Reporting Trends Over Time - Project Online

Question

Hi All

We currently run a PowerShell script in our POL environment each month to track changes in items contained within a PDP e.g. Overall Project Status, month-on-month.

More recently, a requirement has arisen to report change in risk status over time. We capture risks in SharePoint lists on the Project Site. My current understanding is that it is not possible to use PowerShell to iterate through every project risk on every project site (>150 projects, >200 risks at the moment). And even if it was, this would generate a great deal of data each month. 

Does anyone have, or has come across a creative solution for capturing risk status month-on-month? I'd prefer to do so at an individual risk level though would consider capturing "overall risk" on the project which could be calculated from summing and dividing all the numeric risk scores on the Project.

Note: I'd rather not introduce an "Overall Risk" field in the PDP which I could do, but would lose the objectivity currently provided by using numeric values across multiple risks to calculate an average. If we did this, I suspect it would introduce a tendency for risk level to be under-reported.

Cheers
Faye

Answer 1

Hi Faye,

With your current process to capture Project level PDP details each month using PowerShell, why can't you do the same for list items on the project site? When you say it's not possible, how come? Yes it will generate more data but there isn't anyway around that if you want to snapshot the risks each month. Where are you storing this monthly data?

Paul

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Paul Mather | Twitter | http://pwmather.wordpress.com | CPS | MVP | Downloads

Answer 2

Hi Paul

We store the output of the current PowerShell script as a List in Site Contents.

OK, I wasn't sure if there was a way to get the script to iterate through each subsite, and the values I want to snapshot are also calculated columns - does that make a difference?

Thanks for your help
Faye

Answer 3

Hi Faye,

Here is an example PowerShell script to access all Project Sites: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2016/07/08/access-projectonline-project-sites-using-powershell-and-sharepoint-csom-office365/ 

It wont do what you need as is but should help get you started.

Paul

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Paul Mather | Twitter | http://pwmather.wordpress.com | CPS | MVP | Downloads