Key updates in the Dynamics 365 Project Operations 2023 release wave 1

The 2023 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Project Operations has been announced and new features and enhancements will be released from April 2023 to September 2023. In this release wave, Microsoft continues to invest in capabilities to empower project managers and project teams with new features and usability enhancements. In this post, we will highlight a few important updates and enhancements users can expect during this release wave.

In September 2023, a new feature for project budget management and time-phased forecasting will be released to give users better control over the status of spend and work progress. Additionally, this new feature will help project managers forecast trends for the future duration of the project. A project budget is a versioned snapshot of the financial estimation of time, expenses, and materials required on the project. Project managers will be able to create snapshots at different periods during the project lifecycle to get a clear view of how they are tracking to their spending and progress targets. This provides the ability to add forecasts based on current spending trends and follows these within a desired granularity of periods configured using project calendars and working days.

In the 2023 release wave 1 of Project Operations, new features will be added to configure and use advanced cost and revenue deferrals for production or stocked scenarios of Project Operations. This enables organizations to support their business model to sell project-based work and subscription-based services in a consolidated contractual agreement.

This feature will include the following capabilities:

• Configuring cost and revenue deferrals for different project transaction types
• Recording deferred cost and revenue to the project subledger
• Adjusting project transactions with cost and revenue deferrals

Project-based companies often create an invoice for a large team that is working on a project that has a recurring lifespan. The invoicing period can involve thousands of transactions across time, expense, and material usage activity for projects that will need to be reviewed and confirmed. In the 2023 release wave 1, Microsoft implements enhancements to the project invoicing process.

Key enhancements to the usability and performance of project invoicing include:

• Usability investments to ensure project managers can review billing backlog for the next invoice cycle, make edits to billable hours, add transactions to the invoice when reviewing, and easily evaluate the impact of any of these changes on the amount to be invoiced
• Enhancements to the creation of proforma invoice entry points with improvements to the control and selection of which transactions in the billing backlog should be included on an invoice
• xMultiple paradigms and parallelize CRUD options in the invoicing context to improve the scale and throughput of invoicing operations

In the 2023 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Microsoft will implement usability and performance improves on Quotes and Contracts to empower salespeople working on project proposals to easily create quotes with detailed estimates and accurate pricing information. Usability enhancements make it easier to change prices, hours, and resourcing mixes and to understand the impact of these changes.

With these enhancements and usability improvements, users will be able to:

• Visualize key metrics like profitability and comparison to customer expectations
• Update prices for specific roles and categories on a quote line
• Change values and visualize the impact on key metrics

Rand Group is your Dynamics 365 Project Operations support partner to help you to start utilizing this new wave of features. Our experts are knowledgeable on the latest updates to Project Operations and ready to answer any questions. If you have any questions about these new features, contact our team today.