January 2025 Release Notes

Modified on Wed, 29 Jan at 8:49 AM

28th January Release


New - FluidAI: Your AI-Powered Project Assistant

Effective project and portfolio management depends on having real-time insights into project health, risks, financials, and resource capacity. Yet, PMOs and project managers often lose valuable time manually gathering, analysing, and presenting data—time that could be better spent making strategic decisions. FluidAI transforms this process by acting as an AI-powered project assistant, enabling teams to move from data collection to decision-making in seconds.


PMOs, project managers, and delivery teams can ask questions about their projects or portfolios using natural language. The assistant quickly provides clear, actionable answers or concise summaries, helping users stay informed and proactive in their decision-making.


Here are some examples of questions users can ask the assistant:

  • What are the key risks in this project?
  • What are the next steps for this project?
  • Are there any blockers or issues?
  • and more!


Whether you need quick clarity on project risks, resource availability, or financial performance — or have more nuanced questions — FluidAI delivers insights in seconds, allowing you to stay focused on delivery and strategy. With FluidAI, the possibilities are limitless: simply ask, and get the answers you need.



FluidAI is seamlessly integrates into the Project Workspace and Project Dashboard pages, enabling PMOs and project managers to access its powerful capabilities whether they are managing a project or reviewing a project portfolio.



Note on data security. Fluid operates on private AI models (hosted in our MS Azure environment), ensuring that your data is never sent to third-party AI services or stored outside of Fluid's secure environment. All queries and responses remain within Fluid services, maintaining strict data confidentiality and compliance. You can trust FluidAI to provide insights without compromising data security.



Automated Governance and Assurance Engine

Fluid Governance (formally known as Cortex), is a governance engine designed to strengthen assurance reporting and exception management within your project portfolio. It ensures project compliance by continuously monitoring key governance metrics, highlighting exceptions, and enabling PMOs to take corrective action before risks escalate. It therefore enables organisations to improve oversight, enhance data accuracy, and drive strategic focus by identifying potential risks early and ensuring projects stay on course. 


In this release, we have better embedded governance into the project workspaces and project dashboards, making it easier for PMOs to track compliance, monitor key metrics, and take action within their existing workflows. 


Key Features

  1. Assurance Reporting & Project KPIs
    Fluid Governance provides a structured approach to governance assurance by tracking key project performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs ensure projects adhere to compliance, quality, and risk standards, allowing PMOs to validate project health and performance with confidence.

  2. Managing by Exception
    Instead of manually reviewing every project, PMOs can focus on the areas that need attention. Fluid Governance highlights exceptions to governance rules, enabling Assurance Managers to proactively address risks and prevent project delays.

  3. Customisable Governance Framework
    PMOs can configure governance criteria to align with organisational policies and objectives. These criteria can include financial thresholds, milestone adherence, resource utilisation, and risk management, ensuring governance remains relevant and actionable.

  4. Continuous Oversight & Early Intervention
    Real-time monitoring and automated alerts enable PMOs to detect governance concerns before they escalate. By identifying potential gaps early, Fluid Governance supports proactive intervention, ensuring project KPIs remain on track and minimising disruptions.

  5. Informed Decision-Making for Assurance Managers
    With structured governance reporting and project KPIs, Assurance Managers and executives gain a clearer picture of project status and portfolio health. This data-driven approach supports faster, more informed decision-making, ensuring governance drives project success and aligns with strategic goals.



How Does Fluid Governance Work?

  1. Configure Governance Rules: Define the criteria and rules that align with your portfolio’s governance framework.

  2. Create Data Checks: Establish data checks across various project capabilities, including Resources, Financials, Health, Schedule, and Governance.

  3. Monitor Project Compliance: Use the Governance Assessment reporting tool (available from the project workspace and project dashboards) to monitor and review project compliance against the configured rules.

  4. Communicate Best Practices: Roll out and enforce reporting standards and best practices via Fluid Governance.




Delivery teams

This release introduces key enhancements to the Delivery Teams functionality, designed to empower PMOs, project managers, and delivery team managers with greater flexibility and visibility. Delivery Teams provide a centralised workspace for managing resources, tracking capacity, and ensuring alignment with project priorities, making them essential for effective team and workload management. These updates provide new ways to manage resource assignments, track team contributions, and adapt dynamically to project needs. 


