like a block of marble. And you need to chisel out the David. And that's what you've been doing.

A lot of people in my - in one of my companies, I work a little bit longer. They say Microsoft Project is a classical project management tool with a waterfall model. And use planar-based power and DevOps, because this is Ed Agile, and it's nothing what's working in Microsoft's project. Is it right?

Well, Microsoft Project has an agile component. OK. But it is really true that it isn't the main focus. Agile was created for a developer and a software engineering department, right?

It is not meant for all types of project. And I think the world is coming to terms with that. Some projects should not be wrong Agile. Other projects should, but not every project can run Agile.

If I want to build a house, I'm not starting with a tent. I'm starting with the foundation. And that is a waterfall project. So yes, the agile components really live in the IT departments and software development, because you pick something up.

You work on it until you don't work on it. And you hand that over. And you iterate on these processes. Microsoft Project is one of the top applications when it is compared to waterfall projects.

And you have competition, but Microsoft Project is the default within most organizations still. And I see also a lot of companies they have another project management to it. They use Teams in JAPOINT. Yeah, absolutely.

It's a struggle at times to start a new engagement with an organization. Because most often it starts from a specific department that has a specific need. And when we come there, when we join their team to build this project management software, it typically happens that other departments look at us and say, oh, I want you to own a board. And it can happen that one department will work with planner.

And another department will work with DevOps. A third one might use JIRA. And where does our software then land? Is that middle layer?

We've done that a couple of times where we connect DevOps. We connect JIRA. We connect planner. We connect Trello into our software.

Because we don't tend to compete with Microsoft planner or project management software like Project Server or Project Online. We are that shell on top of it. Yeah. Your software is to getting an overview of all projects, right?

So that is what I mean with an enterprise portfolio management software. And we changed that name a little bit. Our tool is called ProjectMXPM. And the X is really everything project management.

And that means that we have a financial module. That means that we have a scheduling module. That means that we have risk management in there. And we do have a scheduling component.

So you could use ProjectMXPM as its own application layer and as its own full-blown project and portfolio management software. But in case you want your financials to come from an SAP background, and we can interact with that. We can integrate with that. If you are very happy with planner, planner has its APIs.

So yes, we can pull that information in using the Graph API, well, WorkIQ now, right? So we can pull that in, WorkIQ, because the whole set of APIs was just released recently. So we have the capabilities of pulling all that information in and our tool creating that layer that isn't provided by Microsoft Stack itself or other stacks. So we delivered that portfolio enterprise overview, that strategic overview of how many projects do you have, how many budget are you consuming?

Are you getting out of touch with your critical path or your baseline? How is resource in going? Do you have core competencies in abundance? Or are you running behind?

So that's the conversation that our tool brings. We're not unique. In this sense, there is competition. And that's healthy.

But we have done this since the first red flags came up from Microsoft. OK, we are not going to develop project online anymore. That happened roughly 16 years ago. Well, no, that might be a little bit stretching it.

But it happened a number of years ago. We jumped on board with a power platform and have been developing our application since then. So yeah, enterprise project management is not the single schedule where that layer on top. This is it.

For sure, because have you developed this completely in your solution in the Microsoft ecosystem? So XPM. So our solution is built on a model driven power app with its own tables, security roles, relationships. And there are specific components that we took either PCF components in, or we had our developers create our own IP.

So I mentioned before that we have a financial module. We have a scheduling module. We have a resource management module. Those were developed by our developers as a core component of the whole solution.

So yeah, it's Microsoft plus a little bit of intelligence from the developers. And I am absolutely not a developer. I've been in DevOps. I've worked with DevOps, but I'm not a developer at all.

No. But how do you see when we talk about this, tools, especially from the power platform, we have power apps, power automate, and also power BI, I think it could also be interesting. How did you see these tools extending the project management towards the best world, the project management project management world? Yeah.

