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I am new to Microsoft Dataverse and the common data model.
I want to build a model-driven app that would help us manage all of our project management needs. We manage software development projects and other non-development projects. At a minimum, I have the need to track user stories, their associated tasks, the time spent on a task by day, the accomplishments of the resource for the work they did that day for a given task, capture status updates at the story and project level, prioritize user stories with various stakeholders, etc.
At first, I was just going to create separate tables for how I envisioned each entity (Program, Project, Epic, Story, Task, Task Timesheet, etc.), but then thought perhaps some of the standard tables that come with Dataverse may work for my needs.
QUESTION 1: One of the reasons I am posting is because I wanted to know if anyone had some example model-driven apps for project management, requirements management, agile development management, support (helpdesk tickets/incident) management, etc.
I am sure there are a lot of great already-built applications out there, but it doesn't appear that my work company has subscriptions/licenses for those products. So, I think I will need to build something myself to help our team manage our projects better. But I don't want to reinvent the wheel, especially if there are free or at least example apps out there.
QUESTION 2: Would you consider a user story to be a type of task, and then the tasks for the user story to be sub-tasks? I was thinking it might make sense to use the Task table to capture my user stories, but I would want to extend the table I think for user story specific fields. I was going to make it its own table, but then I was thinking about the future - and what if I want to show nested tasks in something like a MS Project file. I thought having Stories and Tasks in separate lists might make it messy. Any thoughts?
Thanks for any responses. I feel pretty dumb for trying to build out functionality that I am sure already exists much better in other tools - but if our company doesn't have those tools, what else can I do? Or maybe we do have tools that we are actually underutilizing.
Free for any licensed Office365 organizations, this SharePoint & Teams template makes one source of truth for a project log, kanbans, GANTTs, workload trackers, & update notifications:
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Project-Tracker-SharePoint-and-Teams/td-p/1788102
Very Agile friendly too
I looked at a load of options a few years back, and the closest I found was Project Service Automation (now Dynamics Project Operations lite) - which still required a fair bit of customisation.
Personally I would build something custom. It doesn't need to be fancy, you could use a single entity with a hierarchical relationship to link Epics > Features > User Stories, then use a choice column to define what it is (Epic, Feature, etc) and the OOTB owner column to record who is responsible for that piece of work.
Another option would be to build a set of tables with 1:N relationships (like you first thought)
I like the hierarchy visual that comes with the single entity approach
Neil Pankhurst wrote a great blog on hierarchical relationships a few years back
To answer your questions directly:
Question 1 - I have done in the past, and recommend doing a custom app, there isn't a product I'm aware of that wouldn't require serious customisation
Question 2 - in theory you could use the task table, but I personally would recommend using a custom table, as one Story can have multiple tasks, each with different owners.
Hope this helps
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