Video – Power Apps Project Reporting Dashboards

Introduction

Microsoft Power Apps is a low-code platform that allows users to create custom business applications without writing code.

It is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which also includes Power BI and Power Automate.

With Microsoft Power Apps, you can create custom apps for a variety of purposes, including project management, inventory tracking, and customer relationship management (CRM).

BrightWork 365 is a project and portfolio management solution for Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform.

It provides project management templates, dashboards, reports, and collaborative features to enable project teams to increase their project success rates.

BrightWork 365 is deployed in your Microsoft 365 cloud environment, so you can centralize project processes and information in one hub, working across Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Apps (Word, Excel, and OneNote), Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, and SharePoint Online.

5 Power Apps Dashboards for Project Reporting

This article will cover 5 ways you can use Power Apps dashboards to streamline reporting for project processes, including:

1. Project requests app dashboard
2. Projects app dashboard
3. Issues app dashboard
4. Risks app dashboard
5. Costs and Budgets app dashboard

Each type has distinct advantages as you’ll see from the rest of this article or in the video above.

1. Project Request App Dashboards

Starting from the home page in the BrightWork 365 app, you’ll notice that in the left navigation there are four main sections:

1. Home
2. Requests
3. Projects
4. Portfolios

In the Home section, just click on Dashboards, which defaults to a series of Power Apps dashboards.

You can see here that Requests app dashboard comes into view by default.

There are six dashboards on this page, and by default they’re scoped to the All Requests view.

If you select any of those drop-down menus, there are several other views available, including Open requests, Approved requests, etc.

Now to put that in the context of the BrightWork 365 app itself.

If you click Requests on the main menu, then you’ll see all of the current Open Requests logged in the system.

And if you click on the drop-down menu, you’ll see that all of those views are also available in the Requests area.

Another handy item we have in that view as well is that you can see the charts.

These are effectively the same charts that are in the Power Apps dashboard area, and you’ll see how that links up here in just a moment.

Back in the Power Apps dashboards, let’s take look at an example of Requests by Request Status, the first visualization here.

You can expand the visualization with the pop out icon in the right-hand corner to expand the chart into a lightbox view.

From here, you might want to get additional detail.

For example, you might want to find out who sponsored these requests for which a project has been created.

So you’ll drill into the Project Created bar, and then look up the Project sponsor.

You can see now that Jonathan, Anne, Christine, and Alan all have some projects that have been created from requests.

So those are my folks who are sponsoring some of these some of these requests that have actually been created into projects.

2. Project App Dashboards

Now I’m going to look at the Project app dashboards.

The Project dashboards contain many of the same indicators that requests contain, but also many more, because effectively a request what feeds into a project.

So the Projects app dashboard here actually has thirteen separate visualizations.

For this example, we’ll expand Projects by Health.

And you can see that we have four projects currently that are in the Red.

Let’s drill into the Red health projects.

You may want to see who the Project Managers are on these projects in danger.

Now we can see that Eamonn, Anne, Alex, and Christine each have, projects that are in a critical state.

The next logical step is to understand which projects are in the red.

You can just click on this list icon in the top right corner, which will bring you into a view of these four project back in the main BrightWork 365 app.

You can see we’re in the All Projects view, but it has been filtered on just those four projects in danger.

If you want to see what Anne with this red project, just click on the project itself here to view that specific project app and drill into the details of that project.

3. Issues App Dashboard

Now we’ll take a look at the Issues app dashboard.

In this example, we’ll take a look at the By Assigned To to chart, because there is a project that has an issue that’s not assigned.

In this case, looks like we have seven, so you’ll want to drill down on the on the Project name so you can see which projects have an issue that is unassigned.

We can see the six projects that have unassigned issues.

By clicking the View Records icon, you could jump to the project list in BrightWork 365 and navigate to the project app and make the appropriate edits to assign that issue if needed.

4. Risk App Dashboards

The Risks app dashboard is very similar to Issues.

When you are in here, you’ll probably end up using these charts in much the same way to drill into the data and extract the details.

For the purposes of this example, we’re going to focus on Risks by Escalation and Risks by Exposure charts.

Let’s start with By Escalation.

Risks by Escalation might not make immediate sense to some folks.

Really, what we’re talking about here is which level within the project hierarchy does the risk affect?

So, for example, let’s say you’re a general contractor.

If you have specialty contractors working on a specific project, and that contractor is having difficulty hiring an electrician to come in and finish the job, then that risk escalation would be at the project level.

Now if you had multiple construction projects, in a program or in a portfolio, for example the electrician’s union is threatening to go on strike, then there’s a risk at the program or portfolio level.

You can see that in in in our demo, we have sixteen risks that are escalated to the project level and one that is escalated to the portfolio level at this time.

There are no program or portfolio level risks, but certainly that’s something that a PMO might encounter,

Risk by Exposure is something most Project Managers are fairly familiar with.

All we’ve done is given exposure as the name to calculation of risk probability, multiplied by risk impact.

If each of those is ranked on a High/Medium/Low scale, a three-value scale for a total of nine.

Possible values in the range is basically two for the lowest risk exposure to a nine for the highest risk exposure.

And so, you can see we fortunately have a couple low risk, but we have a couple that are in that middle exposure range as well.

5. Costs and Budgets App Dashboard

All project stakeholders recognize the importance of project budgets, so we have also included dashboards to help ensure projects are coming in at or under budget.

You can track project costs and even do some cost forecasting.

We’ve scoped three different sets of dashboards – one scoped to the project level, one to the program level, and another to the portfolio level.

We’ll start with the Project-level dashboards, where you can see six visualizations here in this dashboard.

The top three are different views of the approved budget, and the bottom three are cost forecast views.

These charts are all familiar again, with the ability to expand and drill into them to extract some details.

As an example, you may want to see how a specific project manager’s budget is allocated.

You expand the Approved Budget by Project Manager view into the pop out here.

Then you may want to bring Project Manager into focus, so let’s take a look at Alex’s projects.

This will pull up the chart showing where the budget is allocated across Alex’s projects.

The program and portfolio dashboards are very similar, all we’re doing is rolling these up to the program or portfolio level.