So the project management world, and for our customers, to dig into deeper, what we've previously seen is that the project server and project online environments were delivered and developed by Microsoft. And it was difficult for us to add our own coding, our own specifics to. Now with the power platform, that flexibility here that we have, you want a new table that doesn't exist yet, and you want it to interact with your initiatives level because we have projects, but we also have an agile track, so we call it initiatives.

Well, OK, within a couple of hours, you have that whole new table that didn't exist before, and it works. And it feeds back into our power hub application, which is our reporting layer, and that feeds into power BI. And then you have power automate, you have this whole stack of applications from Microsoft that make this such a flexible layer. We have our base product that's called ProjectMXPM, but once we're done as consultants, it still is ProjectMXPM, but it's ProjectMXPM custom name, right?

It becomes a very local version that ties into their needs as we started, right? One company might be very financial focused, and the other might be very resource focused. And the flexibility with the power platform that you get is immense. And I think with the whole AI topic, that is going into sixth gear.

It is going so fast. And I'm very happy that the Dataverse environment and a co-pilot studio is so close to Dataverse because we're front and center. We're maybe we already are, or maybe we're still becoming a frontier organization, meaning that we adopt these new technologies as they come out, and we train our consultants on it. And having co-pilot studio and an MCP server on Dataverse, it was a dream working with ModelDriven Power Apps before, but now the sky's the limit.

[LAUGHTER] Absolutely. Yeah, that's really great. I think, yeah, that's - I think for me at the start, it's worth all a little bit. Yeah, I think, OK, all of these co-pilot doesn't work.

I don't like it, but now they have - I think they have got to turn Microsoft. So now I use it. And I think it's also interesting what they do with this code apps, and so on. And that comes a lot of interesting stuff.

Yeah, it is a catch-up world, right? One organization might invent an LLM, and Microsoft and it's about that. Then there is a time where it needs to catch up to the organization. And now we have co-pilot, and we have co-work.

And since co-work was activated on my machine, I was like a kid in a candy store again. Things that that thing can do. And I'm only hearing this from the developers on our side that Claude is doing an excellent job for them, and they don't use co-work. But yeah, it's brilliant.

It just makes so much sense to use the AI in your day to day job nowadays. Yeah. I think what I'm really interesting, also, is this topic project portfolios. Can you a little bit, how did you work with this, or your tool?

Now, I'm really interested in it, and it's topic. Yeah, so in the scenario that you have your project, as a project manager, you might have five projects. Or you're a project manager, and you got some promotion, and now all of a sudden you're a portfolio manager, or a project manager, let's start with a program manager. You're running this huge project.

Let's take a building a nuclear power plant as an example. That is no longer a house. That doesn't start out as a tent. No, a nuclear power plant is this massive engagement.

So if you are in an organization that builds these things, then I can imagine that building that is a program. It might even be a portfolio, but let's go for program for now. Because there will be a department that is dedicated for the nuclear isotopes and a separate department that runs the project of the cooling engine, and a third project that runs the actual outer shell. So these are minor projects within that program that you run.

So that's its own layer. It has different ownership. You have different risks that go across those different projects. And that layer didn't exist previously with Microsoft Project or Project Server.

You needed to create your own tech that this is a program, not a project. But within our tool, we have the program layer. And you can have its dedicated budget, its dedicated risks, dedicated stakeholders, its own SharePoint folder structure, for instance. And then there's a layer on top.

That is the portfolio layer. And this differs per organization, but you could see a portfolio as a transform portfolio. Every project that delivers something completely new is in the transform portfolio. It has a project, right?

An organization needs to align 20% of its budget to evolve, evolve or die. So having that portfolio and someone that guards that money makes perfect sense. Then you also have these scenarios where a portfolio is tied into a technology. We surface a lot of sustainable energy companies.

And typically, these portfolios are aligned with the technologies of sustainable energy, like nuclear, like wind, like solar, like hydrogen, well, hydrogen, and nuclear. So you have these different technologies that could be a portfolio. Or you have different departments that are a portfolio. But typically, you have these different layers.

