Dynamics 365 Wave 2 2023: highlights for Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Microsoft’s plans for its second release wave 2023 are here, delivering brand new features and updates to Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry, and providing customers with a regular and predictable schedule for receiving new functionalities, improvements, and fixes.

Release Wave 2 2023 will be available from October this year. For this article, we have picked out some highlights for Dynamics 365 Project Operations!

Resources

There are several ways for you to navigate through all the latest features and updates:

• Overview site: From here, you can click from subpage to subpage in your browser and delve into all new features for Dynamics 365.
• Release planner: The interactive portal offers individual filter options for browsing all new features for Dynamics 365 Project Operations.
• PDF file: A comprehensive PDF detailing all the new features for Dynamics 365.

Meanwhile, check out the resources for Release Wave 1 2023, which has been out since April 2023, and spans until September 2023!

Highlights: Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Bulk resource reconciliation

Resource managers and project managers in particular will benefit from being able to make bulk asynchronous updates to bookings and requirements. This feature improves resource management processes by saving time to ensure accurate capacity alignment.

Planned preview: October 2023
Planned availability: March 2024

Bulk approvals improvements

This feature will reduce execution times for bulk approvals, adding meaningful performance improvements to modern approvals. It will, for example, speed up bulk approvals like end-of-the-month time entries for multiple employees.

Planned preview: January 2024
Planned availability: March 2024

Project budget based on estimations

This feature allows creating a project budget from estimates by importing the estimates into budget lines. Summarization during import enables a recap of the estimate lines and makes tracking actuals against the budget lines easier to manage.

Planned preview: March 2024

Recommendations on best resources for your project

The role of project manager is much easier if they can understand the status and challenges of a project at a specific time and get recommendations for the best matches for tasks. This feature relies on AI for analyzing availability, experience, utilization, skills, and costs of employees and subcontractors in your organization!

Planned availability: March 2024

Increase WBS limits

Good news for companies that run large complex projects across various industry verticals! The task limit for one project will be increased and includes an extension of the total number of resource assignments and dependencies between project tasks.

Planned availability: March 2024

Progress-based billing on fixed-price contracts

Project managers will be able to split the value of a contract into a distinct schedule of values that are invoiced based on the progress of the work, rather than billing the entire milestone at once.

Planned availability: March 2024

Sales and cost budget tracking

With this feature, project managers can perform revenue analysis for their projects, and revise the project sales budget when encountering new scopes or changes in reality, enabling ongoing tracking of billed sales against the updated budget.

Planned preview: March 2024

Update tasks as complete

A well-known feature from Project for the Web will finally become part of Dynamics 365 Project Operations, too! This feature provides a very efficient and simple way to mark 100 % task completion without switching interfaces, no longer creating unneeded friction for projects managers setting the status for their tasks!

Planned availability: March 2024

If you’d like to learn more about Dynamics 365 in general, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, or have any questions about current and upcoming functionalities, please contact our expert team at proMX!