Projects Reporting: how to meet the expectations of all stakeholders?

What’s the difference between a Dashboard and Reporting?

Although often confused, the dashboard and Reporting have different purposes and uses.

A dashboard is a type of real-time report that compiles a set of data and key performance indicators (KPIs) used to steer a project or activity. It can be viewed at any time and can be tailored to different levels (company, project, business unit). It consists of various key data points that provide a real-time overview of the project and thus facilitate its management.

Reporting takes the form of a structured report, produced by an author to address specific goals and objectives, and published at regular intervals—often for the purpose of soliciting feedback. It provides an overview of an ongoing project by analyzing the available data. Reporting is first and foremost a communication tool designed to keep project stakeholders—as well as company management—informed.

There is no standard Dashboard or reporting template, as each company has different priorities and needs. Ideally, the information included in reports for an IT department project review, a business-unit steering committee, or an executive committee should not be the same, since each has different expectations.
While all business units within the company may be required to produce reports, IT project reporting has certain specific characteristics.

What are the key elements of effective Projects Reporting?

Effective reporting must contain key information that enables the status of a Projects to be assessed. The level of detail must be adapted to the expectations of stakeholders, to avoid information overload and promote relevant decision-making.

Classic KPIs include :

• Project signage: this is a summary of the project’s objectives, challenges and key people, particularly useful in organizations with hundreds of projects. It’s useful to include scoring and expected benefits(business impact, ROI – Return on Investment, Strategic alignment) in this summary to determine whether a project is a priority or not.
• Project weather: this is the most essential indicator of a project’s state of health. It provides a quick, visual summary that can take the form of a weather point (sunny, cloudy, stormy, etc.) or a color code (Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, for “VOR” or “VJOR”).
• Risks and Trade-offs: Identifying actual or potential critical issues or areas requiring vigilance, alerts, and decisions that need to be made. This KPI is particularly essential for CIOs who steer their projects based on risk.
• Progress: highlights of what has been achieved in the past period, and objectives/milestones for the coming period, with % of completion, milestones reached, highlighting any deviations from forecasts.
• Budget and planning: Tracking of expenses and resources committed, status of planning (including Go-live milestones) and comparison with forecasts.

How do you select the relevant information to include in your reporting?

To ensure relevant reporting, the selection of information is based on four key principles:

• Data standardization: the use of standardized reporting models ensures better understanding of reports within the company. With methods harmonized between all project managers, reporting is consistent from one project to the next, with the same level of requirements.
• Focus on trends: historizing data and reporting enables us to identify long-term trends and anticipate deviations.
• Automation: It’s the detail that makes all the difference. In IT departments, reporting is often a thankless task, as project managers are frequently asked to produce various reports at multiple levels, and a PMO may spend countless hours consolidating disparate and scattered data. Automation of reporting removes this major obstacle, frees up time, and improves engagement among the employees involved: to achieve this, it’s essential to leverage micro-level data—which is useful to project managers on a daily basis and captured at the finest granularity—to automatically feed into the macro view of the project portfolio. Regardless of how granular the management process is, each project is thus presented in a consistent manner. It should be possible to drill down to the desired level of detail, if necessary, to conduct a more in-depth analysis.
• Prioritizing key KPIs: Reporting should be concise and focused on the critical aspects of the project. These KPIs should, in particular, show whether objectives have been met, in relation to the tools used or the information processed. For example, we will track any schedule delays (in days), budget overruns (in person-days or euros), overdue tasks, etc.
• Note: For CIOs with the most mature management practices, there are other, more advanced KPIs; for example, two performance KPIs introduced by the Project Management Institute (PMI):
• SPI (Schedule Performance Index): measures the efficiency of a project’s time utilization.
• CPI (Cost Performance Index): measures the effectiveness of cost management. It provides an overview of a Project’s performance in terms of cost control and Budgets utilization.

Reporting should provide a clear overview of the project to facilitate decision-making and trade-offs, and serve as a genuine driver of performance for the IT department’s activities and the company’s IT Projects.

Generally speaking, it is essential to monitor project results regularly in order to make necessary trade-offs and, in particular, to alert business teams in the event of a major project-related risk. Each major project milestone is thus subject to detailed analysis, either through a periodic report or in real time via a Dashboard. This type of project management, based on reliable KPIs, enhances the performance of the IT department and, more broadly, the company as a whole. Each KPI is closely tracked.

What role does the IT Project Manager play in the success of Reporting?

In this reporting chain, the project manager plays a key role: the consistency and quality of their reports will impact the quality of the broader reports that the PMO or the CIO will produce for other stakeholders. The quality of their management data will directly impact the effectiveness of the decisions that are made.

In most IT departments, the PMO proposes a reporting framework to ensure consistency across the various projects led by project managers and to provide a framework aligned with the expectations of the IT department and the company as a whole. The PMO must ensure that practices are standardized and that key concepts—such as phases, Milestones, Deliverables, and “work remaining”—are consistently applied, and the assessment of project status must be clear and unambiguous: concepts such as budget overruns, schedule slippage, or overdue tasks, for example, must be interpreted in the same way by all project managers—which, unfortunately, is not always the case.

Abraxio reporting: a high-performance “flash report” model

Flash reports enable you to report on the projects and activities that make up your portfolio. They “freeze” a snapshot of all project/activity management data at a given moment: Gantt planning, Budgets, risks and weather. This system guarantees the stability of the content, providing a history of the project/activity and the ability to analyze its evolution over time.

Some tools – such as Abraxio – are designed to produce standardized flash reports very quickly, thanks to a simple progress/weather input template, and are pre-fed with information from the latest published report. Reports can then be presented directly in full-screen mode for Steering committees or Projects review meetings, for example, or exported as Powerpoints.

With its Flash Report, Abraxio offers an effective reporting model in a synthetic, standardized format. Key features include

• A visual format that’s quick and easy to produce: makes it easier to read and analyze information, with a clear layout that’s much more than a data compilation table. Its template features highly visual KPIs, making it an indispensable tool for any Project Manager.
• Standardization of reporting: ensures consistency across different projects through standardized information. The Abraxio model provides a framework that allows all of the IT department’s projects to be analyzed using the same metrics and in an identical format. This standardization also makes it possible to aggregate project data to automatically generate summary views of programs or portfolios.
• Decision-making support: Enables PMOs and CIOs to anticipate the need for trade-offs. With easy-to-read KPIs, analyzing the status of each project is more efficient. The data provided also facilitates communication among the teams working on the project.
• Key sections: project weather, budgets, deadlines, scope, risks and highlights.