And with these different layers, you need to have an organizational structure that supports that. And that's where the project management office, typically something that lives within a department and communicates with the project managers in that department, also has its enterprise counterpart. So you have your enterprise portfolio management office. And that is the group that we love to talk to.

They have a bird's eye view of everything that happens in the organization, project-wise. And you can just talk with these people on what information does need to trickle up to the portfolio, what kind of parabia reports do you want? Do you need trend analysis on how risks evolve, things like that? So the portfolio layer is its own entity, its own table.

It might have similar fields and columns like the project. But it also has its own. We can cut the example. Yeah.

The value thing is because you say this was the nuclear stuff. I have Niluva Doga on the last podcast. And she works at the International Atomic. OK.

Yeah. So it's a good - Nice trend. Yeah. So I think a little bit about the future of PMOs in the AI area.

How did you see AI is changing project management? All my blog, I jumped on board like so many others with regards to chat GPT and what was it going to do for us. I started that conversation with the term, it's the ideal drafting engine. It can create beautiful things, but you should be the end person that evaluates something.

Before the large language models, I've had an interest in AI. And every time I read about it, it talked about there's not enough test material for project management to be fully adopted within AI. And what we mean with that is let's say we want to create an agent that is the ideal project manager in your organization. First off, human backfire, because people don't want to have AI as being their boss.

But then every project is its own universe. It has its budget, it has its risks, it has its team. And that is unique, because it's unique in the time and in the end goal that you have. A project is a unique endeavor in time budget and with a fixed end date as well.

You might not reach that end date, but yeah, that's where deadlines are for. What I've seen happening is the AI is getting better and better and better and better in facilitating the project manager, building a product brief, a PID document. Brilliant. If you are a good project manager, you can instruct that agent to build a very nice template sensitive document.

But your project is unique. It has never happened before, because time and budget and resources, all these things change. So you as the project manager are end responsible. So it is also very good at reading through all the lessons learned.

And this is a part of project management that isn't mature, or is on its way of maturing. And that is lessons learned documentation. It is a we have to do it component within project management. You finish your project.

You need to write that document what you learned previously that will be printed out, shoved into a box and forgot. Theory tells us that we need to learn from the document, and we need to implement that in our projects afterwards. With AI, we finally can do that, because AI is tireless. And it can read through all those documents and facilitate the project manager for building that new nuclear power plant.

Come back to that power plant. Let's say we built 10 of those during the lifecycle of our project. We have learned things. We can do this better, faster, with higher quality.

Next time, if only we learned, AI is our catalyst for that. We will be able to instruct. And we're working on that at ProjectMXBM, where if a project manager goes for a new project, then there is this subsection of information that comes from lessons learned. I am a project manager.

I'm sitting behind my desk, or I'm talking to my phone, because I have an agent. And I'm saying, I want to build a new nuclear power plant in Chironingen, the Netherlands, where I live. It would be opposed to that, but yes. Building a nuclear power plant in Chironingen.

And it looks through all those 10 power plants that we did previously. And it will surface all the risks that are associated with it. Project manager, you're the expert. But I have surfaced these items.

And 9 out of 10, you will have forgotten one of those lessons. Or you would have not done this the right way. It's a massive time safe. It's a massive risk safe.

I think AI will tend full the capabilities of the project manager, but it will never replace it. Yeah, I'm not a good project manager. I'm a lazy project manager. So I do the change log with AI, and then I send it all automatically to the stakeholders.

Yeah, exactly. And there's a book, by the way, that's called the lazy project manager. Oh, OK. It sounds something I have to read.

Yeah, it's a brilliant read. It's written like you can be lazy, but it's actually a good roadmap on how to be good at project manager. There's some things that you should do, and some things that you actually should not do. In my blog, I've told multiple times about, don't be a micro manager.

Be a project manager, right? There's a huge difference. And you're working with experts. Let them be the experts and let them report back to you.

