Assuming we're live. Welcome, everyone. We're glad you're here. We're gonna give it just about another minute as others are joining. Great to see a diverse audience in the chat. Quite. Coming a lot of time's end. Thanks everyone for getting out of bed early or staying out of bed or just making time in your workday. Alright. It's just a couple of minutes past the hour, so I will go ahead and kick this off. Hello, everyone. Again, welcome to today's webinar, transforming project management, Microsoft's Evolution and Future Vision, presented by Innovative-e and CPS. My name is Stephanie Taylor, and I'm your moderator for today. We're excited to be joined by our partners at CPS, a two-time Microsoft Partner of the Year winner for project and portfolio management, and a two-time finalist, including last year. A Microsoft solutions partner with over thirty years' expert expertise, CPS specializes in helping organizations transform the digital workplace. With deep capabilities across modern work, business applications, and security, and a strong focus on adoption and sustainable value, CPS brings a people first approach to envisioning, implementing, and supporting Microsoft powered solutions. Innovative e is a seven-time Microsoft award winner and 2023 and 2024 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Project and Portfolio Management. We partner with organizations to modernize the entire project and work management ecosystem through a platform first approach. With deep expertise in AI and Copilot, we deliver sustainable solutions that give your business the agility it needs to thrive and help you become a higher performing organization with happier people. Your speakers today are from Innovative-e, Mike Taylor, and from CPS, Lester Lovelock. Mike is the founder and CEO of Innovative-e. He began his career writing PPM software for NASA and is recognized visionary in project and work management with deep experience as a PPM practitioner, industry thought leader, published author, and process and applications innovator. In 2023, Mike wrote The AI Project Work Management Revolution is Practical Strategies for Seizing This Moment to Become a Higher Performing Organization with Happier People. It's available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook format. And as a special thank you, today's webinar attendees will receive a free digital copy. We'll have details at the end of our presentation. Lester Lovelock is a head of practice for project and portfolio management at CPS. With over twenty years at the company, Lester brings deep hands-on expertise across the full spectrum of PPM, from on prem to cloud, integration to optimization, known for his practical insight and commitment to real world outcomes, Lester leads CPS's efforts to help organizations reimagine project delivery in the modern workplace. He's based in the UK just outside of London. Before we dive in, let's cover a few housekeeping items. Today's webinar is being recorded. A link to the recording along with the slide deck will be sent to you via email within the next few days. Feel free to review the content at your convenience or share it with colleagues who cannot attend today. Please use the Q&A feature on the right-side panel of this platform to ask questions. We will address as many questions as possible as time permits. If you encounter any technical issues, such as audio or video problems, please use the chat function to notify us and we will do our best to assist you promptly. With those housekeeping items out of the way, let's get started. I'm pleased to hand the floor over to Mike and Lester. The virtual stage is yours. Thank you, Stephanie. And thanks everybody for being here. We're super excited about this topic today. And, Lester, thank you so much for the collaboration over the last several months on the white paper and on, on getting prepared for this. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. Yeah. Absolutely. Looking forward to it, Mike. Yeah. Absolutely. So, what we're gonna cover today is understanding Microsoft's evolution and future vision. I know there's a lot of, there's a lot of questions about kind of where things have been and where they're going, in this in, you know, in 2025. The products have been around a long time. So, we'll cover that, and we'll also cover a lot about kind of, what are what do we see happening and, in terms of the collaboration products, AI products, the modern platform. And then, we'll also cover there's a lot of questions these days about what's going on with Project Online and what might be the next best thing to do in terms of transformation there. Then we'll also just quickly cover on some customer journeys. As Steph said, this is the first in a three-part series. When we first started talking about this, Lester and I, we realized pretty quickly we couldn't cover all the content in one, so we decided to do three. So please, if you haven't yet and you haven't seen this, then sign up for the other two that'll be in July 23rd and August 13th. And, we'll be covering how and when to move from legacy platforms and, and then how to modernize and finding your strategic window, which, there'll be some insights there. We work with a lot of customers - Lester's team and our team here, hundreds of customers we work with on PPM and work management solutions. And, one of the challenges customers have is, you know, how do you how do you convince management now is a good time to do this. How do you get the funding to go do it and make the transformation that's available? So, you know, and take advantage of the platform and, really start moving into the future of project management. Grounding for this, series, I mentioned, we produced a, we co-produced a whitepaper. We started this work, last year. It was back in the, winter of last year. Right? Then we thought we'd have it out by the end of the year. It turns out, I think we released it in, what, May or something like that. Took a while. It was it was a, it was a lot to chew on. Yeah. I completely agree. It was a, it's a broad topic, and, I think the whitepaper incredibly, gives a lot of evidence and, and factual information about, you know, how to maximize the opportunity. So. Yeah. Yep. And I think the reason we did this, right, Lester, is we, you know, we came to, had a meeting of the minds that, you know, we've talked to probably hundreds or thousands of organizations and found that there's a lot of need for information. There's, because there is so many different versions of the of the Microsoft products that are out there from the traditional Microsoft Project to, and we'll cover that more detail in a few minutes, to the new Planner, Planner with premium features. There's Power Apps, there's Copilot, there's all these different things that are out there. So, it really needs some clarification of what's available. And that's really what we'll start to cover today is, it's what's kind of there and where we've been and how we've gotten to where we are and start previewing what's a good next step to really look to going forward. We were, did have the honor of having the Planner, the Microsoft Planner team, review this whitepaper as well. So, we wanted to make sure it was, you know, accurate and reliable with what they were seeing for the future as well. One of the things that's interesting, and I'll only read a little bit of this, the opening of the whitepaper states that successful project work management is essential to thriving organizations. Yet traditional siloed project management tools have become obstacles rather than enablers. And I think we're seeing that a lot. Right, Lester? That there's this proliferation of tools and technologies, and that's what it's all about today as well. It's not just talking about if you have something like Project Online, how do you move forward? But there's also this whole proliferation of data and tools, and it's creating a, as much chaos as it is solving problems wouldn’t you say? Yeah. Absolutely. It feels like every, every week, there's a new procurement to look at a very specific niche problem rather than exploiting the tools and the capabilities that you may not even know you have in your organization. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And with that, we said we're gonna be interactive with this. So, we have several polls. We want you guys to stay interactive. Give us feedback that'll help guide the conversation and then, also, as Steph said earlier, please feel free to put your questions in the QA. We'll cover that as we can, and we definitely hope to have some time at the end. And if we don't get to things, we will, you know, we'll follow-up with you guys, afterwards. So, with that, I think, Lester, you wanna take us through the first question—next few slides? Yeah. For sure. So first of all, welcome everyone again. We're really interested in your feedback, and we're really interested in understanding a little bit about what you're hoping to get out of it, not just this webinar, but the whole series of webinars that we're looking to run. So, with that in mind, let us know. There's a poll up now that should be live. You should see it on your screen. We're interested to hear what you're hoping to get out of this webinar. If, if none of the options apply, there's a something else option. Post it in chat. We would like to, to hear what's going on in your brains. Yeah. And looking at the results, they're starting to roll in. A lot of people participating. That's awesome. Looks like both is in the lead. There's a finding opportunities is, you know, about thirteen percent and understanding the future of Project Online is about twenty-two percent now, but both is, way out in front with about, about sixty something percent. And then something else, yeah, somebody's saying, what kind of guidance or toolings would you make more confident moving forward? We'll actually cover that. So, thank you for putting that in. It's really good. It feels like we might pitch this just about right, Mike, since the, the something else is so far behind. Yeah. It is, it is quite telling though that, understanding the future of Project Online is so far, you know, our second option because sometimes the messaging isn't clear, and sometimes it is a bit hard to find out what's going on and how so, hopefully, we'll, we'll do our best to illuminate you where we can. Absolutely. Looks like it's slowing down, so we probably wanna go ahead and close the poll here. Keep moving forward. But, yeah, about sixty five percent were both. So, like you said, Lester, I think we're, everybody will be pleased. We'll be covering those topics in this and the next ones as well. Alright. Looks like we're back to the back to the deck, so let's move forward. So, we're interested also in, letting you know why we think this matters. And, here's our take on it. So, there are multiple tools out there. Right? It may not just be Project Online that you're here to talk about. It may be some of the other proliferation of tools that have existed in your organization, whether it's, you know, some of the SaaS, options like a Monday or an Asana or a Jira, or it's more legacy stuff like your Project Online or your Project Server in some cases. Be surprised how many of our customers are still clinging on to bits of tin in a basement somewhere and hoping it'll continue limping along. So, you know, everyone's thinking about multiple tools. So, really, the purpose of today is about understanding, you know, what is the, what is the future, what options are available to you, and, where do you go from here? Are there opportunities to exploit that maybe you haven't thought about? That that's what Mike and I are here for is to kind of highlight, where your magic moment is. Really, this is a space where everyone can share stories and opinions, and we're here from a presentation side of things to share our war wounds, to share our hard-earned scars and battle stories. And I'm sure if you find us over a beer somewhere, Mike and I would wax lyrical about this for one—Couple of pints maybe. Just a couple of pints. Yeah. So, it'd be interesting to, you know, get you guys talking to each other as well in the chat and sharing your histories and your stories. We'd, we'd love to see that as well. It's also to try and explore and get across a little bit about what the future of the Microsoft PPM stack looks like. Again, like I said earlier and, you know, the results from the poll ring through, it's a bit of a muddy future. The communication hasn't been massively clear, and we're here to enlighten you a little bit, from the partner track. You know, we have some of the inside conversations, and we talk directly to the product team and to the product marketing team. So, we'll share what we can, in that space. And then finally, we'd like to communicate as much as we can or as best as we can what a real transition looks like for you. Clearly, every organization is gonna be slightly different, and, you know, we can't tailor this material to everyone's specific needs. But we'll talk about some of the more common practices, the more common approaches, and we'll talk about what an opportunity to consolidate under a single cloud might look like as well. Yeah. Just jump in real there's a few questions in. We won't cover them all, but, somebody posted that, their Lotus 123 is not gonna be sufficient. So, I love the humor. Thank you for that on this Wednesday. Yeah. And then there's a couple of questions about the timeline for deprecation. We'll talk a little bit about that. We don't have any information that hasn't already been shared publicly, but we can talk a little more detail around maybe, so the nuance around that. And then, there's also a question about the best, future proof alternative. And I think that's what this whole series is about. It's really more of a platform approach, which takes a little bit of time to get your head around, rather than a pure SaaS to SaaS type migration. So, we will definitely be covering that in more detail. Great. Thanks, Mike. Let's move on, shall we? Yep. And we told everybody there'd be more polls. Right? Spoiler alert. Here's the next one. So, we're interested to understand a little bit more about the source of tools that you're using today. What, what does your organization shape look like? So, which of these options apply to your team or organization? Poll should be live now. Let’s see what you're all doing. It looks like some results are just about to start coming in. Don't be shy. There's a lot to read there. Alright. We're up and running. Okay. This is, this is a, quite interesting, Mike. The, more than one of the above is straight out there in the front, which is pretty much in line with our findings as well. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm a little surprised that wasting time on tedious repetitive tasks is so low compared to everything else. It's pretty balanced among the other three. It's all about twelve percent. Clearly, there's a lot of job satisfaction, in the chat today. People are enjoying their work, and, it doesn't feel tedious or repetitive. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it really is in most cases, like I said, we pretty much know what people are gonna answer to these because we've had so many discussions with folks. But, yeah, usually, it's a combination of these challenges. And it's interesting that it's pretty well spread out except for, again, wasting time on repetitive tasks. Awesome. Alright. Looks like it was slowing down a little bit now. Yeah. We'd probably go ahead and close the poll. Thanks everyone for your input and your feedback there. That was really helpful. And, actually, we'll use some of these stats then to, to have further conversations with our customers and with Microsoft as well. So, all useful info. Yeah. Very much. And it's a good population size. We had well over four hundred sign up for this, so it's a good set of folks. We really appreciate everybody signing up and attending today. Alright. Moving forward then. Still a lot to cover here. So, this is, a lot of folks have, I know Lester, you guys you guys just did a, an in person event recently, and we, you know, we did project, the PMI Symposium back in September, October last year. But one of the things that always happens, and I'm sure this happened to you as well, Lester's people walk up and they have questions about what is, you know, what's going on with the platform or sometimes there's even confusion to ask them, are you using Project and they're, you know, it's like which version of Project? Project desktop, Project server, Project Online, Project for the web, project. You know, so there's, there's a lot of different, you know, Microsoft probably could have done a better job of naming over the years. So, I think there's been a lot of confusion. Right? Absolutely. I think, you know, having multiple solutions and different systems called Project, whether it's Project server, Project Online, Project for the web, now defunct, or Project desktop, you know, it's very confusing. It kinda gets the point of what it's trying to convey, but when you're looking at a market and you're trying to select tooling, it's very hard sometimes to find out what's most appropriate. Yeah. In Project operations, I forgot that one as well. Yeah. Yeah. There are a few others that we don't have listed here. So, there's a whole lot of things that happened with on premise going back to 2000 and even before that, was Microsoft Project for the desktop, which dates back all the way to 1984, I think. So, that's the way back machine there. But you can see that Microsoft has been iterating and investing over the years in different versions of the of the project management platform. And you see all the thing. I'm not gonna read all that out. You guys see it. But, you know, Project Online was introduced in 2013 and still exists today. As Lester mentioned, there are still versions of Project server out there and probably will be for a while for those who are, you know, have their own data centers and, and are managing it that way. And, like CPS, we have customers who are still there. What's interesting here is that, the evolution, I think, really shows the evolving customer needs as well. You start to look at the three bars at the bottom, you know, Project for the web, and which will, is now being renamed into Planner Premium or is being absorbed into that with Power Apps, which is an important point. We'll talk about that. But also, Teams, Copilot and agents, those other bars. I think going all the way back to the early versions of Project server and then Project Online, one of the themes that really resonated with folks was collaboration. I know I was doing project management back in the day with, you know, with some of the first versions of Project server in that 2003-2007 time frame. And one of the things I loved was that as a project manager, I could create my own collaboration space with SharePoint. And collaboration really is a huge component of project management. And I think one of the things, you know, people say all the time if they're Microsoft-centric is Teams is where the work is happening. Whether you're calling it project or work management, you're doing your meetings, you're capturing your meeting notes. Now if you have Copilot with Teams, it's great. Right? I mean, you can automatically AI summarize your meeting notes and everything. So, you know, you're storing your artifacts there. So, a lot of stuff's happening even outside of traditional, like, task management. Right, Lester? So, I think the evolution more into a collaborative kind of component for work management is an important thing to see, with this kind of graphic here. Right? Yeah, definitely. And then I think the other thing that comes into play is you see things like, Planner, I mean, sorry, Power Apps in there, and AI, of course. And what Microsoft has always been, they're very good at doing, you know, the productivity suite and they call it Modern Work. That's where this a lot of this stuff lives is in the Modern Workspace. All of your M365 office apps, everything else kind of live in that space. But they also have always been really good at building platforms for development and for, not just professional developers, but over the last few years, moving more into the low code pro code, you know, easier to do kind of development. And so that individuals, power users, things like that can do more on their own. And even professional developers, I think eighty nine percent of professional developers use, you know, some form of low code solution nowadays because it accelerates the time frame to get things done. And we'll talk more about this, but one of the things that happens in any kind of complex project, whatever the product is, is there's oftentimes a lot of customizations around it. What Microsoft is leaning into is this concept of, you know, collaboration is key between people and now, you know, technology and AI. We'll talk more about that, but also the ability to easily extend and customize because, Lester, you made a great point a few minutes ago, every customer is different in how they how they build and evolve their project management solutions. And the bigger the organization, the more complexity they have, the more of these things they have to do to customize around their project management or business processes. So, Microsoft is trying to make the collaboration easier and trying to make that customization components easier. And I think that's really a big piece of this evolution that you're seeing and why the platform is such an important part of this message that we're kind of taking forward here. For sure. I mean, every organization is, I kind of see them as fingerprints. Right? Your enterprise architecture is completely different to anywhere else you'll work. It's that spicy blend of people and infrastructure and tools that have come together and formed over a number of years. But like you say, Mike, this is why it's really important that Microsoft provide a platform that actually can do away with a lot of that complexity and give you a single place to start looking at expanding and solving those problems, all under a single architecture. Yep. Absolutely. So, this takes us into some insights. I think you guys have, in some recent events, you were working with customers to pull some of these insights out. Right, Lester? Yeah. Absolutely. So we, we ran a few in person events with our customers, not so long ago. So, this is a, apologies, a fairly UK skewed, view of things. I think, however, it rings true, regardless of where you are. We asked them a few a few questions. Really, it was about looking at legacy platforms and, why there might have been hesitation to look at modern platforms like Planner or Project for the Web. And it was interesting, the results that we got back here. So, one of the key things, and we touched on it just a moment ago with enterprise architecture, is about integration with other systems and being able to make sure that you have the ability to do that. If you're just buying a product that is ring fenced and does what it does, it's kind of a blank box approach. Integration is either very hard or very expensive or needs comprehensive middleware, which is, you know, adding to your, to your technical burden again. So, it was interesting in the, the number of poll responses that integration with other systems was, one of the concerns because you've built this legacy platform with all these, bells and whistles and integrations over time, and what do you do with that? How do you move it? Right. Other things that were interesting to us, data migration. So, again, you know, not just system integrations, but the complexity of data that goes into those systems over time. If you look at something like Project Online, it may have, and in multiple cases for us, has come up through a number of years of different versions. Some of our customers in fact, one we've been working with since, Project server 2007, when it was first launched, and they actually came from Project server 2003 before that, and they've just been upgrading the databases through the, through the years, all the way until their first step into cloud when we did a migration of all the legacy data into cloud. So, they've got a huge history of, of everything that they've delivered over time. This was for a large telco, and you can imagine the size and scale and complexity of the projects that they operate. So, actually, migrating data to them is a big concern. They wanna make sure that they can maintain that fidelity if they do want to move across or at least have a strategy that says, how do we look back and how do we make sure that we're still comparing what we did previously with where we want to be? So, there's a huge amount of insight we took from those. And, really, what that's helped us as partners doing, I'm sure, Mike, you'll say the same, is it's helped us kind of shape how we talk to our customers. It's helped us understand what your problems are and where you might want to focus your time and attention. If there's something that's of low value, we won't bother talking about it. We won't bother building it. Whereas if, there are concerns that we need to allay, if that we need to help you in certain areas, that's where we'll focus our time with you. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. I can, I you and I could probably talk about these things for a while? Very interesting stuff, especially the I really think about when you talk about the integration, that being one of the biggest ones, and I know you're gonna talk more about that. We see that all the time. And, you know, you hear people talk about, well, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, you know, go build something, and you find out that, you know, you probably already have built something. Almost every organization, like I said, with any complexity is built some kind of, customization and integration is whether it's a traditional integration where you're, you know, feeding data back and forth or it's really more like a data warehouse where you're pulling things from multiple sources and using that for reporting and visibility for decision making. Those kind of things exist all the time. And, and with the platform and I know you're going to talk on this and stealing your thunder a little bit, is with the modern platform with Microsoft, the integrations are so much easier, so many connectors, so much that you can work with directly in the Dataverse, which is kind of the underlying data structures that are there. Yeah. For sure. It's, it it's interesting when you talk about system integrations, and I won't wax lyrical about this for too much longer, Mike. I promise. I'm conscious of the time. But in some whether it's a system integration that's been built or it's a system integration that operates by people. I'm sure we've moved a little bit further away from the days of Access databases that run business critical systems now, but you still find people owning and operating spreadsheets that push and pull data. All the time. So don't underestimate that as being one of your potential hurdles. You may need to unpick. Right. We also asked, a bunch of other questions, around customizations and integrations, whether they are system built, or they are people operated. And the answer from every single one of our customers who came to our event was one hundred percent yes. Yes. We have integrations. We didn't stand still. We didn't use out of the box. It's a core part of how we operate our platform. We have integrated with other systems. And then, the deep dive on that was what are they then? The majority of people said that they had data warehouses of some sort. Project Online, other systems are great at presenting live data, but how do you look at history? How do you do trend analysis? How do you take snapshots of that data? How do you integrate it with other platforms? So, data warehousing was the answer, whether that's traditional or now lakes and boat houses and whatever other terminology starting to be polite. Yeah. I know boat houses isn't a real thing. I thought it was. So, there's all sorts of warehousing of data and transformation of data that goes on. Bespoke integration is another big thing, you know, for most of our customers over time. We've done things like tie into other systems, whether it’s pulling back finance data from, you know, Oracle or SAP or tying back work breakdown structures to give a, you know, comprehensive picture of what your project costing looks like. There are always requirements for those sorts of things. Same for visualizing data. So, we consider integrations like Power BI, where you may have, out of the box visualizations of data, or you may have built bespoke visualizations of data again, mashing data up from different systems from your data warehouses. And there was a whole bunch of other stuff as well, kind of niche bespoke things, some of our manufacturing organizations. One, one in particular sprung to mind where they wanted to integrate Project Online time sheets with the clock in and clock out on the machines in the warehouse to understand how many minutes people were spending. A very comprehensive integration there. But, we did something very similar a few years ago. That's interesting. It made about Yeah. Yep. Understand how much time people are spending in the warehouse and on machines. Yep. That's the cost of the project. Yep. Interesting. I think I got ahead of you on some of these other preview of questions here. No problem. So, we asked them also, you know, what would help? What would help from us as a partner to, to answer some of these questions. And they suggested these things. So, workshops, demos, being able to reimagine what a modern PPM platform looks like. And this isn't about an upgrade. This isn't about a migration necessarily. This is oftentimes a reimagining of everything that's come before in the legacy systems. And, Mike, I know you'll talk about this a little bit, maybe in this, this webinar or the next one, probably both. Probably. It's not, it's not just about taking what you've got and putting on the latest platform. It's also about understanding where value lies. Systems and data that aren't used, don't use them. You know? If there's stuff that you're not exploiting or there's an opportunity to automate something, take that opportunity, take that moment. And with that in mind, you know, key feature mapping, there is stuff that is core that you still need to do and will continue need to need to do. And how do you do that on the new platform? What does that look like? As well as a review of those processes that you have internally in your organization. So, project approvals and start-ups, enclosures, and captures of lessons learned, and all of that good stuff. What processes can you take forward, should you take forward, would you look to automate, or would you just leave behind? And then a road map. You know, how do I do it? And we'll talk about this more in later webinars in this series. What does a road map look like for modernizing a platform? How do you do it? What do you take the opportunity to do? What do you do with legacy data? What features do you port across? Or what features do you look at reimagining? And, how do you engage with your user base as well? How do you make sure that they're bought into all of this? Yep. Absolutely. And with that, let's get your thoughts. So that was based on a set of workshops from our customers over here in the UK. We'd love to hear what you think. What do you need in order to make decisions about replatforming? What do you need to help make that case? I saw a few questions in the chat earlier about I'm on ServiceNow. How do I convince my bosses that that's not the right platform? Well, what would you need to do that? Let us know. Yeah. Absolutely. And to pregame that answer a little bit, it depends. Right, Lester? Yeah. It depends massively. Yeah. We have customers who, that decide that they wanna use something that's more, Microsoft-centric for their PPM solution. We have other customers who decide that they still need, you know, capabilities of the Microsoft, you know, platform and a bunch of the stuff that we've talked about, and we'll talk about. But they still use ServiceNow as well. I mean, ServiceNow is a great platform for your IT service management, and it does have some pretty good project management capabilities built in. So it, you know, the question is it depends. And that's where oftentimes things like integrations come in or data, you know, pulling data in and data warehousing and stuff like that. So, this one's interesting. We're seeing yeah. The workshops seems to be ahead in the clear road map. And I think that probably aligns with what we've been hearing a lot, especially lately. I'd say, this year a lot, people are really trying to get their head around visualizing how this this approach, this transition kinda works. Right? Yeah. For sure. And we'll talk about this a bit later on about, you know, how do you engage a partner. I'd be interested to know what percentage of that that forty one percent have a partner that they're talking to actively about reimagining or if they're trying to go it alone, which can sometimes times be hard when you don't know what the, you know, the options are to you even. Right. Why partners exist. We've done this, dozens, thousands of times. Yep. Absolutely. Well, this is interesting. So, it looks like the workshop's still clearly in the lead here about forty two percent. Clear roadmap is in second with twenty-five and twenty for key feature mapping. And review of processes is actually pretty low there, and then something else, five percent as well. Yeah. That is interesting, the processes. I guess, I guess a lot of organizations have worked out the way they work now. They know how to deliver a project. It's been around for a few years, and maybe that doesn't need reimagining. Right. What I would say is that perhaps you need to consider how, how that process maps to the technology that you're looking to embed. And what are the options to smooth it out, to automate it, to put some assurance points in perhaps? Yeah. Absolutely. Well, thanks for everybody for participating in that one. We're gonna move forward with some more information here. This is about, we're gonna take a small segue over into Microsoft Planner. Planner, of course, has been around, and then you mentioned this a minute ago, and we'll talk a little bit more about this. Planner is actually going to be the go forward product, product name. After forty something years, Microsoft is rebranding it to Planner. So, what their modern tool started to be after Project Online was Project for the web. Now it's being assimilated into Planner, and there's a few other subtleties that go into that. But that will be the work management component. Now, again, we see Planner as being part of a solution and not the endpoint solution. And I think there's been a lot of, a lot of consternation and a lot of, misunderstanding over, like, Microsoft's direction. And Microsoft never intended Project for the web or Planner to be a complete replacement for Project, Project Online. If they had, they would have built it with feature parity. They did not. They reimagined the product and the product suite, and then they added, you know, the capability to do things like having, you know, your own ability to update it and have partners update, via the, the Power Apps and, of course, Copilot extensions and things like that. So, they really can get to a situation where it's a, it's a better endpoint. But they're also doing some really cool things with Planner. I mean, it's a simple to use interface. It's more modern. It has different ways you can look at information. It's intelligent. They started building Copilot in it, well, Planner with premium features. There's the base version and then premium. Started to call it Planner with premium features. I think they're landing on just Planner premium now. Right, Lester? I think that's where they landed. But they're also starting to do some, so they had Copilot built into it early, just like you see with a lot of your other Office apps. But they're also doing some interesting stuff with, if you guys haven't heard about agentic AI, or agents, which you can develop your own agents or you can have professionals do it, or in some cases, you'll have first party like Microsoft develop this thing called a Project Manager Agent. This is really meant to help project managers do some of the work that is not necessarily the fun work. In this case, this is just a very quick demo of getting started. The interesting piece here is not just that it goes out and it helps you create a schedule. It's that it uses what's called grounding it, and it uses different things to ground that information. So, it's allowing AI to understand. In this case, I think it's pointed at a SharePoint list. So, it's looking at documents and things like that, plus some prompting that you put in, about what your project is about and uses that as grounding to then decide what to do in terms of going out and helping you get started. So, I'll just play this quick video. I think it's less than a minute and let you guys get an idea of what this is. This was unveiled in, and I think it's out there. Right, Lester? It was unveiled at Ignite back in November, but I think it's generally available now. It is. Yeah. Introducing the Project Manager, a new agent that automates project and task management. Start by creating a new plan and then selecting plan with Project Manager. Give the plan a name and share it with the group. Now it's time to set the goal for the project. Think of this like a well crafted prompt that AI will use to create relevant tasks to complete the project successfully. The more descriptive and specific, the better. You can even add relevant files to the plan to provide key information and context. Then click generate tasks, and the Project Manager instantly creates a task list tailored to this goal. Yes. It's that easy. And there you have it. You know, In very short order. It was able to use some of the, like we said, some of the grounding to go out and create, create these tasks, which then can be you know, you can manage it within Planner. If you've seen the interface, you can do it with, you know, traditional kind of timeline view or Gantt chart kind of view, or you can use, you know, the boards or, different views to manage through the task that way. Alright. So, we have kind of alluded to key platform dates. The, there are changes going on. So, every software that's out there has a life cycle. And so, there are product changes and retirements and things that happen. Right? We, you saw earlier all those different versions of Project and Project Online, Project for the web, and all those things throughout the year and Teams and everything else. So, there's versioning that goes on all the time. There, that is continuing to happen, and we'll highlight a few of those here. There are, also are some things happening on the platform, you know, from a deeper dive perspective to understand why these changes are happening. Some of the underlying platform, capabilities and components are changing and evolving as well. Microsoft is hardening the platform from a security perspective. They're modernizing it and making it more optimal towards the, you know, the new way of doing things using the Dataverse and Power Apps and Copilot and all those kind of things. So, what's happening is in addition to the normal life cycle things that you see going on, there's also some deprecations that are going on that that are impacting certain applications like SharePoint and Project Online. And it's important if you have those, this is almost like a, our public service announcement here. If you have those and you haven't seen it, you need to understand kinda what's happening in that respect. So, some of the bigger ones that are coming in April of next year, the SharePoint workflows are going away. So, if you've used those workflows embedded into some of your Project Online capabilities, you know, people use them for all kinds of things, intake and other things. You need to be aware of that. And there is a workaround. Obviously, you can use the Power Platform to do that. We've helped. I'm sure, Lester, you guys have helped with that. The remote event receivers, this is more of an edge case. I think this is probably for your larger organizations who are doing things like the data warehousing, like Lester was mentioning before. But those event receivers are used to pull Project Online information rather than having to do it, you know, and it does it in a more of a programmatic way, but those are going away at the, at the platform level. So, if you have that kind of capability built in or if you bought products, one of the great products that's out there is, we've used this. I know you guys have this, Edison DataStore. Unfortunately, it won't be able to, unless they rearchitect it. I don't know if they're gonna do that, but they can't take advantage of the remote event receiver. So, your data warehouse won't go away, but the feeds from Project Online will go away. So, you need to be aware of that. Then we have several customers, I’m sure you guys do too Lester, they're being impacted by that one. SharePoint add ins are gonna be retired, you know, and you'll have to assess whether or not that's a big impact for your organization. And then, there's some other things going on. These are, I think, probably more of just normal life cycle stuff or SharePoint 2016, 19. Lester mentioned I mentioned it again that there's officially I think that's when the official transition will be complete for, all the Project for the web to Planner. And then Roadmap's gonna be retired. And then, of course, there's some other things going on with Project 2021, which will be a new version. They'll be coming out, and I believe that's, what's that called? Subscription edition or something like that, I believe. Yeah. That's the version for Project server is gonna be subscription edition. Okay. And then 2021 will be the desktop. Yeah. Whatever, whatever year they end up settling on 2024, perhaps 2026, maybe the next one. Who knows? Yeah. It used to be really predictable. Right? It was a three-year cadence. Everything was built around that three-year cadence, and now all that's changed. And with the with the online stuff, a lot of it's, it's called CICD. Microsoft Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment. So, if you're using things like Teams, you'll notice that sometimes your experience changes overnight to come in the next day. Like, that's working a little bit different, but that's the new world we live in. And it's not just Microsoft. All ISVs are, you know, software providers are pretty much doing continuous deployment of new capabilities and things like that, which is great. Can be a little disruptive, though. But, it's just the world we live in now. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. I think what a couple of things to note here that are important, though, is that Project Online has no end date. Like, that is that is continuing for the moment, until Microsoft announced that. Same with Project desktop. That's not going anywhere. So, you know, Project professional or Project desktop or Project 2019. Yeah. There's been a lot of confusion around the online, piece, Lester. So, thanks for bringing it back up. Somebody actually had a question on that. Some people are confusing things like these particular feature capabilities, platform features for, announcement that there's a deprecation online. That is not, that is not the case. There's still people standing up Online all the time. You know, Microsoft has given guidance on that, and they, that original guidance came out, I think, 2019 that you need to start thinking about a transition. There's been no real investment in the product in terms of new capabilities or feature functionality. But there are, you know, there's no official retirement date. And we're gonna have to move forward. We're going through a lot of material here. I believe this one's me, isn't it, Lester? It is you. Okay. So, Microsoft, this is actually a slide from Microsoft, and we talked a little bit earlier about how they're really reenvisioning, and it's not just them, but the whole marketplace, the analyst, everyone else. And, Lester, you mentioned Monday. com and Asana, and you didn't go through the whole list, but, you know, all of the different ones that are out there, ClickUp, Wrike, Smartsheet. There's all these things that are out there, and almost everyone is trying to really focus on this collaborative work management piece. We talked about it before because over the last ten or fifteen years, it's really become apparent that some of the detailed, well, disciplined project management piece was too heavy for the vast majority of folks that are out there, it’s still required, and there's no doubt that still required for your, your project portfolio management and your project management organizations, maybe more than ever for, you know, IT, engineering, places where you have to really get it right in terms of your dependencies and all that kind of stuff. But there's an awful lot of work that goes on that doesn't require that level of rigor, that more basic project management or collaborative work management. So that's where you'll see the products are focusing. Now they don't want to abandon enterprise work management. Right? And there's a lot of stuff that are, that goes on that side of the equation there, the right side. But, you know, the idea, what Microsoft's ideal here is and it's really in concert with customers and partners is really you see that first highlight. They've been saying this for years that Teams can work the way they want. They can work in the tools they want. Of course, they mean things like Teams and, you know, the different tools that are out there. But enterprises can get the results they need both from a collaborative work management and an enterprise work management. So, when you see enterprise work management, think PPM if you're a project portfolio specialist and then sometimes collaborative work management, people will talk about, you know, casual project managers or non-professional project managers. Somebody that may work in a department like HR or marketing or something like that. So, but the other highlight here is that disconnected apps and tools make it harder to get done. There's been this huge proliferation of tools, we've mentioned that, and that makes it harder to get things done. So that's another reason we're talking more about a platform approach where over time you can actually start to collapse the number of tools that you're that you're using. And there's some cost savings associated with that. We don't go into any real detail on that. But there are ways to do that and happy to talk to folks about that as well. See that all the time. You know, if you have six different, tools out there that are doing similar things, you're probably paying for overlapping licenses as well. Playing for, you know, workflow management. You're paying for file storage, you're paying for collaboration over and over and over again. And, and there's ways to reduce those costs. And if you have Microsoft, you're probably paying for some of those core costs with a lot of the product right out of the box. Alright. So, some reasons why. This is kind of a little bit of a, an insight into the brain of Microsoft if such a thing exists. I think it's more like a collection of brains. But, really, the reason why Microsoft have evolved their tools is because the technology's changed. So, if you look at a platform like Project server or Project Online that's been around in one form or another since 2007, the technology has evolved since then. Project Online in a specific example or Project server specifically, you know, a SharePoint base is built in that platform, and it hasn't really changed since then. Whereas the rest of their stack has moved on. So, it's an opportunity to, to exploit a lot of the other capabilities that have naturally grown up over time. So, if you look at something like Planner that's now built in the Power Platform, based on Power Apps, if you're using the Planner premium Power App, there's a lot of extensibility, and we touch on that in the whitepaper in a lot more detail. And, really, it's all of that has kinda led to an evolution from legacy to modern tools. So, a shift away from kind of black box, it does these things under this license to recognition that all organizations work slightly differently. And, actually, there may not be a single tool that does everything that you need, and maybe there's a platform approach that you need to take that will allow you to homegrow a lot of that capability or work with partners to build that capability that is unique to your organization. So those are the three real reasons why Microsoft are starting to shift this mindset, and that's being evidenced now by the approach to PPM tools like Planner. Yep. Absolutely. It's me again. Mike, or is this you? I can get started, and you can jump in. I don't think we've decided on this one, to be honest. So, what we're really trying to do is kinda talk about, bringing all this together. So, what are, what are some of the concepts we've talked about, and some of the things we might not have delved into in too much detail. It's all in the whitepaper, though. One of the things that's really important to understand is the Project desktop server Project Online are really not part of Microsoft's go forward. I shouldn't say go forward strategy. We probably should have said go forward cloud-based collaboration strategy. The, those products are not slated for retirement. They would probably be around for a long time for customers who wanna use them. But if you wanna use the modern platform, these products are not really part of that platform. Not even Project Online, even though it's in the cloud, it's really not part of the modern platform being built into all of the capabilities that are there. It's really basically a SharePoint app that is in that's in the that's in the cloud. Planner premium is the AI-centric modern work management app from Microsoft. So, it is, you know, that's it, that it is what it is, that’s, that is what it is. And, but people also should not try to compare feature for feature on that. That's why we talk about platform versus, so don't go comparing Project Online to Planner premium. It comes with Power Platform and Copilot components for extensibility. That's one of the really interesting parts because Microsoft does recognize the need for extensibility and that's one of the things where if you were looking at, Planner against another, you know, third party born in the cloud solution day of the week.com or whatever, Planner will have the capability. And Microsoft gives some of that capability away for customers and partners, and we all take advantage of that with the Power Platform and extension. So, it makes it a much more, extendable and flexible platform or our product within the platform. And interestingly on that one, Mike, I think a lot of organizations who are currently exploiting Microsoft Cloud for other purposes will be using aspects of that already. So, whether it's things like Power Automate or Power, Power BI for reporting or even Power Apps for building homegrown applications, there'll be aspects of that already in the organization. Yeah. That's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up, Lester. One of the things that we tell folks as well is, think about your future. If you're using, and, actually, I'll bring this next one up. Custom PPM solutions have always required some kind of customization. You said that. Right? And you mentioned that as well. And these new tools make it easier and more powerful. If you had whatever the tool was, even, you know, day of the week .com, you they always they always make these tools look like they're really easy because they look nice and it's easy to get started and stuff. But when you start tackling complex problems, you end up getting a Monday.com consultant to help you with complex workflow or whatever. Right? Or a Smartsheet consultant or whatever. But what you just said is really important there, Lester. There's, you're never gonna find a higher, number of, or a bigger breadth of human capital that can manage the technology than you will with the Microsoft platform. Right? There's just gonna be more people who understand Power Platform and Copilot and those kind of things than there will ever be for a Monday.com or whatever. So, you're gonna have your ability to manage that in-house or find a partner who can do that very quickly and easily and efficiently is it's gonna be better, and it's just gonna get better and better. Right? Because the platform, there are, I can't remember how many, I think over a million companies on the platform, hundreds of millions of users. There's, for it's just it's just gonna be the most prolific and most ubiquitous amount of human capital to work on these things. You don't hear about human capital much these days, but that is an important piece. Again, Microsoft partners and customers are building better ways to address challenges, and these challenges are, you know, the new challenges of today that we find and challenges we've found in the past. And, you know, it's actually very refreshing that we can actually solve problems today that we could never solve before, because the platform allows us to do that. And this is really important. The path, we've said this several times, and you'll continue to hear us say it today and in the future, future sessions that we hope you attend. It requires a shift from app-centric to a platform centric approach. We've had a lot of futures discussions with our customers. I know, bless you. You guys have been doing the same thing at CPS and trying to guide them into an approach. And that's not necessarily the platform approach might not be right for everyone. They may still wanna go to another SaaS solution, which is fine. But if you really wanna take advantage of the platform and you wanna move forward with all that it that it offers, then you really have to change your thinking and the way that you want to move forward. And we're running short on time. So, this is a bit of an eye chart. I don't want to, I'm not going to go into great detail on it, but it really does. And you guys will get a copy of the deck so you can go through it. But really, if you look at kind of these columns here, the migration versus transition, and you said that a little while ago, Lester, and it's really important to understand migration is really, it's a like for like. You're going to move from one house to another house. It's a similar house, a three bedroom, two bath or whatever. Right? A transition is really more of a move to a different way of living. Right? You're gonna move from, I don't know, a house to, you know, shared living with, in condos. I don't know. It's something completely different, though. And each of those areas, you know, it requires different way of thinking. So, like, in the definition there of technical move of data, it really becomes more of an organizational shift of how work is managed. And I won't read through all these, but, you know, that end goal is really important. And migration is about replicating existing functionality where a transition is really trying to take advantage of all the capabilities of the platform for your enterprise. And really, it becomes a value ascension curve. And we've got some information on that. If you wanna know more about that, we can share that later. But that's really the core difference. It really is a, it's a transition approach rather than a migration approach. Anything to add on that, Lester? No. I think you've, you've encaptured that encapsulated that brilliantly, Mike. And we're running short on time. We have some, customer evidence here, both the two on the left are from Innovative and the ones on the right are from CPS. And we have many more. I'm sure you guys have many more as well, Lester. And so, you guys can click on that and feel free to know, reach out if you have more questions. And, you know there's, these customers are really taking it, and we'll talk more about these. We'll go into more detail in some of the future sessions as well as to how the customers are actually moving through their journey. We didn't have time to do that today, but we wanted to share this customer evidence with each. The customers are already doing this. They are already moving forward with it, and with some success and some really good success. Yeah. Absolutely. But Mike and I, from CPS and Innovative-e, we have case studies published. Go and have a look. Yeah. If you want to either of us about, you know, real world evidence and how partnerships work, then, we've got the credits to back it up. Yeah. Absolutely. So, again, yeah, my book is free today, up until midnight. So, click on the QR code and get that. But, also, there's a ton of links here. Obviously, the most important are at the top. If you wanna reach out to Innovative-e or to CPS, please do so. We'd love to continue the conversation. If you wanna do it individually, there's Lester and my contact information. We've got about three minutes left. To see if there's any questions we could pick off real quick or if anybody there's a lot of questions. Yeah. Seventeen questions unanswered at the moment. Yeah. So, AI support, the answer is yes. There's AI support built in. There's AI support that, into the platform. That's one of the reasons to go with the platform approach, inside on timeline for deprecation. We covered that. We don't really, but it is a good time to move away. Is a recommendation best future proofed alternative? Yeah. Platform. Go with a platform approach. Don't think about feature for feature, and that's where, you know, partner and partner solutions, can really help accelerate that journey significantly. Using ServiceNow, we talked about that. Lotus 123, seminar. Does it count for PDUs? I think somebody replied to that. Yes. You can claim it under your self-directed learning. And if anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out on that. Somebody talked about ServiceNow. That's just more of a statement. You see anything else there? In the Q&A, there's a few. So, is, is Project Online and Project web app the same thing? It is kind of, Project web app exists in both Project Online and Project service, the browser side of, of that application. Somebody asked, is the old OKRMS Goals feature gonna be resurfaced and integrated into project? Oof. Not right now. It what I can give you. So, Viva Goals is being deprecated. It's not all being sold by Microsoft. There's no replacement for it yet, but talk to partners. CPS has one that we're working on, and I'm sure other partners out there certainly do as well. We do as well. Yeah. We actually built it into our Teams4PM product. I think somebody asked if that's our product, and that, it's, it is an Innovative-e product. And we do we actually had it integrated with Goals and then Microsoft deprecated Goals. So, we rebuilt that functionality into the product. So, okay. You don't need Goals anymore. Agile features like Monday and Jira. So, plenty of agile features in the new platform. So, Kanban boards are, you can manage by sprints and, you know, assigned to. So, all of the board functionality and capabilities there. We found also that a lot of organizations want to, kind of integrate again with, other agile management tools like DevOps. So, we built connectors that will do exactly that. Mike, I'm sure you guys have the same. Yeah. We actually, we're actually very close. We have them on the roadmap both for Azure DevOps and for Jira on their Teams4PM. And it's an interesting scenario. Right? Sometimes you're doing traditional project management, you need to understand goals and milestones, but then you have inside that you have, like, software development and, you know, epics and user stories and things that are going on. You let those be managed in the other two as well. Yep. Yep. I think we're, I think we're at time. So, thank you, everyone. Really appreciate you, you joining us today. Yep. Thank you, Lester and Stephanie, and everyone here especially for joining us. And don't forget, we have the next two coming, in July. I think it's 23rd and August 16th, and those are further up in the deck as well. And, we'd really love to hear from you. So, thanks again, everybody. Have a great afternoon, evening, morning, wherever you're at. Thanks, all. Thank you. Thank you to Mike and Lester and all of you for participating in today's webinar. We do hope you found it valuable and informative. If we didn't get to your question, feel free to reach out via email. You can reach out to Lester and Mike on, their information is still on the screen, and, we might just use your question in an upcoming webinar or blog post. Also, keep an eye on your inbox for the recording of today's session and additional resources. Thanks again. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks, everybody.

Good morning or good evening wherever you're joining from. We're going to give it just a couple of more minutes as people start to arrive. We'd love to know where you're joining from. Give us a chat. All right, it's just a couple of minutes after the hour, so we'll go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone to today's webinar. “Why and When to Modernize: Finding Your Strategic Window” presented by Innovative-e and CPS. My name is Stephanie Taylor and I'm your moderator for today. We're excited to be joined by our partners at CPS, a two-time Microsoft Partner of the Year winner for project and portfolio management and a two-time finalist, including last year. A Microsoft Solutions Partner with over thirty years expertise, CPS specializes in helping organizations transform the digital workplace with deep capabilities across modern work, business applications, and security, and a strong focus on adoption and sustainable value. CPS brings a people first approach to envisioning, implementing, and supporting Microsoft powered solutions. Innovative-e is a seven-time Microsoft award winner and the 2023 and 2024 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Project and Portfolio Management. We partner with organizations to modernize the entire project and work management ecosystem through a platform first approach. With deep expertise in AI and Copilot, we deliver sustainable solutions that give your business the agility it needs to thrive and help you become a higher performing organization with happier people. Your speakers today are from Innovative-e, Mike Taylor, and from CPS, Lester Lovelock. Mike Taylor is the founder and CEO of Innovative-e. He began his career writing PPM software for NASA and is a recognized visionary in project and work management with deep experience as a PPM practitioner, industry thought leader, published author, and process and application innovator. In 2023 Mike wrote “The AI Project and Work Management Revolution is Here Practical Strategies for Seizing This Moment to Become a Higher Performing Organization with Happier People”. It's available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook format. And as a special thank you today's webinar attendees will receive a free digital copy. We'll have details at the end of the presentation. Lester Lovelock is Head of Practice for Project and Portfolio Management at CPS. With over twenty years at the company, Lester brings deep hands-on expertise across the full spectrum of PPM from on prem to cloud, integration to optimization. Known for his practical insight and commitment to real world outcomes, Lester leads CPS's efforts to help organizations reimagine project delivery in the modern workplace. He's based in the UK just outside of London. Before we dive in let's cover a few housekeeping items. Today's webinar is being recorded. A link to the recording along with the slide deck will be sent to you via email within the next few days. You're free to review the content at your convenience and share it with colleagues who could not attend today's live session. Please use the Q&A feature on the right-side panel of this platform to ask questions. We will address as many questions as possible as time permits. If you encounter any technical issues such as audio or video problems, please use the chat function to notify us and we'll do our best to assist you promptly. With those housekeeping items out of the way let's get started. I'm pleased to hand the floor over to Mike and Lester. The virtual stage is yours. Thanks Steph, that's great. Really appreciate the introduction. I feel way more important than I actually am, I'm sure. Likewise. So, thanks to everyone for joining us today. Hopefully this will be a really good valuable session for you. We're really keen to talk to you about a whole raft of subjects today. In case you didn't know, this is the second webinar in the series of three. The previous one we ran on July twenty-third, which was around, you know, Microsoft's evolution and future vision of PPM. And today, we're talking about finding your strategic window and when and why to modernize. The next one will be on the thirteenth of August, so we'd love you to sign up for that. Please do go ahead and do that. But in today's session, we'll be talking about a few different bullet points. We'll be talking about compelling reasons to move, like what's your “why”, how do we help you find your “why”, and how do you find that yourselves? And carrots and sticks. So, in that vein, you know, there may be some compelling whys that actually are more stick than carrot. There may be some reasons that you have to move. We'll cover some of those. And some of the carrots, some really good reasons to improve and enhance your platform. And then we'll cover off finding your strategic window, kind of helping you to identify good timings to do things and understand what you might want to do in advance. I can't remember which one of us was going to do this. I'll just jump in. Go for it. Yeah, so I think this is the, for those of you who attended the first one as well. The whole basis of this is basically a whitepaper that Lester and I did, I think we released it back in May, April or May and it's about modernizing your project and work management estate, how, why, and when. And we decided to follow it up with a webinar. And then once we started digging into the content that we had produced, we said, you know what, this is really gonna end up being a three-part series. So therefore, the three-part series. But we do encourage you, if you haven't already downloaded it, you see the different links there from CPS or from