Assign Delivery Teams as Placeholders

The Delivery Teams functionality now allows you to assign entire teams as placeholders for actions, impacts (such as risks, issues, or dependencies), or schedule tasks. This feature is particularly valuable during the early stages of planning or when specific team members have yet to be identified. By assigning work to a delivery team, you can ensure that responsibilities are accounted for without waiting to finalize individual allocations.




This capability is also ideal for high-level project planning. Teams can now be allocated to projects with defined monthly capacity, serving as placeholders until the exact resources are determined. This flexibility keeps project timelines on track, prevents planning bottlenecks, and supports seamless transitions when team member assignments are finalized. Once the specific team member responsible for the work is identified, their allocation can easily replace the placeholder assignment, ensuring smooth handoffs and accurate resource tracking.


This enhancement empowers project managers to maintain forward momentum in project execution while providing delivery team managers with clear visibility of their team's planned involvement across tasks and projects. It ensures resource planning is both flexible and actionable, even in dynamic or uncertain project environments.


To assign a delivery team to an action, impact or schedule, simply click on the badge of the assignee field, select Teams and then search for the team you want to assign.



To allocate a delivery team to a project, expand the filters of the Add Resource dialog, set the Is Placeholder switch to on and search for the delivery team.





Comprehensive Team Visibility

The enhanced Delivery Team workspace now serves as a centralised hub for tracking your team’s workload and responsibilities. In addition to providing a detailed overview of projects, the workspace now includes all impacts—such as risks, issues, and dependencies — either assigned directly to the delivery team or owned by individual team members.



This improvement offers delivery team managers and cross-functional leaders a clearer, more actionable view of their team’s overall impact on organisational objectives. Managers can easily track which projects their team is working on while also understanding the broader scope of assignments and interdependencies. This holistic visibility enables proactive management of risks, better alignment of team efforts with project priorities, and improved capacity planning, ensuring that teams remain effective and projects stay on track.



Enhancements / Fixes

  • Schedule Export: Enhanced the schedule export functionality to include additional information for milestones linked to Board cards. The export now includes the following read-only columns:

    • Linked Title: Displays the name of the card the milestone is linked to.
    • Linked ShortId: Shows the short ID of the action/card.
    • Linked Workspace: Indicates the name of the board where the linked card has been created.
    • Linked External Reference: Displays the external reference ID of the card integrated with Jira/DevOps. This field is blank if the card is not externally linked.
  • Meetings:

    • Resolved an issue where meeting attendees were erroneously able to edit session details.
    • Fixed a bug that allowed attendees to unlink meetings from Outlook.
  • Non-Resource Forecast and Actuals Upload: Updated the process to correctly attribute the Modified By field to the user who uploads the file, ensuring accurate tracking of changes.

  • Catalog Bulk Edit: Introduced an option to include or exclude inactive catalog values during bulk edits, offering greater flexibility in managing catalog data.





22nd January Patch Release


Fixed

  • Gantt Edit View: Resolved an issue where indenting a task triggered a full page refresh, causing users to lose their focus on the task being updated.




19th January Patch Release


Enhancements / Fixes

  • Cortex Enhancements:
    1. Added two new funding tests to monitor and flag under-spend or over-spend percentages, enhancing financial oversight.
    2. Introduced a detailed log message to the Cortex Grid [click the Criteria Header], providing improved debugging support and audit trails. 
    3. Fixed an issue in the Model Editor where messages would swap incorrectly when selecting variations.
  • Portfolio Bulk Edit: Resolved an issue preventing the creation of sub-portfolios using the bulk edit functionality.
  • Resource Plan Bulk Edit: Fixed an issue where the resource's division value was not downloaded the decision contained the & character.




13th January Patch Release


Fixed

  • Resource Community Plan: A validation message now prevents creating duplicate placeholder records on a project.



11th January Patch Release


Fixed

  • Portfolio and Sub-Portfolio Bulk Edit: Bulk edit now supports Administrators, Viewers and Approver columns.
  • Archived Projects: Fixed an issue for archived projects where edit (UI/Bulk Edit) and save an archived project resulted in it becoming active and searchable. 
  • Creating Workhubs: Addressed issue with displaying the "Create a Workhub" button for accounts with minimum user permission roles when creating a workhub for the first time.
  • Timesheets: Made an improvement to include delete option to project lines when copying from previous week timesheet. Applies to amending timesheets as well.
  • URL Validation for URL Custom Properties: Ensures that URL custom property types are validated during the save process.



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