Yeah. So also, say, your blog, all the stuff from you, the people find on the show notes. So let's say this, so a little bit marketing. Yeah.

So you feel back in your study time. Is there also, I think, or can we say, AI become a project assistant instead of a project manager? Or - I would love that. We've talked about the project management office.

And one of the most popular recent videos that I did was creating a skill for co-work. And that skill is tied in becoming the best project manager officer. And that is actually the assistant of the project management office, right? It knows about project theory.

It knows about research management. It knows about the broader theory. But then again, you didn't bring in your own documentation, so it's very global. And the moment that an organization has a good feel on their own processes, their own way of work, I think AI can be the perfect assistant.

I'm saying that lightly, but yes, the perfect assistant. And everyone could have an assistant. But still, what do you do then in your free time? What do you do in the time that you didn't have before?

Because you were still writing that document that AI finished in 30 seconds. There's a huge gain to be had in quality improvement. Let's say previously I will be working as a project manager. I will be working maybe 24 hours to write a status report.

With our system, it's a press of the button. It picks up the template. It fills the information that is all updated through the system, and it sends that out to the manager. As a project manager, that shouldn't be your main focus, right?

As a project manager, your first priority is your team. And of course, the end goal of your project. But your team is the most important. And you need to be a facilitator for them.

Yeah. And that's really interesting. We have - we can win a lot of time with AI. So what showed project manager PIMOs learn for staying relevant in times - the AI world AI times.

Yeah. I think not everyone will be interested in AI as we are, as consultants, as solo primers. We need to know the nuts and bolts of that AI. We need to know how it takes.

And I think five years from now, AI is a given. Everyone will be working with AI in one shape of form. This is the first technology that I saw my parents adopt sooner than I did. Can you imagine?

My parents are in their 70s. And they adopted this. And they learned about it. And of course, I work with a daily.

So I have an upside because they are retired. So I'm still ahead of the girth. But five years from now, it's a given that you work with AI. And how you work with AI is either you're interested in improving the AI or you're utilizing AI to its fullest, meaning that either you help shape the future version of it or you work with it and you are a lot more proficient because of it.

It's almost like having a second Eric or a second Mirko sitting beside you. And yeah, you become the manager of you. My date of the twin. The digital twin.

Yeah, now I'm a Gemini. So I can relate to that. So yes, the digital twin. We already have Azure with the twin world, right?

So AI could be your digital twin. And I hope it doesn't go the way of sky net and determinator and future versions of that dark mirror, black mirror, sorry. But in some form, people will lose their job, go for something else. But I think the general wealth of knowledge in the organizations and with people internally will skyrocket.

Before we jump in the quick fire round, one last question. Where did you see the role of governance in project management, especially the Microsoft ecosystem? Is there anything you say that's really important? It is probably one of the more important things that we need to take account of.

Because previously you might have been able to say, OK, a project manager can see all projects, including its finances. And you would trust that the project manager wouldn't because they didn't have the time to look at other people's projects. They didn't care. But with the scenario of AI and work IQ so that integrated net that AI can do everything that you can, now all of the certain security and governance becomes very important.

You have to scenario that if I have that scenario of opening up all the projects, all of the projects have higher budget than I do. What should I do? Which managers should I tickle and find that extra budget for it? So AI and governance is one of the key pillars of making this a success.

Please, as an organization, make sure that you have a clear understanding of where permission is given. And start from a no permission mindset, zero permission mindset, right? The AI should have a zero permission access from day one and build from that. Because if you give it too much information, too much power, you can end up with a scenario where your complete database is removed, right?

You've probably seen that use case that someone had a clawed agent to delete the whole organization. So that is the power of AI. And it can be used in that sense in a bad way, absolutely. And yeah, let's jump in the quick fire route.

So you also have a podcast who will your dream guest? So my podcast is called The Voices of the Neighborhood. And it's having a next episode today as well, because I'm jumping on the next guest right after this. The Voices of the Neighborhood is a group of Microsoft MVPs from the Digital Neighborhood.