Innovative-e that you can go access and download that whitepaper. I encourage you to do so. So, we wanna keep this interactive. And in that vein, we've come up with a series of questions, and we'd love to get your take on this. It really helps us with future research. It really helps us to understand what the rest of the market is doing. Whilst Mike and I between us can talk to hundreds of customers over a year, forums like this really give you a voice and give us a chance to hear from you. So, with that in mind, what are you using today? There'll be a poll appearing in the chat in a moment. We'd love your feedback on what platforms you're looking at today. How does this work? So, is it Project Online or Project Server with a whole bunch of customizations? Is it third party SaaS? Is it, you know, day of the week dot com, Smartsheet, ServiceNow, something like that? Are you a little bit more manual doing things with Teams and Excel and email? Or maybe even still working just in a desktop zone, just with Microsoft Project or other tools like that. So, the results are already coming in. Interestingly, that we've got mostly manual at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. That's a little bit of SaaS popping in there. Some Teams, Excel. Yep. Not surprised by the Teams, Excel, email, etc. There's been a lot, of a lot of surveys that said that, you know, you're the number one project management tools actually are more collaboration tools, which collaboration is a huge piece of project management as I think we all know. Somebody put that in the chat too. More than two of those. Yep. Yep. Not surprising. I've always found Excel to be the biggest competitor to any other PPM platform out there because it just does what you want. You type stuff in a cell and away you go. Yeah. Microsoft had a real, I don't know if you saw this, Lester, a few years ago they had a really funny video about doing, managing a project in Excel versus doing it in Project. It was, they were, the analogy was watering a plant with a teaspoon. That was Excel. Somebody was running to the faucet and then running over and putting a teaspoon in, running to it again. It's like, you can do it, but it's not necessarily easy. We got some interesting feedback in the, in the chat as well. So, Teams for project document storage and team management, Teams, Excel and Project, Google Sheets, Cherwell, yeah, we've got lots of feedback there. Interestingly, very in fact, zero Project Online customers in the chat today. Yeah. That is interesting. Would have thought there would have been a little bit, but okay. Good to know. Maybe everyone's heeded out our advice already. That's right. Pre-migrated. Replatformed. Transitioned. All right. So, one of the things that we see, and several people put in there, into the chat, you know, we use more than one of these, is there is a lot of disconnection or disaggregation of people, apps, and data in kinda the project work management space. In fact, Lester, you said that, you know, we use these things, these kind of polls and things, a former colleague of mine and I did a I thing back in 2023, one of these polls, we had about four or five hundred folks. So, it was a really good sample size. Ninety two percent of the people who responded to that particular survey said that they were using multiple work and project management tools, and that aligns with what we see, industry analysts will tell you that when they’ve surveyed it, the average enterprise organization uses, I think, five point seven project or work management tools or collaboration work management tools, depending on how you define them. There's some new terminology kind of floating around out there. Another real big challenge we find is that project managers spend way too much time finding and aggregating data, and this really hampers the ability to make timely and effective decisions. Right? You talk about Excel. There's still a huge amount of time that's spent pulling, because you have these different things, you pull data into Excel, you aggregate it, you put it together in a fashion that can be then represented, maybe put into a PowerPoint or something like that for a project steering committee meeting, and then, you know, put out that way. And you're spending a lot of time what we oftentimes call chasing data. And that's a real challenge for folks. There's actually, this is an interesting point that we've kind of emerged in our thinking over the last few years is really project management per se is not the work itself. Right? What you're doing is you're entering the data about the work into a system. And the reason that becomes more important today in the age of AI is how much of that data could then be automated to be done. We'll talk a little bit more about that, but there's a gap between the work and the systems that govern it when people are out there developing code or they're doing engineering product or a real estate project or a construction project, whatever you're doing, the work is actually one thing and the digital representation is another. The more we can close that gap, the better we'll be able to have better data to actually do that management process. Right? And then finally, again, you'll hear this over and over and if you haven't already, I'm sure you will, that AI is really going to change the world of project and work management because it's highly human dependent on project managers doing the work, you know, people that are doing the, you know, work like status reports and task management and all that kind of stuff. Then all the team members have to provide status and do all these things, potentially time sheeting and, you know, time capture and all that. So, the more AI and automation can do that work, the more you can create higher value outcomes. Right? So, one of the things that we've seen is, you know, there's been a proliferation of we like to call it the proliferation of everything. Tools, processes, methodologies, and anybody who's done much in the way of doing, you know, system automation, it's always about people, process, technology. So that's what we're looking at here. There's been a real proliferation of the tools going back into all the way into the nineteen eighties from the original Microsoft desktop, you know, where people would start to enter their tasks and Gantt charts and do all that. Over the last ten or fifteen years, you've seen a proliferation of the born in the cloud solutions like Monday.com, Asana, Wrike. You also have different things that, you know, in Smartsheet, of course, you have the on the left side, there's some of the legacy Microsoft technologies that you're familiar with; Project, Planner, Project Online, Project Server, and then of course the icon at the bottom there is the new Planner. Planner Premium. And then you have, you know, tools that manage two different methodologies. And that's another thing that's really, over the last probably few decades, has really emerged. It's not just about, you know, waterfall or Gantt charts. There's a huge emergence of work management that are being done in agile and different things. At the end of the day, I think, Lester, we can agree that collaboration is always at the center of whatever methodology you're using. And typically, we find that people end up sort of merging those at some point in most initiatives for at least part of the initiative. So the methodologies are important, but they're not the end all in solving the problem. And then of course, you know, starting with PMI and other certification organizations and standards bodies and then curriculum that's been built, whether it's by universities or degrees in project management and things like that. There's also internal, a lot of organizations have built their own PMOs and their own PMO training and everything. So, there's been a proliferation of all these people, processes and technologies. However, that's why the “but’s” there. This study was in two 2023 by an article in HBR. These project success rates as self-attested by these organizations, this was the Standish group who did this research, are still only providing about a thirty-five percent success rate. And, you know, and that's despite all this proliferation. You go back, you know, a couple decades, that that success rate was probably twenty to thirty percent. So, it hasn't moved much. And I think one of the things that really contributes to this, what we hear is this proliferation. It's well, it solves certain problems that also creates others. I think I saw in the chat there that somebody said, you know, we keep throwing tools at things and keep buying more tools and that's absolutely part of the problem. So, when you think about how to move forward and modernize, keep this in mind. It's kind of some grounding of how we got to the point where we probably got to in your organization. Okay. So, we have another poll question. Lester said we're gonna keep you on your toes, so we're gonna put this one into the into the poll here in a second. But what are your reasons for modernization? Select all that apply. So, is it low adoption or value realization? At the end of the day, we do know that, you know, projects are done to create value for an organization, whatever that value is. So, you know, if you're not achieving the results of that, that project, then you might not be achieving all the value realization. Is there, you know, legacy tool dependency? You know, there's all kinds of legacy tools out there. We didn't see anybody with Project Online, but I bet there's a lot of people with Project Desktop. Are you looking for alignment for, with Microsoft for adoption and extensibility and the modern platform? And there's a lot of, lot of talk around how that's really changing the game. Are you looking at cloud app consolidation? Again, we talked about in the last slide, saw a lot of things pop up. We see a lot of these tools throughout enterprise organizations. Maybe departments buy one tool and the PMO buys another, and then another department buys another, and you have all this stuff and that's kind of that concept of technical debt. Now you've actually got applications that are out there that do similar functionality and you may end up, even be paying for the same functionality like, you know, task management or document storage or collaboration or things like that. So, there's cost efficiencies that could be found. And then of course there's the very fastly evolving world of low code and AI and organizations that are really looking for this to maximize the use of AI for value realization. So how are we doing on the poll there? I wasn't actually watching. Have that come out there, Lester? It wasn't on screen so I'm seeing the results for the first time too. It’s a, a fairly even spread. It is. Not on the legacy tool dependency. That's interesting. Consolidation of apps. That's interesting. Yep. That's, that seems to be on the leaderboard right up there with future proofing and low code and AI. Actually, those are tied now. So, alright. Good stuff. It's a good point in the chat. Options one and four often go hand in hand. That's absolutely true. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Right? Context switching and things like that. If you have to go from one app to another, you know, it's a, it's a completely different experience potentially. And, you know, that's inherently inefficient. So. Yep, okay. Let's move forward then. Hopefully we'll save a little bit of time for some of the questions at the end here. Alright. So, what is this? We find ourselves, and if you read the white paper, which we encourage you to do, one of the things you'll see a recurring theme in there is this idea of reimagining solutions. So where are we today? And you have an opportunity, a point in time, I think, to really look at reimagining the future of your project and work management and for all kinds of reasons. One of the things you do when you reimagine is actually ask the question, why are we doing what we're doing? And I'll give you a really good example. We were literally just on a call this week with a customer, and they're going through a merger between organizations. So, they need to really look at that from a, from a perspective of they need to merge their systems. We were talking to another customer recently, and it was part of a futures conversation. And we've, we put it in the first webinar, and we'll actually review it again, some things that are going on at the platform level, if you're on the Microsoft platform, especially around Project Online and SharePoint, that are changing. And when we were reviewing some of the things that were changing, this customer is like, well, you know, we're gonna have to rework this piece because that feature deprecation, it was around, you know, some remote event receivers, not to get too technical, and it was around time capture. And after a couple months of continuing to talk about it, they went, you know what? That's really not a requirement anymore. But what's interesting about that is if we hadn't had to force that conversation because technology was changing, would they have continued to do something that was really not providing a lot of value? So, this is an opportunity to relook at doing what you're doing and say, why are we doing it? Is that requirement still there? And all three of these kind of go hand in hand, right? So, the other piece of that is what are the real game changing opportunities? Are there ways to really move the needle for your PPM and your solutions to move things forward and achieve higher value and better project outcomes? So those could, you know, involve AI and really reducing the work that people are doing, which kind of goes into the third point as well is how do people work and how do people wanna work? You know, the workforce is changing. People wanna work in more modern ways. Think about like Project. Microsoft Project that started in the eighties when you sit down and a project manager enters all these things, you know, in a Gantt chart. And then there's all this task, time phase task management that goes into it. Do people really wanna work that way? Do they really wanna go update these tasks? Do project managers really wanna have to do it? In certain cases, have to. Right? There are certain things, I'm not saying you don't have to do those things, but maybe there's other opportunities to look at ways to modernize the work and to automate some of that. We talked about the data chasing. Is there ways to automate some of that work? Is there ways to use AI to do some of the work? Like, one of the things that people are really finding with things like Microsoft Copilot is the meeting minutes. Right? You can you can capture meeting minutes with AI very quickly and it and it reduces the time that it takes to do that and increases the, the quality of the data because you have better, you know, you're not sitting there scribing it or putting it in OneNote or whatever and then having to come back and put it all in there. AI is actually helping you do that. So, what are the opportunities to do more work, the way people wanna work? Right? Anything to add to that Lester? Yeah, I was going to lift the lid a little bit, pull back the covers on what we do as partners. You've probably had the same experience, Mike, when you receive an RFP or a tender or some sort of procurement document where for the most part it's a feature list. People are after a feature list. They're rarely on something that will actually make them more efficient. It's, know, tick the box, does it do this? Does it include time capture? Realistically, where the value is, it's not in the feature list. The value is in will it change the way your organization works for the better? Will it save people time? Will it save people effort? Will it make you more efficient? Will it save you money? So, if anyone's ever thinking about writing a business case for a PPM tool, keep that in mind please, because it makes our lives a little bit easier and it makes the responses a little bit more interesting too. Yeah. It really does. And we're gonna talk a little bit about that. Right? We're talk a little bit about business case and your, finding your window of opportunity here in a minute. Absolutely. Yep. So, we've heard from you. Here's what we think some of the reasons are. This is lifted from the whitepaper, so please do go ahead and have a bit more of a dig into there to see the real reasons behind these. So just in summary, alignment is one of our first reasons. So, empowering all organizations with AI is kind of core to Microsoft strategy at the moment. And leveraging those tools, leveraging that if you're in the Microsoft 365 platform, if you're on that journey, should be part of your vision as well. Not to replace people, but kind of to focus them on what matters most. So do away with a lot of the drudgery of the day-to-day work and actually make them more efficient and outcome focused. Maximizing. So, if you are in Microsoft 365, you have a whole suite of things available to you, productivity tools available to you. Like ninety percent of projects require some form of collaboration, and Teams generally is where that work happens. Since COVID, I used the c word, I apologize. But since then, we've noticed massively with our customers, things are more remote than ever. And collaboration, which used to happen around a boardroom table or in a meeting room, now it's all done through that platform. So, making those platforms part of your central experience for project management, it kind of reduces that context switching that Mike talked about earlier. And it makes people a bit more efficient when they don't have to shift gears to go and work in a different tool all the time. Enhancing, so business agility through low and no code. Well, PPM solutions often require quite a lot of customizations for specific needs. Actually, embracing a Microsoft platform centric approach in this case comes with the ability to use tools or products like Power Apps. I think we switched a couple of slides. Yeah. It was an errant click on my part. I'm sorry. Giving the spoilers away. Keep it real. It's not recorded. This is live. Can you go back one more? All right. There we go. There we are. Thank you. So, Power Platform low code/no code approaches actually puts the hands, puts back in the hands of the end user some of the ability to enhance platforms and make those business integrations. Clearly, there's always a place for IT and professional developers, but actually, there's an opportunity to broaden your developer workforce. Yeah, I would just like to jump in there. Sure. We have, and I'm sure this happens to you all the time, we have customers asking us when we help them develop a solution, well, how much of this can we do on our own? We're like, you can do almost all of it on your own, right? It almost always starts with things like customizing the reporting. So, a lot of our customers have built or are building a lot of expertise in Microsoft Power BI. And so they, the data's available for them and they're like, well, can we customize these reports? Like, sure. If you know, you have a license for it, go do the work. And so, it really does start to really make it much more self-service with that kind of approach, right? Yeah, absolutely. But we'll come into this a little bit later on with the role of the partner. What we're here for is not necessarily to provide just technical expertise. You've got that in spades in house already for the most part. What we're here to do is to get you going really fast. So, you may be capability rich on your side, but time poor. We're there to speed those things up. That's exactly what partners are for and should be used for, to give you some expert advice, to be a critical friend, and to help you go faster. Last one on this slide then is avoiding. You know, there's some legacy tools around. There's no avoiding that, although clearly based on our poll responses earlier, none of them are Project Online. But some people, some organizations are still in that platform. I was talking to a customer this morning who I'm not sure if you're aware, there was an announcement recently around a SharePoint on premise vulnerability that went out. Oh, yeah. Just happened in the past couple of days. They shut down their entire platform because of that vulnerability. And it sparked conversation. We really should move you off of this legacy on premise solution, shouldn't we? Yes. Can we plan that, please? Was the outcome of the call after we got them back up and running and patched. So, there are a bunch of tools that are starting to be phased out. Cloud native collaborative solutions are key, and that's been the direction of travel for probably the past ten years now. Absolutely. Moving on. Sorry, you skipped one again, Mike. I'm sorry, my clicker is going way too fast. We should have numbered these slides, perhaps, to keep us on track. Well, they actually have numbers. I just wasn't paying attention to it. It's a little twelve in the lower. So, a few more reasons, and I will skip through these a little bit quicker. So, scalability, visibility, cost and licensing, and future proofing. Like we're talking about an enterprise cloud here with Microsoft in terms of scalability. Having all of your data within that one platform where all of your other organizational data goes is normally a good thing, right? Because it means you can join stuff up. And it's all under the Microsoft banner of the security features and functions that they offer and provide, whether it's native security or it's enhanced through additional licensing like Purview and so on. It also helps with DLP. So, if you're not managing multiple clouds, data loss prevention, you have a rogue employee or someone accidentally sends something out, DLP policies can stop that. And it's much easier to do if you're in a central platform. Visibility wise, a platform centric data set gives you the ability then to look across all of your data sets and to do that near real time reporting if you want to. It also gives you the ability to join data sets together that you may have had difficulty with if you're in multiple clouds. And then cost and licensing. So actually, there's normally reasons to consolidate under a single cloud. And it's, like Mike said, it's that feature creep of multiple tools, the five point seven tools per organization, where you're paying for things multiple times. Actually, if you're in a single platform, if you're in a single cloud, you're doing away with a lot of that redundancy, and therefore, there's a cost and time saving and a license saving that goes along with that, as well as the stuff that you don't really recognize back office, which is things like IT teams being able to support this and not have to understand the complete prolif, prolif, it's a very hard word to say late on a Monday, proliferation of tools across multiple systems. And then finally, future proofing. So, everyone's aware of the stuff that comes out from Microsoft on a very regular basis. As partners, we're kind of at the fast end of the fire hose trying to absorb it all and pass it on to our customers, you know, the stuff that really matters and makes a difference to you guys. But it is constant. And that's a good thing. Right? There is constant innovation enhancement from Microsoft, and being in that platform means you're gonna be able to leverage it. Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. Now I'm ready to go forward. Right? Yes, please. So, I'm not gonna go through every single one of these tools. I will pick out a few key points, though. So, these are the reasons why we hear from our customers why you might want to look at work management or PPM management. So it may be that you're looking at new tools or new platforms because your current organization has too many or it has too few or they're not fit for purpose or they're very hard to integrate. I mean, we saw some stuff in the chat earlier about people trying to do Google Sheets. I'm sure you don't have Google email as well. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't be on this call talking about Microsoft platforms. Right. Decision making. Sometimes it's hard to understand what your resource capacity and demand looks like across an organization. You might want to start centralizing your data to make those decisions. You may find it hard to prioritize your pipeline. Or your reporting, where you're doing all of that, is very manual, and someone has to crank a handle every month to produce a PowerPoint deck. And moving diamonds to the right by a centimeter every month is a thankless task. This is why people invest in PPM tools. All your reporting is just out of date the minute it's done. Back to that moving the diamond right to the month, once a month, it's not great because it's out of date as soon as you've done it. Same with things like planning. So, we've touched on tools. We've touched on people and processes. Planning might be poor. You might want to enhance that through the implementation of a tool, maybe siloed, it may be done piecemeal, it might not be done collaboratively with other teams or in the grander picture of your resource profiles. And similarly, dependencies. I'm sorry, Lester. But, you know, the planning and what you just talked about with the reporting being out of date, those kind of data issues go hand in hand. Right? It's hard to do good planning if you really don't know, it's hard to manage day to day if you don't know where you are, if your report's out of date and you're not managing off good information. It's hard to plan if your portfolio projects, you can't rely on the data. Right? Yeah. Decision making's hard if you don't have the right information to your fingertips straight away. And this is the point of implementing tools like this, where you have a platform and you have automated reporting and the people involved in that process understand it end to end. Able to make those inputs on a regular basis. So, I think someone in the chat mentioned earlier, processes are often the last thing to be brought up. It's as important as selecting at all, making sure that things are well embedded. Maybe that actually controlling your projects is hard. So, you don't have a method perhaps of saying how far through are we? Most organizations that we work with start just by having a project manager updating things. They might eventually get to the team members saying I've done this amount of effort but it's going to take me this additional amount that we hadn't planned for previously. It's a fairly mature process to do that and it's hard. Again, we see it in requirements all the time. We need to track and manage team member progress. Rarely are they ready for it. Same for things like tracking costs, being able to do cost forecasting and recognize where you are, what's your estimate at completion, being able to recognize that maybe you need a budgetary uplift or there'll be a change coming or a risk coming and you haven't maybe budgeted for that in your risk profile or your risk budgets. Lots of reasons to track costs in tools. And the same for RAID. Again, you might have a list of stuff in Excel, but you might not be able to join all of that up across everything and see what is our risk profile as a portfolio? What do we have in terms of appetite to accept these risks or to treat them? How much risk budget do we have and how much have we spent of that? And then finally around the governance, I mentioned it earlier, it's only as good as the last time someone updated the data. So, if people are doing it poorly or they're not doing it at all, or they're doing it out of sequence with the rest of the organization, the data is invalid. Or maybe they are not even following the processes. So it could be that they skip stage gates. They just move themselves along. I don't need to ask for a budget. What do you want about? I have got CFO sign off. I just go. So, you know, you can automate and govern your projects through tools. There's lots of reasons to do this stuff. Absolutely. Alright. So, we go to our last poll question, but do stick around to the end. We've got some good Q&A coming up and some other things. So, what is holding you back from modernization? What are your biggest blockers? Again, this is like Lester said. We'd love to hear from folks and get feedback on what's going on. So, you know, is it that you don't feel ready or mature enough? You know, as you're just not ready to modernize, not sure where to start maybe? Is your, is it that you don't know the cost benefit? You know, this gets back to what you said a minute ago, we'll talk a little bit more about that, Lester, business case. How do you build a case to do this? And that that goes hand in hand with the other one, which is number three, which is getting buy in from leadership. Number four, existing complexity. Yeah. It's you know, so we've got all these customizations and complexity and kinda goes back to where to start and to what, how do we, how do we do all this? Or maybe it's just too overwhelming or feels like it's gonna be too costly and time consuming or disruptive to the business to do that, right? And then something else. So it could be, you know, it could be a plethora of other reasons that you do that. So how are the results looking coming in existing customizations? Not surprised about that. Clear front runner there. And, you know, I don't know about you, Mike, but we're seeing it in our conversations with customers at the minute where they might have had a platform that they've had in place for ten years in some cases, and they've built up a weight of technical legacy to it, you know, where it's so core to the rest of their business. It's just, it’s got roots everywhere. And I'm picking that. It's hard. So, we've had conversations across the past twelve, eighteen months where, how long can we just kick this can down the road so we don't have to make a decision for? I even had one last week. I'm retiring in six months. Can we just put the decision off until I'm gone? Making somebody else's problem. I'm sure she said it tongue in cheek, but yeah. A lot of truth said in jest, right? So yeah, that's definitely far and above, it's over half, fifty five percent now of the respondents have said existing customizations and complexity. And that is certainly, that’s where the opportunity comes, but also the challenge. There's no sugarcoating it. It is not for the faint of heart to do that. There are ways to do it to make it less disruptive to the organization. And there are ways to really look at both the benefit and the, you know, the cost of not doing it. So, I think we'll talk a little bit more about that in the coming slides. We'll also talk about approaches to minimizing impact in the next webinar. So. Yes. Keep your eyes peeled for that one. That one's really where we're going to bring it all together, right? And then how you actually do it and bring some real-world examples in as well. So, in this one, this kind of gets to the when. So, the why and when start to overlap a little bit, but you know, so that you see the little carrot and stick analogy there in the bottom. So, what are the carrots? What are the things that are the reasons why you would want to move to something? Because people make change for two reasons. You're either moving towards something or away from something or both. Right? You're moving towards the promise of a better way to do things. So, what are the process improvements that can be made? What are the leveraging new tech capabilities? You talked about AI. You talked about low code, no code. Moving past legacy ways of working. Like I said earlier, we were talking to that customer and they you know, when we started to a deeper dive into a process and how it was automated, they said that process isn't even really needed anymore. So really a way to capitalize on eliminating ways of working that didn't work and maybe start to work in ways that that work much better and lead to better success. Right? Then, of course, we have the sticks, and you mentioned this before, Lester, the technical debt. Sometimes we’ll have a lot of overlapping technologies, and that that's a multilayered problem. Right? It's not just that the users who are using the systems have to figure out the context switching or that there's more cost associated with having duplicate, capabilities. But, also, as you mentioned, this is a good one, a lot of times, the business users don't think about this, if you're in the PMO or something and you're buying different technologies, you might be putting more on your IT staff to have to figure out how to support those different technologies. So, the more of those they have that are, you know, incongruent and different in the way that they work, the more cost and slowness of change kinda comes in with those technologies as well. And that goes into the last one right there, Lester, you were talking about this the other day. You know, the availability of, and actually I think you mentioned earlier in this one as well. The availability of Microsoft centric people with skills around the Power Platform, even emerging A,I Copilot, Platform are much less scarce than some of these niche SaaS applications that are out there, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think we talked previously about, you know, the banking industry is holding that up as an example and people out there are still learning COBOL because they can demand a ridiculous day rate because they're so in demand and so niche. You don't want to have to pay that ridiculous day rate for people to come and work on your platform. You should be looking at platforms that are widely available and widely supported. But even so, you've got, that's the old piece, but on the front other side of that slash, the niche SaaS, you've got some of the newer things that are out there, the day of the week dot com, right? The Smartsheets, whatever. And if you were gonna be doing, I was on a call with a customer the other day and they were talking about how they have a consultant that's a, I think it was a Monday consultant because they didn't have that capability in house. As you mentioned earlier, Lester, more and more people are getting the most prevalent capabilities, if you're a Microsoft-centric organization, is gonna have capabilities around the Microsoft toolset, right? So, you're gonna not have to necessarily go out and get scarce resources or very niche resources to work on those things. Then there's the strategic window. And I think we're gonna we're gonna dive into that a little bit, but, you know, I think I saw somebody mentioned in this one, and we definitely hear this question all the time, is how do I how do I get leadership bought in? How do I find an organ…, a way to attach needing to modernize my PPM to potentially organizational circumstances or needs? Right? So that is always a way to look at it, and we're gonna talk about that here in a second. So, how do you how do you build the case? So, other compelling initiatives to align with, and Lester, you chime in here, I know you see this kind of thing all the time. We had a customer the other day that came to us, and it was a, it was an M&A. I mentioned it earlier as well. Same customer, actually. They are, they are compelled to make a change. Right? The two organizations are merging. They're compelled to pick a technology and go with it because executives, you know, CTO, CIO, whoever is saying we're not gonna continue to do these five or six different things. Right? We're gonna we're gonna align these. There's time sensitive initiatives. Maybe there's things that are going on that you have to, the organization has to react to. Maybe there's business things that are going on. There's a lot of challenges that are going on. We have some of our businesses, our customers that are reacting to business environment challenges that are because of political things that are happening, but they have to react to them, so, you know, it makes a very time sensitive initiative to maintain their, you know, their business trajectory. Easy for me to say. Leveraging organizational pain points. Maybe there's certain things, time to delivery, lower delivery of value, things like that. Maybe there's things that are, you know, organizationally being driven that you wanna tie into from, you know, we can help if we modernize our PPM, we can do a better job of supporting those. Capitalizing on budget capability and availability, and sometimes it goes hand in hand with another one that's coming up in a minute, which is, you know, key initiatives. Or maybe that's the second one. But if there's budget for those initiatives, there may be budget to help you with your PPM piece as well. And sometimes that happens at a, at a variety of levels. It's not just budget for potentially to get help with a partner, but also, you know, we've seen it where organizations will start on a kind of a wave of transition from maybe different technologies or disaggregated technologies into the Microsoft platform, and then it kinda hits critical mass. You know, again, top down, they say, alright, everything's gonna be on the platform, and we're gonna create a certain amount of budget to go do this. So that's a good time to look at that. Market or regulatory changes goes hand in hand with time sensitive initiatives. Sometimes, Lester, you guys deal a lot with regulated industries. In fact, I think some of your case studies that you guys have talked about recently are in regulated industries. I've seen a lot of the great work you guys are doing in the public sector there in the UK. But there are changes that happen that drive a need for the organization to make a change, and if you're a PPM solution, that may be a good opportunity to modernize to respond to those and be more agile in the future. We've had a great example over here in the UK, and I hate saying it because I wasn't in back of it, but we had Brexit and we've also had things like GDPR regulations come in as a result. All that led to a huge wave of transformation projects over here in the UK, and actually PPM became a big thing to try and manage those transformation projects. It was a good strategic window for a lot of organizations over here to try and do things better because of a regulatory change that came about that was forced upon them. Yep. Absolutely. And we've seen things like that. I've worked on a bunch of those kinds of initiatives over the years. You'd also mentioned IT rationalization and tool consolidation, Lester. I think that's something that we're seeing a lot more of this this kind of digital transformation window. A lot of our, kind of, journey that companies have been on, organizations have been on, has probably been going on for eight or ten years now. But as they become more mature in that, in that consolidation or in moving everything to a digital platform, now's the opportunity that leadership starts looking at and going, okay, we still have a lot of tools that now we're all in the cloud, we're all, you know, doing a better job of making the business value out of getting out of the data centers and doing all that kind of stuff, what do we need to start looking as far as rationalization so that it becomes like a future or a next phase of things to look at. And, you know, PPM can be part of that as well if you're on some of those older tools that you mentioned just a minute ago, Lester, one of your customers is on, still on desktop or I'm sorry, on server. And maybe that's been put into a data center in a virtual. Maybe it hasn't, but it's still legacy. Right? And now it's a good opportunity. I think you guys used the opportunity to bring up your customer. Maybe you wanna update that so you're not still having to do these physical server patches for security and things like that. Executive leadership and new priorities. We actually see this. I'm sure Lester you find this as well. We actually have a customer that has, they are on their third organization in the past five or six years where they've reached out to us because they have a perspective on how they wanna implement their PPM solutions. And that happens a lot. Right? You get a new CIO, CTO, Chief Innovation Officer, and they have a way to do things. Maybe they're bringing in the Microsoft platform or maybe they're, have got perspectives around AI or things like that, and then those priorities become something that the PMO or the PPM solutions can support. So, there's ways to leverage that as well. I suppose one of the other things that might be missing from here is, like, actually when date-wise you might want to do some of these things. So, we have a whole bunch of education-based customers over here and universities, for example, have key windows when they can implement changes there are no students around. So, they have to develop business cases and therefore funnel as much change as they can into that small window. So, actually trying to get an initiative with enough momentum in it to make that window is hard sometimes. Right. Yep. Absolutely. And the next point is there's the review of the key dates, which just as sort of a reminder to go back to this next slide, which is kinda where things are. We'll go through this quickly. We reviewed it in the last one. We're gonna review it in the next one as well because it is really important for those who are on the Microsoft platform. So, for those who are familiar with Project for the Web, which is Microsoft's new version of, you know, on the modern platform, that was what they called it, they're actually officially retiring it. It's more of a name change than it is an actual retirement. Most of the feature functionality is gonna be now going forward in what is being called Planner premium. But that's a very close date. Right? That's only eight or nine days away. So, if you're not aware of that and you need anything, feel free to reach out to Lester or I, and we can help you with that if, to see if it might impact you. The rest of the dates are a little further out. In April twenty-six, SharePoint workflows are going away. So, if you're relying on those for a solution, that's important. Even if it's not necessarily a Project Online solution, uses SharePoint workflows. We have a lot of customers who built their own workflows in support of a project or work management solution. The remote event receivers, nobody here said they were worried about Project Online, so I won't go into that too much. But if you are pulling data through the remote event receivers, those are going away. And we have some enterprise customers with a lot of customizations that that's gonna be a challenge for us, so we gotta work around that. Other SharePoint add ins are slid for retirement. This is, this causes a variety of different issues, and there's even things around the secrets and, they call them secrets, which are ways that the add ons can have systems access and things like that. Those are going back. And there's, some of that even reaches back into how far out you can renew a secret and things like that. So, if you need specialized assistance on that, again, a partner or Microsoft would be a good place to go. Then in July of next year, you know, Project Server 2016 and 19, they're gonna be out of support as they, products often do. And then you've got deprecation for SharePoint alerts. And then next August, Project for the Web will finalize its transition to Planner. So, any remaining feature functionality will transition to Planner, Planner premium. And then, of course, they're gonna retire one of the early features of Planner, Project, Project and road map features, that actually worked with Project and Project for the Web, and they're gonna retire that as well. And DevOps. And DevOps. Yep. So, you mentioned when, suggested timelines. You had mentioned, Lester, you have customers who have, you know, strategic windows to work within, like education and possibly, you know, summer holiday or things like that is a good time to get things done. In terms of just overall for our customers, I know Lester and I have talked about this a lot, it takes a long time for many customers to initiate these kind of, you know, to build these kind of projects to go do a modernization. And so, you know, for those who were reliant on some of the legacy underlying things we talked about, this is kinda where this timeline came from. It's saying, you know, you really need to start now, this year, and begin a project during this summer because it typically will take customers a while to get the, you know, the support behind it and whatever they need to do resource wise. If it's gonna be a spend, it's gonna be a license change, it's gonna be a partner to help out with, you know, build it, have an adjustment period. In this case, we're talking about migrating or transitioning off Project Online. Stop using those and then, you know, completely get off of Project Online if that's the legacy transition that you're making. Again, nobody said that they were on it for this call, so we will, we'll move past that quickly. So, I've been talking for a minute. Lester, do you wanna talk just real quickly? And then in the next webinar, we're gonna do a little bit deeper dive into some of these customer testimonials. But we have, you know, customers that are already on this journey in varying different areas or places on the journey of full modernization, right? Yeah, absolutely. And Steph's putting some links in the chat so you can go ahead and click on those if you want to see a little bit more. But to give you a bit of a flavor, CBS in the UK, we work across every sector. We don't just work in a PPM space, we work across Microsoft 365, as well as adoption and change management, which kind of underpins everything that we do with organizations. What is the point in implementing systems and solutions if it is not going to be adopted and used? So, some good examples that we have pulled up here. A couple of very recognizable names if you are in the UK. If you are not, I am sure you know what a Ministry of Justice might do. Some really good case studies and examples here to dive in and see how larger organizations perhaps are adopting and using Microsoft platforms and Microsoft PPM solutions. So, for MOJ, for example, we turned basic planning into something that was an end-to-end process across the organization. It enabled any end user to log a request for any piece of work within the platform and for that to be triaged and routed accordingly to the right teams. It also gave it risk profiles and risk budgets and made sure that the request was being assigned the right level of governance based on the type of request that it was. So, you know, really simple things from, I need a new laptop, my screen's broken, that would get routed to their service management function, all the way through to, I want to implement a new platform for managing prisons across the UK. All of those requests went through the right sized process and we helped them do that by having a pipeline system and a pipeline process that managed and triaged that through to the delivery in Microsoft Planner. So, a really compelling case study there for the MOJ. Network Rail is kind of similar, except this was an example of Network Rail as an organization are quite interesting in that they don't have a centralized top-down governance. They have devolved all of the management of the business, of the organization, into individual routes and regions across the UK. So, for example, how they work in Wales and Western routes and region might be completely different to how they work in Central England, for example. So, we took an approach with them where we built a core platform, a core configuration that contained all of the requirements that top level management would want to see reported together. And then that became our core rollout. And then that solution got deployed across the routes and regions, I think we're up to eight now and then localized. So top Network Rail HQ could have that consolidated view of what's going on across routes and regions, but everyone got to work in their own specific unique flavors as well. So again, a really cool case study there and a very cool project to work on. Very nice. And again, we'll go into a little bit more detail on the next one as well. On the two that we have there, Carolinas Telco is actually from a couple years ago, but it's representative of, we have really, it's really emerging two kinds of customers who are really coming to us with a modernization, you know, approach. One is that they don't have much. They don't have a lot of legacy like Project Online, which is apparently like a lot of folks on this call. And they're coming to us, and they're really trying to get established and use the platform and certain tools to be able to say, alright, this is a starting point, a foundation to go forward. And they were kinda in that area, so they used our product and our, and what we built to have governance so that everything was contained within Teams so everyone would start up their projects and it would be exactly the same and, you know, eliminate all that context switching and aggregated things. And they may have been using, you know, different tools like Excel and Project on desktop and things like that and pulled it all into one. Southern New Hampshire University is on the other end of the spectrum. They've been, they're a larger organization. I think they have a couple hundred project managers maybe. And they've been doing, they traditionally were using things like Project Online and Project. They started using Project for the Web, now Planner. They're on that migration journey, and they're working on ways to fully, to fully automate and fully automate leverage the new platform capabilities. And so, they're very kind of a avant garde organization and thinking forward, but they still have some of the stuff we talked about, some of those challenges of being, you know, mired in some of the complexity of existing customizations and things out there. So, you know, we're helping them through that process, but they're definitely in that journey. So, kinda wanted to highlight two different, two different types of customers that that come in there. So, we're almost ready to wrap it up. Please join us in our next webinar, transitioning, moving from legacy to modern platform. As we kind of hinted, we're gonna go into some of the transition approaches, key steps, challenge areas. We're gonna talk a little bit more, and again, please do download the white paper, but what is Microsoft's role? What are partner roles? What are the types of partners? We'll break that down a little bit because there's a lot of, there's a lot of great partners out there doing a lot of good work. Some are more focused on adoption and change management. Some have IP or, you know, applications that they've built. Both CPS and Innovative-e are in that category. And we'll go more into the real world of success stories and how customers have really gone into what their journey is towards modernization. Again, thank you. The book is available, I think, until midnight. There's the QR code. All kinds of contact information. Feel free to contact us. And I think we have a couple three minutes here if there's any questions. I hadn't even had a chance to look at the questions or the chat to see if anyone's asking questions. Not a huge amount of questions in the in the Q&A, so PDUs. Thanks, Tad, for answering that one. So, yeah, you can go self-report. Yeah. We have a, we can actually send a, there's a, we've got a couple steps within that one that of our partners gave us this. Here's exactly the steps you go to self-report. So, it's like screenshots so we can send that to you. Any other questions? I don't see anything else in the in the Q&A right now. We'll give it another minute. See if anybody has any other questions or comments. Anything you'd like to add, Lester? No. Just add my, add my thanks for taking the time with us. And hopefully, we'll see you on the next one as well where we'll dive into the nuts and bolts of how. How do you do this? What are the things you should consider if you're thinking about replatforming? Yeah, absolutely. And if you do have any questions in the meantime, feel free. Here's all the contact information. Reach back out to us and we'll be happy to connect. It's always great talking to folks about their challenges and any ways we can help to move you forward with your modernization journey. So, again, thanks again, and hope to see you folks on the next one. Thanks, Lester. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Mike. Thank you both, Mike and Lester, and thank all of you for your participation in today's webinar. We do hope you found it valuable and informative. If you do have any questions, please feel free, or any comments, reach out to either Mike or Lester. Their information is on the screen or you can email Innovative-e at info@innovatave-e.com and we'll get back to you. We just might use your question or comment in an upcoming webinar or blog post. Also keep an eye on your inbox for the recording of today's session and the slide deck and additional resources. Thanks again, everyone. Have a great rest of your day. Take care. Bye bye. Bye.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We'll give it just a couple of more minutes as people start to join in. Looks like we have folks from all over the place here. Guess I should have clarified. I'm actually London, UK, not London, Canada. Right? I think people might have noticed when I started talking though. That's what I was about to say. Accent may have just given it away. All right. We're just a few minutes after the hour, so we'll go ahead and get things kicked off. Welcome, everyone, to today's webinar, How to Transition, Moving from Legacy to Modern Platform, presented by Innovative-e and CPS. My name is Stephanie Taylor, and I'm your moderator for today. We're excited to be joined by our partners at CPS, a two-time Microsoft Partner of the Year winner for project and portfolio management and a two time finalist, including last year. A Microsoft solutions partner with over thirty years of expertise; CPS specializes in helping organizations transform the digital workplace. With deep capabilities across modern work, business applications and security, and a strong focus on adoption and sustainable value, CPS brings a people first approach to envisioning, implementing, and supporting Microsoft powered solutions. Innovative e is a seven-time Microsoft Award winner and the 2023 and 2024 Microsoft Partner of the Year for project and portfolio management. We partner with organizations to modernize the entire project and work management ecosystem through a platform first approach. With expertise in AI and Copilot, we deliver sustainable solutions that give your business the agility it needs to thrive and help you become a higher performing organization with happier people. Your speakers today are from Innovative-e, Mike Taylor, and from CPS, Lester Lovelock. Mike Taylor is the founder and CEO of Innovative-e. He began his career writing PPM software for NASA and is a recognized visionary in project and work management with experience as a PPM practitioner, industry thought leader, published author, and process and application innovator. In 2023, Mike wrote The AI Project and Work Management Revolution is Here. It's available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook format. And as a special thank you, today's webinar attendees will receive a free digital copy. We'll have details at the end of our presentation. Lester Lovelock is Head of Practice for Project and Portfolio Management at CPS. With over twenty years at the company, Lester brings deep hands-on expertise across the full spectrum of PPM from on-prem to cloud, integration to optimization. Known for his practical insight and commitment to real world outcomes, Lester leads CPS's efforts to help organizations reimagine project delivery in the modern workplace. He's based in the UK just outside of London. Before we dive in, let's cover a few housekeeping items. Today's webinar is being recorded. A link to the recording along with the slide deck will be sent to you via email within the next few days. You're free to review the content at your convenience and share it with colleagues who couldn't attend today. Please use the Q&A feature on the right-side panel of this platform to ask questions. We will address as many questions as possible as time permits. If you encounter any technical issues such as audio or video problems, please use the chat function to notify us and we'll do our best to assist you promptly. Now with those housekeeping items out of the way, let's get started. I'm pleased to hand the floor over to Mike and Lester. The virtual stage is yours. Thank you, Steph. Thanks, Steph. Appreciate it. Alright. I think I'm gonna get right into the agenda here. So, we talked about the, this is really the third in a series of webinars, a three-part series. And what we covered in the first one was understanding Microsoft's evolution and the future vision. And the second one on the twenty third, why and when to move from legacy modern to the modern platform. And today, we’ll talk about modernizing and finding your strategic window. Then we're gonna break this into a few different areas of transition approaches and key steps, identifying your strategic window itself, and then getting help. What is Microsoft's role and what would and finding the right partner and what that might mean to you. We initially envisioned this webinar as being one after we wrote the whitepaper, but it turned out, really had a lot more content to cover, didn't we, Lester? So ended up breaking it into three. We will have the link to the first two. No one's ever accused us of being brief. eh, Mike. That's right. We'll try to keep it on time today. Again, this whole thing came from, we had the idea of last year. We started on this well, fall or maybe wintertime, right, Lester? Yeah. You know, feels, before Christmas. Yeah. We were gonna try to get it done by the end of the year, but like some projects, they get delayed. Right? Competing priorities. But you can download the whitepaper. It's pretty comprehensive. It's available both from CPS and Innovative-e. The links are there. We'll also have the links at the end of the presentation. So, we really wanted to cover a little bit about what's been said so far. And in the previous two webinars, we asked some questions, some interesting questions. And we wanted a bit of a recap on what your answers were. So, first question we asked was, where are you in your modernization journey? And actually, the most overwhelming answer to that was we're still exploring options, which I found quite interesting because there's a good reason why people turn up to webinars like this, right? They want to understand what the options are and how partners can help and how best to achieve things. I wasn't that surprised with that outcome. Was surprised it was such a low percentage though. Yeah, me too. The next thing we asked was, what's the biggest driver for modernization? Why are you trying to do this? And actually, the overwhelming response here was around improving collaboration and visibility, which again, no great surprise here, but always good to kind of reaffirm what we were already thinking. So, most people really want to see better collaboration because that is really the heart of project program and portfolio management. It's about bringing people and teams together and getting better visibility of what's going on in the organization. We asked about transition approaches and what people's preferred transition approach would be, which is an interesting question. Historically, big bang has been a big thing, but nice to see that people are learning from those historic mistakes and starting to think a bit more about actually using a phased migration approach, taking the time to do things not piecemeal, but more thoughtfully. We asked, how prepared is your organization for AI and project management? Which is a big thing. Microsoft are investing heavily in AI, as are most other organizations these days who work in the tech space. And no great surprise, it's a fairly new technology. Very prepared was only fourteen percent of the response. So clearly there's a lot more work to do and a lot more thought that needs to go into being prepared for AI and project management. Maybe it's even finding use cases for those things, which certainly we've helped customers with in the past, and I know you have as well, Mike. Yep. Modernization challenges. What's the biggest ones? Again, not a huge surprise for people on this call, though. You may be interested to know it was thirty nine percent of challenge was around user adoption, change management. Most projects fail because they don't get adopted. And it's kind of echoed through our findings here. And then finally, when do people expect to take the next modernization step? The next six to twelve months. So welcome to the webinar. This is good content for you if you're on that journey in the next six to twelve months. Hopefully you'll get some good value from what we're talking about today. Right place at the right time. Right place at the right time, absolutely. Now in the spirit of this being a fairly interactive webinar, we'd like to hear from you on this one. So, what type of modernization approach do you prefer? Big bang, rip and replace, transition over time or something else? And if you're thinking about something else, pop it in the chat for us. This poll will go live in just a second. We'd be interested to hear your thoughts. These stats we actually then reuse in other research and other work that we do with customers. So please, as you just saw on the previous slide. All right, so we're getting some answers coming in here. We're seeing a bit of an echo of the phased approach, transition over time, rip and replace. Okay, interesting. We do see that a fair amount with customers as well. We've tried one thing. We don't like it. Rip it out. Start again. Didn't work. Try again. And not surprisingly, though, it's being dominated by transition over time. The rip and replace is and most people have probably been through it one time or another with different technologies. It's fairly painful. So, transition over time, clear front runner here. There's a something else. Someone's too shy to pop that in the chat on what their something else is. No big bang migrations, Okay. No big bangs. Yeah. Alright. Good. Transition over time. And that's, again, people in the right place at the right time. We're gonna talk more about that, and we have in previous ones as well, if you haven't seen those. I think that's, it's an interesting stat, right? Transitioning over time and that being the preferred approach for modernization, because it means that people are investing in a platform. They start in one position and they continue to invest over that to expand and grow that capability. And that could not have been a better segue into this next slide. It's almost like you knew it was coming, Lester. Almost. Almost. So, there's a lot of discussion going on around kind of the, and you'll hear it, Lester and I talk about this all the time, kind of a product centric approach versus a platform centric approach. What do we mean by that? A product centric approach would really be, there's a lot of products that have emerged over the last ten plus years with, you know, born in the cloud solutions, you know, Monday.com, Asana, Smartsheet, all these things are SaaS solutions that are available out there. And, of course, originally, the Microsoft platforms were standalone and then SaaS with Project Online. But what we really mean is when you're thinking about a platform approach that you're not doing some of these things that are on the left. So, it's not single tool focused. It's, you know, it's not speech feature specific. We're really not talking about the technology itself. We're talking about a broader focus. Of course, the technology is a key piece of it. But there is, when you go with a product centric approach, there's a higher risk of obsolescence as well. And when you compare that with more of a platform centric approach, especially, you know, we're talking everything, you know, CPS and Innovative-e, both Microsoft partners, as we've mentioned, we're talking everything unified on the Microsoft platform. There's a whole lot of tools that are built and that out of the box really help with work management itself. There's, you know, no, it's not a secret that one of their biggest pillars of, it's called work, modern work, right? It's one of the six pillars or solutions designations of the modern AI platform now. So, unified ecosystem with Teams, Planner, Power Platform, Copilot, those are, it's a, it's an amazing tool set to get work done. And, of course, now you're seeing more and more, AI powered automation and insights. Of course, seamless collaborations across apps, and that can't really be overstated how valuable that is. In the past when you were using standalone technologies or single tool focused things, you were using things like APIs, and ways to get data in and out of those apps. And now everything is in the modern Microsoft platform is centralized into what's called the dataverse without getting too technical, but, you really can manipulate everything that's happening with any of these apps, through a common interface, common dataset, and a common set of apps, which are things like the Power Apps and Copilot. And of course, have a more of a flexible, scalable foundation. But at the end, what this means is you're really focusing more on long term adaptability and growth. You're really focusing on the outcome and not the tool itself. So really, that's why we talk about a, you know, a platform centric lens and read the whitepaper, you'll see we, we support that with it. There's a lot of research that's been done. You could even go out and take your favorite AI tool, you know, Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever, and ask about product centric versus platform centric approaches to project portfolio management and see what it tells you. See if see if it doesn't sound familiar with some of the stuff we're talking about today. And I think the platform centric approach, Mike, really really works nicely with the Microsoft approach. And this is the whole point of them building a whole ecosystem of work management tools that knit closely together. And it's where partners like us come into our own, right? We understand the whole platform, we understand what integration opportunities there might be and how you might wanna join your stuff together and what that user journey could look like. Yeah, absolutely. And that's, you know, it really is, for the folks who are using the Microsoft platform. It is the platform where most work is getting done and project