The Digital Neighborhood is the umbrella organization of context and and as such, we have roughly 16, maybe 20 MVPs. And it was my goal to elevate the availability of these MVPs. So my dream goal is not a specific person, but at least having all of these people on my podcast for once, at least. I'm in season two right now, so I did a full year of MVPs last year, and I'm on a halfway through this year.

I think the podcast will evolve, where it's not just the Digital Neighborhood MVPs. But I would love to turn the tables. You would be an excellent guest. Yeah, I'm open for everything in the future.

I don't have a dream candidate so far, Peter Kessinels, my own founding partner of Projectum. He was a really successful episode. He had a really successful episode. So I would love to add them back and I'm sure that that will happen.

And the Planner or Project depends on the goal. As we've made it, Planner is lightweight and Project is enterprise. My life revolves about the enterprise. So I would say Project.

When you get all money, time, resources from Microsoft, which Planner feature will you develop? Enterprise custom fields. Enterprise custom fields is something that has been there for Projects Server and Project Online. And it is, I believe, the key catalyst of making it an enterprise solution.

So far, you have your projects and they live in their own bubble. And if you can have a layer on top that says, okay, region as a field. The region of the company is always the same. So why not have that as a field on top of that project for all projects so that we can have that enterprise reporting?

Enterprise resource, enterprise custom fields is something that we're missing. And if I had all the power in time and money to push that through Microsoft's throat, I would do that. Yes. Bit of ball or a...

The candle. Bit of ball if he can tell. I would say bit of ball. And the reason behind that is because my wife is a celiac.

So that means that she cannot ingest any gluten. And since then, you have had hardly any gluten stuff in the house. And a bit of ball is made with gluten and the freaking bell is without. So having something of the forbidden fruit would be nice.

Yes. What did you think is the most underrated Microsoft app? Most... Oh, loop.

Definitely loop. Loop is a little bit of a hobby and a pet project for me. Where Power BI has taken storm and was my previous hobby project. Loop is something that is coming for everyone.

Where I'm a huge no-poker. I have books where I scribble everything down. I have one note. And ever since loop, I haven't touched one note anymore.

And that's a big thing saying from my point. Yeah. I think it's also become so famous with AI actually. Yeah, it's piggyback riding on that for sure.

Absolutely. Yeah. What did you think is project management in five years? I think there's this famous saying of 80% of projects fail.

You can just google it. How many projects percentage wise fail? And it will be somewhere around 50 and 80%. Those numbers are not the big deal.

I think that number will go down substantially. Because we have more time to increase the quality of projects thanks to AI. And is there any hobby people may not know about you? Any hobby.

I'm a big fan of reading even though I'm dyslexic. So I read very slowly and Spotify now has audiobooks and that's a blessing. I read a whole ton more than I used to and would have ever been able to do. So yeah.

I'm a big audiobook fan. Yeah. Imagine someone is leading a PMO today and wants to modernize isishing Microsoft technology. What is the one piece of wise you will leave him with?

Involve a Microsoft partner fast early in the solution development. Make sure that you have outside eyes looking at your project management methodology. Because typically what we see and something that I tell customers early on is you know your processes better than anyone in the world. We and then Pat on the shoulder again, no project management.

And our software. Right? So it involved partners early on. They've been around for 25 years plus 17 years in my case.

We've seen things that you haven't seen and haven't thought of before that will change the outcome of your application to the better. Yeah. And thank you so much Eric to join me today. It was a really interesting travel through the Microsoft planner and all power ads power to make power be eye and the board Microsoft system.

And yeah, I think we also have sometimes to do a real live stream with video to see the solution you build with your team. And yeah, that's, I'm really interested in and yeah, I hope we see us again. And yeah, thank you so much for staying here. Thank you, Mirko.

It was a blast. I thought it was very nice being on the show and I would welcome being back another time.