work. You know, project management is just a subset of your overall work that you're doing in a day. So, if you're involved with that, so the platform is, you know, like you said, ready-made for that. So, what are some transition scenarios if you're trying to start thinking about modernizing? So, there's a few different ways to go. We'll have a couple slides to concentrate on giving you a few different ways to think about this and look at. One is kind of a direct-to-platform. And this is if, and we, we're finding a surprising number of this, I think you guys are too. Right, Lester? Where you've a surprising number of customers who actually are just starting a PPM solution or a PMO solution. Some of them may have already done one, and some of them are saying, you know, we really, we have a collection of tools and we just wanna start and do it from, but we don't, maybe we're using Excel, maybe we're using some third party SaaS or whatever. Let's just start from scratch. Build out build things around Teams and the Power Platform and just try to do it right from the get-go. And then, you know, in 2025, I'm actually surprised how often we still hear that that scenario. Then there's the multistep, and this really means if, and this, you know, with the phase transition over time. Right? Where you already have, we have a lot of customers, I know CPS does as well, that have very long standing project and portfolio management solutions. Some of them may have been around for fifteen, twenty years. Maybe they started off on desktop, and then they went to Project server and then Project online. You know, those things don't transition quickly. The rip and replace is really a bad idea there unless you absolutely have to because, typically there's a lot of customizations and configurations done around there. So, if you can start to transition over time, maybe you can pick a department or a work stream that you can start to use. That's, we do that all the time with our customers and start to pick these things off. And then as you know, it starts to grow and get more momentum and adoption in one area, and you mentioned a minute ago, Lester, adoption is the number one reason that things fail. When you transition over time, it gives the whole solution a better chance to kinda get adopted and, inculcated and working in the organization piece by piece and then can become a solution for the whole organization. Then there's sort of a hybrid, and we actually still see this happening, and that's really where some legacy solutions, whatever they are, concurrently run with, you know, in the transition, that can obviously happen as well. But we have customers who are kind of in this hybrid mode, and they really aren't planning on moving forward. Maybe they will at some point in time when technology dictates it or certain things happen, but they're really running multiple solutions in parallel. But they're finding a lot of value out of the hybrid approach because now they have maybe some of these legacy solutions and some of the modern solutions. But now everybody's collaborating and working in the same way through things like a Teams interface, using the modern platform for your customizations, using things like Power Platform and Power BI for all your visualizations and data. So, it really starts to create a lot more value for the organization, even if you still are using some of the older technology. And it's probably worth mentioning here, Mike, that these aren't the only approaches that you can take. Right? These are the most common transition scenarios we come across. It's not meant to be an all-encompassing slide, but I'm sure ninety-nine percent of the audience here today will fit into one of these scenarios here. Yep. I agree. So, we have another slide here, and this is directly from the whitepaper as well. And I'll go through this quick. There's a lot of animations. But this really kind of shows what a journey can look like. You've got kind of when you when you talk about Microsoft and you and you listen and watch what Microsoft talks about, they always talk about data on their secure platform. You know, it's fundamental. Security is fundamental to everything, and I talked about the Dataverse. And so, you know, it creates a nice foundation layer, and you see those different products across the bottom. We've talked some about those and how those can work together on a secure platform. Security and AI responsibility are key to everything in building solutions these days. Over time, you can start to increase your Copilot and automation capabilities. And then we have some graphics here that kinda show where people are and what a journey could look like starting with the disparate tools. You can keep some of those tools. You can centralize some. You can start to go through, and this would be more if you like your hybrid approach or your transitional approach. You start to move to a Teams centric approach where you have Planner premium or other tools maybe, but Planner premium is almost always what we recommend now for the first, to, for anything that's new. You may still be using something like Project Online for a while, but then you're starting to use Planner premium for everything that's maybe new projects or new departments that are coming on. And then you start to think about leveraging more robust capabilities of the, of the applications that are there in the platform. One of the things that's true when you're, you know, you're buying the Microsoft platform is it's always being innovated. The largest software provider on the planet, probably arguably the largest work management provider on the planet. They're always making improvements. I mean, they've got continuous integration, continuous deployment nowadays, and you probably have noticed using Teams, think new things show up all the time. And Planner's the same way. They're always innovating and building it. So, you're gonna continue to get better and better functionality over time as you will also, and we'll talk a little bit about partner solutions in IP as well. But over time, you can start to eliminate third party apps if you decide to go that route, and you can start to you know, there's technical debt and additional cost when you're running multiple apps that do the same thing. We've talked about that before. And then you can start to look at actually turning off things like legacy apps, like Project online. It really hasn't changed in about ten years. Microsoft has been giving direction for at six or seven years now that you need to start thinking about transitioning away from Project online for the long term. And then ultimately, where you'd like to get to, most customers, you know, that really think through this and roadmap it, think about getting to a unified, project and work management, collaborative work management platform with, you know, a unified dataset, robust capabilities to build for the future, future proofing for Copilot and AI. And then from there, can continue with, is it true with any solution, is you can continue to develop it and grow it over time. IP partner and solutions, we'll talk more about that, can help tie this together. Most organizations today, as we've seen some of the surveys we've done are kinda on this far left side. A lot of people are starting to realize they really would like to get to the right, and then you can do a multi-step or you can go with a full approach like we talked about a minute ago in the previous slide. We just go straight to it. So, what are some of the key steps? And this, again, is in the whitepaper as well. I just wanna highlight some of these real quickly. Some of the key steps to, to getting to where you need to be from where you are. I had a teacher in college that always said everything is simple no matter, it was a calculus teacher, he said no matter how sophisticated it sounds, there's three basic steps. Where are you now? Where do you wanna go? And then figure out how get there. Right? So, this is a little bit of the how you get there. So, the first thing is to really assess your current platform and your pain points. And this is, you know, dig in and understand why you're doing some of the process. So, we brought this up in the oops. I don't know why I did that. Is to really understand kinda where you are with your pain points. And sometimes this means even looking at current things that you're doing and saying, do we really need to do them? And we mentioned this in the last webinar. We've seen customers that, as they start to face things that, you know, changes in the platform and things like that, they start to assess it and go, there's things we don't need to do anymore that we've been doing. And, you know, and some of those discussions are driven by necessity of things that are coming up. But if you start to think about your overall journey, that's a good time to really assess everything. Then really think about the future aligned with the business goals. What are you trying to chase over long term? We have customers, for instance, in the financial services industries that are thinking in terms of multi years of where they need to be with their project and work management data and what they might need to be reporting on in the future. So, what are those future business goals look like? What are the things that they've got now that they think they're gonna have to chase in the future, and how are they gonna get there? Again, you will hear this, you know, sort of a broken record here, but build on the platform, Teams, Copilot, Power Platform, and then third party. We'll talk a little bit more about third party and what partners can bring to the table when we talk about extending the platform. And then, you know, executing a transition. And, again, it goes back to the, everybody was saying eighty percent, eighty plus percent transition. Starting with a pilot, build that core team. I know, Lester, you guys have a, an adoption and change management specialty, and you have certifications in that and all of that to help customers get on board and adopted. We have likewise, but starting small and doing things and get winnable wins are always a very good way to ensure that you're gonna have success long term. And then again, create a long-term roadmap that, with emphasis on adoption. One of the things here is if you have this roadmap, it's amazing how often people don't necessarily do that. They kind of go after what they need to do tactically to get a solution in place. Think about the long term. If you don't do that, then you're not necessarily keeping your most strategic things in mind. You're focusing on the, you know, the daily busy work and the things, you need a new report to reflect this or whatever. But really creating a roadmap for long term is really a great way to go. I think to add to this, Mike, this is very much a technology assessment and approach, right? But one thing you really shouldn't underestimate is the, this is all about technical debt when you're understanding and assessing current tools and pain points. But what you may also need to review and probably should review is what about the process debt that you've built up? What about all of the wraparound making these tools work neatly together or as efficiently as possible that would need to be reviewed and reworked in new space to become more efficient. Again, just because you've always done it one way doesn't mean it's the best way. Take the opportunity to review and understand that as well. Yeah, yeah. An example I was saying a few minutes ago was actually two of our companies were doing detailed time reporting. And it turns out that the need for doing that has since gone away and they didn't ever do anything about it. And then they start taking a look at it and they're we don't need that level of detail anymore. So let's not, that's not, this doesn't need to be automated. We don't even need the process now. Yeah. No one's gonna have a go at you for giving them time back in the day. Absolutely. All right. Next poll question. Is your current solution strategic? So where are you? Is what you have currently a critical part of delivering your organizational value? Is it fundamental to the things you do and the way you do them? Is it just important, but not necessarily that critical? Or is it just seen as a means to get information in? Is it sometimes seen as a place you have to go and do an update because that's the process? Or are you not sure at all how strategic your solutions are? Where are you? Where's your organization? We'd love to hear. Alright. So, we got the poll up. Some people coming in. Considered important, but not critical. Viewed as a means to manage information. See that? I'm pulling for a critical part of delivering organizational values. It's certainly an underdog. It is an underdog right now. Okay. Then we've some people, very unsurprised that the third option is leading here. A lot of systems seem to be brought in just to get visibility of that data, and that's all it is. It's busy work to show you're doing things, but not necessarily seen as a critical part of actually managing your portfolios of work. Yeah, and when you think about the statistics, and we've talked a lot about this, that project success rates as self-identified by organizations have hovered between twenty-five- and thirty-five percent success, which means sixty-five to seventy-five percent failure. I think this mindset that sets into organizations is a big part of that. It's you think about it as, you know, it's sort of tactical and not strategic. It doesn't get the investment in time and energy that it deserves. So, we only have seven percent said it's part of delivering organizational value. Wow. Alright. So, speaking of strategy, Lester. Yeah. Well, how do you get buy in to do something that is strategic? How do you make sure that what you're doing actually gets some legs in your organization and you're given authority to go and do stuff? Well, there's a few different ways to do that, and we'll cover that in the next couple of slides. So, first of all, excuse the very on the nose imagery here, finding strategic windows. So, it can take a few different forms, right? It may be that actually you have to bid as part of an annual planning or an annual budget cycle. That's your strategic window. You have to put together a business case and bid for it and justify. And in previous webinars, we've talked about building a good business case. We've done a webinar on the CPS website, which you can go and access about building a good one and being able to articulate benefits and making it realistic. So, feel free to go and consume that. So first strategic window, annual planning or budget cycles. Other things you may not have considered though, what about when you have changed within your organization, when there's new leadership? New leadership always comes with clean slates or a legacy of how they worked in previous organizations that they want to bring into the new place. It's a good opportunity to put together a case for doing something strategic, and it doesn't have to be Microsoft. Of course, we'd prefer if it was, but it's about finding that window and being able to put together a good case for managing work through a modern platform. Well, finally, kind of aligning yourselves with other initiatives. So, in the current world where we're doing everything AI, maybe there's an opportunity there to piggyback on the back of an AI initiative or a digital transformation initiative. We see this with loads of our customers, I'm sure you do as well, Mike, when we're talking to them about AI and about getting ready or a Microsoft 365 migration from Google or whatever. How are you managing that work? Wouldn't this be a good opportunity to embed and implement some really good practices in the platform to help gain visibility of the portfolio of work that that you're trying to deliver here? Yeah. So, there are definite routes to come in by stealth here. Sorry, mate. Go ahead. No, I was going say, absolutely, we see that all the time. Yeah. And a little top tip here. Try to frame any modernization that you're doing as a transformation and not just a technology upgrade. Sometimes a technology upgrade is an appropriate thing if have aging tools and it's the only way to do it by stealth, but actually, a business transformation actually brings a lot more value than just a straight upgrade of tech. So, think about that when you're articulating your reasons why. Other things you might want to consider for getting buy in, leveraging pain. It sounds really brutal and macabre, but if you can articulate and solve a problem that people feel in their day to day lives, such as delivery being delayed all the time, consistently over budget or management not being able to get the information that they need, that's a good lever to say, well, let's do something strategic about that. Let's solve that problem with an approach, not just a piece of kit, not just a go and buy a black box solution. Actually, let's do something strategic that ties things together and solves a problem. Or maybe you find that, that actually the best way of doing that is when the pain is fresh. And so failed projects, a big transformation program maybe have just fallen over, or an audit that you had run by an external party that just failed because maybe you were looking at ISO twenty-seven thousand and one accreditation and you failed your repeatable processes. Well, actually, that might be a good opportunity there to start bringing in initiatives like this to solve some of those fresh pain problems. And then finally, budget. We work with many organizations, public sector and private, predominantly the public, who get to the end of a fiscal year and have a whole bunch of money remaining because they just haven't spent it. But if they don't spend it, they won't get it the next year. So, you can come in by stealth that way. If there's funds or there's upcoming budget allocations that you need bid for, maybe you start with a pilot. Maybe you start small and go in and build, build value that way. And I can tell you, Lester, just interject that we have a couple of those happening right now with some customers who are running in, here in the US, a lot of governments, their fiscal years ended in September. September. And so, they're saying, yes, go ahead and get something started. But you can't start at this point in the year. You have to start well in advance and have been socializing the idea and building the case for the, for the solution so that when those funds do become available, they can go, yeah. Let's use them for that. Yeah. Absolutely. Socializing these ideas and actually getting a business case through the process takes way longer than it should sometimes. So, if you want something started, start the conversation early. Start articulating the benefit and the strategic solution you're trying to pitch way before you have to make a budget call. Yep. Absolutely. And you got a tip there at the bottom there about use inefficiencies and expected improvements, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, people love stats, people love data. My organization is absolutely data driven. It's hard to get something signed off unless you have a data point to say this is why it would be a good thing to do. I'm sure most organizations are the same. Use that data, gather it, show the pain points, show what expected improvement would look like, and then you've got something to prove against. If you don't have a baseline, you can't articulate a benefit, why would anyone do it? Yep, absolutely. All right, so we're going to go through our third poll question here. How do you leverage Microsoft and or partners? So, do you use information from Microsoft or partners or both for guidance? Do you, do you have your own solution planning? Do your own solution planning and implementation? Do you hire consultants or partners for solution planning? Do you hire consultants or partners? Same thing for planning or, and or implementation support and growth, or you're trying to figure it out and from whom. So kinda where are you on that continuum? There's a lot of good information. We'll actually share some more of that here in a little bit from Microsoft and partners, especially CPS and Innovative-e, obviously. But, where are you on the kind of the continuum of where do you go to get your information? You know, most of the time, people will, you can, anybody who does any kind of solution work understands that customers are probably seventy to eighty percent through their journey before they ever reach out for help. So yeah. So, somebody, it looks like some folks are already saying they do their own solution planning and implementation. So where do you get your information? Do you get it from Microsoft? Hire consultants? Looks like that's in there as well, in the race now. Sometimes people will do, the reason the third one's in there is sometimes people will hire consultants just for solutions. They take the, you know, the plan that's been built, and they go, they work it themselves. Yeah. The third option there is an interesting one because you're putting a lot of trust in a partner to be agnostic for you and to actually recommend a solution that is gonna actually support and not just that lines their pockets the best. Yes. We don't have many of that. And it's interesting that we're not seeing that go up either because I am reading more, I saw an article in the Harvard Business Review recently about the real shift away from using, you know, kind of the traditional management consultants for planning your solutions and things like that. So, I think if we had done this poll ten years ago, that would have probably come up a little higher, number three there. Yeah. Not surprised by the by the fourth option, though. If you want something done quickly and you want it done very well, you tend to rely on partners rather than trying to bring those skills in house initially. Clearly, there'll be a transition plan from the implementation consultant to in house. But in the interest of speed and efficiency, it's typically best to hire experts. Right. Absolutely. All right. So, it's a pretty good spread across the board. But yeah, like you said, the hire partners for support and growth is forty one percent. Next is do their own solution implementation planning. And then of course, it's the tie between partners just for guidance and consultants for planning. Thanks, everybody, for answering the poll. Again, it's good information. And like Lester said, we'll use that again in the future. So, with that, since we talked about partners and Microsoft, what are the kind of the roles of Microsoft and the partners in the partner ecosystem? The project ecosystem has been around for a very long time, probably one of the oldest ecosystems within the Microsoft partner community, which has, of course, been around since almost the very beginning of Microsoft. But Microsoft's role, let's talk about that for a second, Lester. They really, you have a bunch of different entities at Microsoft. Right? You have the product group, the Planner group, which is formerly the Project group, Planner premium now. They really drive education, product direction, community engagement. They're there to be a source of information and kind of a gateway to next steps. If you wanna have a partner alignment, have they will recommend a few partners and things like that. But they also have account teams that, which are really important these days. Right? They align platform licensing and connect customers with partners. And, in some cases, they know their customer really well. And if they know what they need, and they’re familiar with partners who have a particular type of solution that may best align with what that customer needs, one partner over another, they may recommend that as well. So, it’s really good to get to know those folks. I know, Lester, you guys work with Microsoft, as we do. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, interestingly, the Planner product group, they tend to look after things like roadmaps, publish that, blogs, marketing messaging, all of that sort of stuff sits within the Planner product group. And we, as partners, tend to work fairly closely with the Planner product group as well, and we get an opportunity to feed in with where we think enhancements would come from. So, leverage your partners for that type of information. We have access into the product group. We can inform them of burning needs and burning desires. There are other avenues to do that, to a greater or lesser success sometimes, but that’s really what the Planner product group is about. And then the account teams, depending on what kind of organization you are and your size and your scale, you may even have a dedicated Microsoft account manager who looks after your organization. It’s imperative that you work with them when you’re thinking about strategic initiatives like this, because if you’re looking at partner solutions, if you’re looking at engaging a partner to do this, they will have a strong history of working with good partners before, and will be able to make really good recommendations for you. And I’m not just saying that because we get recommended all the time by Microsoft, but genuinely, it is a good source to pick up. Yeah, one hundred percent. And they has a, the product group actually has a way to filter and, by organizational needs and things. They have surveys and things that they do, which are really great to help direct people in a particular direction, whether they need an adoption and change management partner for training or adoption, or they need somebody who’s really skilled in Power Platform. So, you get all that insight built into the Microsoft ecosystem as well, which is great. Great. Talking about partner contributions, the partner program, some people may have known it as the Gold and Silver program in the past. It’s been rebranded by Microsoft, it’s now the Cloud Partner Program, the AI Cloud Partner Program. And there’s no longer special or product-centric designations, like we used to be a Gold, and CPS used to be a Gold PPM partner. Right? So that doesn’t really exist anymore. You’re now a solutions designation. They’ve collapsed to six or seven. Modern work is one of the main ones that's out there, and we have that, and CPS does CPS has a bunch of others too. And specializations like adoption and changing and product alignment, those are all very important as well. So it is important to look at that for partners as well. So how well that they're ingrained in and do they invest in the partner programs because that, that's not just about the things we talked about above and working with Microsoft. It's also how well are they, is the partner following the skilling programs and things and the requirements that Microsoft puts on them to, you know, remain relevant and current on the technology, and all those things. So, it's important that, you know, your partner was verified. Yeah. Just to lift the curtain on that a little bit more, because I'm conscious that we probably have a whole bunch of people here who aren't partners, there’s a whole bunch of things that go into those accreditations and those specializations. It's not just you take some exams and away you go. A lot of it is about having provable case studies and provable historic work. And then there's a whole bunch around how much you've done with Microsoft, the size and scale of engagement, the number of engagements, and being able to keep that relevant and modern by doing it repeatedly. So, it's really good to find partners who have those relevant specializations and advanced specializations, because it means they're doing the things that they should be doing to be a competent partner. Right. And speaking of which, what type of partner do you need? And we mentioned it a minute ago, but you've got people who specialize in different things, and then you have partners who have project specialization or a broad area of capabilities from planning, implementation, change management. You also have a lot of partners who have preconfigured or purpose-built solutions, like Power Apps accelerators. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, who have built their own PPM solutions and scenarios on top of the platform. So, all of those are things to consider in terms of what do you need, what's your best value to get out of a partner. And there's a lot more we could get into. We could probably spend a whole hour just talking about all the intricacies around all of that stuff. Right, Lester? Yeah, one hundred percent. It's quite an in-depth topic, even as a partner. As a Head of Practice, I find it hard to navigate sometimes. Yeah. I think one of the things that's important though is when you're identifying a partner to work with, it's about identifying someone who can take you on that whole journey, not just the initial part, but beyond where you, beyond where you are now, and beyond what Phase One might look like, and can actually support you beyond that. Right. Absolutely. That's a nice segue into this next one, what do you look out for in finding, you know, a proven track record, obviously, most folks are going to do that, but also the adoption and change management piece, because as you pointed out Lester, that's the number one reason solutions fail, not just project management solutions. The understanding of the models is really critical. There's been an evolution of the technology. A lot of people are in different phases of that. We, and I know you guys are into this all the time, we have folks who might have been on Project Server, now they need to get to the cloud so they then can continue their modernization journey. So, you really have to have extensive knowledge of, kind of, what are the deployment models that are there. This next one, on evaluating the overlap with core functionality, how well does the partner really have depth beyond just a particular one stovepipe kind of solution like Planner or Project? Right? Understand the whole platform and the capabilities for Power Platform and some of those things. And as you said, Lester, balancing external speed with value realization, there's a value to be made. The sooner a solution has value, the sooner you get it in, the more value you're going to realize by definition, right? Then there's the blend of consultancy and tech. There's really, it’s a, there’s a little bit of an art and science to it. Right? Understanding your particular needs. So, and we'll get into this when we talk about what solutions CPS and Innovative-e offer, but there's definitely a consultancy component of that being able to listen and understand what are the biggest priorities that you have and what will work best for your organization. It's not just a matter of saying that this is your top priority. Well, that may be your top priority, but is that really going to work best from an adoption perspective so I can get it in. So, and then, that next point goes back to the one we talked about a minute ago a little bit too. It's beyond the PPM product knowledge, the whole platform capabilities and knowledge, and when and where to leverage what. And then the last one is super important too, is really, you know, larger partners are probably going to have a more breadth of industry experience. You may have some that are more niche-focused in, you know, server, you know, government type places or things like that. But it's really important to have that kind of knowledge, because they will be able to help you through the contracting in terms of the things that are asked for, because we do this kind of stuff all the time. So, we have the same questions that are asked. And a lot of our customers are not in IT. They don't buy technology necessarily. So, if you're in project management or project management office, you might need help with understanding how to get through that process. And, of course, customer evidence and references are really important in that regard as well. Anything to add to that, Lester? No, I think we've covered there and I'm looking at the clock. Yeah, we need to get moving here. So, this is key dates. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, Mike. Okay. So, this is just a recap of the previous. We've had this in every single webinar just because there's a bit of a fire under people's feet at the minute, we want to keep the interest going on this one. There are some key platform dates around the Microsoft legacy systems that we need to talk about. One that's just passed, August 1st was the official retirement of Project for the web. Sounds really scary and doom and gloom. I thought this was a brand new platform. Realistically, it's just a rebrand. Project for the web, the name, has been retired and it's now all under the umbrella of Planner. So don't be too scared if you see Project for the web has gone and has retired, it's not. Same things like Project Online, that hasn't gone anywhere yet, there is no official coms around end of life or anything like that for Project Online. You can still buy it, you can still implement it, and we still offer some of our customers. So just keep that in mind. Coming up next year, around April, there are some deprecations coming around things like SharePoint, and these really relate specifically to Project Online capability. So, if you're already on a modern platform like Planner, don't worry. But if you're on Project Online, be aware of these dates. So, things like SharePoint 2013 workflows, they will completely stop working April 2nd, 2026. You will no longer be able to build a workflow using SharePoint Designer. You will no longer be able to operate a project management lifecycle workflow within Project Online. They will all be gone. So, if you haven't started planning for that now, I would suggest you strongly think about it if you're using that functionality, that capability. Same for things like remote event receivers, and if you don't know what that is, that's probably fine, you're not using it. But there are some third-party tools, like, we work with one called Datastore, which takes data out of Project Online and puts it into SQL databases. They're triggers really for data events happening. So, you update a project, you save it, you publish it, that triggers an event. Those are being deprecated in Project Online or in SharePoint with new ways of working, but it will stop things working in Project Online if you are leveraging that capability. And the same for SharePoint add-ins. And again, in the Project Online arena, this will only really impact you if you've added applications from the app catalog or anything like that. There are a whole bunch out there that some of our customers have used previously. They'll be getting retired come April 2nd. Then, moving forward into July, some of the on-prem capabilities around Project Server will be going end of life. So, 2016 and 2019, they'll be going end of life. Worry not, if you have to stay on-prem, Project Server Subscription Edition is still around, still supported, no end-of-life date. But again, if you are on those number, those year number platforms, you probably need to think about moving onto the subscription edition version, which is still on premise, but there is a migration avenue there. And some of our defense customers have no choice but to be on-prem. Very, very much worth mentioning there. July 14th as well, SharePoint alerts, they'll be deprecated. So, if you sign up to risks or issue alerts or whatever in Project sites in Project Online, those will not work. You can work around that with Power Automate if you want to. And then, August 2026, Project for the web officially finishes that transition into Planner. All record of Project for the Web will have been disappeared by then. I'm sure it'll still exist in a help file somewhere, but it should all be under the Planner umbrella then, as well as the retirement of the Project and Roadmap Teams apps. And again, if you don't know what those are, don't worry, you're probably not using those. There are a whole bunch of links in this deck which you will click on when we share it with you, so please go and have a look. If you already have a partner in place, they should be communicating this data to you. If you don't, here we are, we're giving you it now, which is a fantastic segue into the next question. Let us help. Yeah. Let us help, please. We want your work to be a success. So, this is a small piece about CPS here. You heard at the beginning of this session who we are. This is the breadth of service and the breadth of offerings that CPS can provide to our customers. We are predominantly a UK-based consultancy. We do work in Europe as well. If you need US, Mike's here to talk about Innovative-e. But if you wanted to work with us, these are some of the services we can provide. So, if you need help building out a business case, if you need help justifying why an investment in a modern platform is a good thing, we can absolutely help with that. We've done it for dozens of other customers before with great success for the most part, getting them through into actually implementing. So that's about defining and writing down your real tangible benefits and helping you, again, understand that baseline of where you are and where you want to be. In that vein, developing a roadmap with you, we can support. If you don't quite know how to roll out beyond one part of the organization, if you don't know how to increase maturity through whatever maturity roadmap or benchmarking tool you're using, we can support with that. We can support with technology strategy. We are a Microsoft-only house, so we will only support you with Microsoft technology strategies. But for the most part, we have found that our customers tend to want to use a cloud, not multiple clouds. We can talk about migration. If you are on legacy tech, if you do need to move from old to new, we can help you with that. We can help you plan. We can go through those steps that Mike and I have talked about today, and we can get you there safely and speedily as much as possible. We also have accelerators, for a lot of these things. If you want to get going with tech fast, we can talk about enhancements to those core accelerators or to your existing platforms as well as integrations across other platforms, not just within Microsoft. And ACM, we've talked about adoption and change management, making it a success. We bake that into every project that we do, so there is a degree of that, but if you want enhanced offerings around it, we can absolutely support. As well as wider Microsoft 365 consultancy, if you want to know a bit more about anything else Microsoft 365, we work in every workload that Microsoft offers. And as well as having a support service, we have access to real people who sit waiting to be asked questions and are more than happy to solve those. So, we offer those support services too. And then I'm not going to touch on the detail of who we are. You can read that, but we are an older UK-recognized framework. So, if you wanted to engage with us, you can do it through Crown Commercial Service, G Cloud 13, 14, Joska, Digital Outcomes. We're also a Fastrack Ready partner as well. So, plenty of ways to work with us. Or you can just go direct if you really want to do that. We're more than happy to do that too. Awesome. Thanks, Lester. And in the interest of time, I'll run through the Innovative-e slide. Not a whole lot different. In fact, the tenure that we have and the number of folks we have working for us and the certifications and awards and everything are very similar. We have a, we don't have as many nice icons though. We are really focusing more on just the project and work management. We're not as broad as I think CPS is in terms of some of the other workloads, but we do have kind of the four, we look, see it in the traditional four, kind of, life cycle phases there, plan, build, grow, and then optimize. We have some customers, as Lester mentioned, that want to come in, have a partner come in to help them do something and then pretty much just be there as needed for top-end support. But we also have others that have been with us for ten plus years who want us to continue to be involved. They want to stay more focused on their business, and they want to have us involved with their ongoing project work management solution. So, it's an ongoing journey with many of our customers. And speaking of a journey, we oftentimes talk about this graphic we like to use a lot is what we've been talking about in this whole webinar series is really that platform modernization is foundational to unlocking a lot of additional, if you look at that, the little things with the endpoints, the arrows that are value points, you can unlock a tremendous amount of value over time by making this transition to a platform and modernizing on the platform. So it’s what, the story we like to tell all of our customers and really help them unlock that value. Because I think, sitting where we are today, it's a brighter future for project and work management than I've ever seen in a few decades, because of all the capabilities of the platform and everything. So, it's pretty exciting. And I think we're going to run out of time to cover this, see if there's any Q&A. But these are some partner spotlights that we have and customer spotlights, really. We've talked about these in some of the other webinars that we've done. And I don't know if there's nothing to mention here real quick. Lester, we've done great work with some of our customers, and you guys have done phenomenal work. I will tell you, the case that you just dropped about a couple of weeks ago was awesome. Yeah, I don't know why we seem to be big in the rail industry in the UK at the minute. Network Rail is a historic one. Well, yes, historic last six months. We've just finished Great Western Rail as well, so that's just been published. Plenty of referenceability for both of us. Yeah. That's right. The new one was Great Western. Awesome. So, we're down to just a couple minutes. There's some links. I forgot to mention this at the top of the webcast, but the book is available for free on Amazon today until midnight Pacific Standard Time. So, if you want to pick it up, it's available there. There's all of our contact information. Looking to see if there's any comments or questions. I do see one comment in there of how we get an organization to adopt this tool and move away from legacy. I think we touched on that a little bit, Shelly, in terms of the ways, the windows of opportunities. But if you need to talk in more detail about that, Lester and I would be happy to have a side conversation. There can be some intricacies there. You say, you know, using desktop version. Desktop is going to be fine. I think a lot of people will continue to use it for a long time, but I think it's really going to be relegated to a planning tool, not part of a collaborative solution, because it's disconnected from everybody else. Any other questions or comments? Don't forget, if you haven't seen the first two, I believe the links are in there. If they're not, let us know. They may be on the registration page, but all the recordings are available. And as Steph said at the beginning of this call, this recording will be available as well. And of course, if anybody has questions afterwards, feel free to reach out to us. Yeah. Absolutely. All of our contact details are up on screen now. Again, you'll get these slides and access to the recording after this. So please do get in touch if you have any questions or you want some support on your journey. Yep. Well, Lester, I'm kind of sad to see this series ending. We'll have to do another one. It's been a lot of fun. Let's get another whitepaper underway, Mike. I’m sure we've got plenty to write about. Yeah. Yep. It's always evolving, evolving very quickly. So, thank you for participating, everybody. And, Lester, I want to say special thanks to you for this journey of working on the whitepaper and doing this webinar. It's been a lot of fun. It's a pleasure as always, Mike. I really enjoy working with you too. Yep, likewise. All right. Thank you both, Mike and Lester. And thank you, all of you for participating in today's webinar. We hope you found it valuable and informative. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to either Mike or Lester, and we might just use your question in an upcoming podcast or blog. Keep an eye out on your email inbox for the recording of today's session and some additional resources. Thanks again. Everyone have a great rest of your day. Thanks everybody. Thanks. Bye.