How to bring project status reporting to the next level ?
What the mgmt. boarder really is expecting to hear?
Today Stakeholders are overwhelmed with information (e-mails, conversations in the hallway, workshops, Steering Committees, DevOps meetings etc).
When running a program of 20 projects spread out over a couple of years, as PMO you hardly have time to dive into details. The logistics of creating on a weekly basis the project status report is eating time.
On the other hand these days the management boarder has very limited time to become informed, therefore:
- We need to report factual the progress of our portfolio of projects
- We need to assemble the report in that way the information can be absorbed in less than 15 minutes per project
- The report needs to contain sufficient detail to allow steering and decision taking
To compete with this we need to communicate project status in a very structured way.
Therefore progress reporting to be based upon a max of 2 slides per project.
The best option of course is to have all information available into 1 tool.
- Collecting progress of all projects
- Calculating the KPIs
- Generating the presentation report
As there are a lot of sophisticated tools on the market embracing 1001 type of reports I was challenged to setup an agile and lean way of working for an extensive team of project managers and their teams.
LEAN Project Status Report
The tools:
1) to reduce the workload of the logistics to a very minimum effort (just a couple of minutes) I’ve been using standard MS Excel covering all information needed : planning, forecast, actuals, earnings, KPI / Earned Value Management, risk management
2) the technique to generate the powerpoint presentation out of the blue is done by a VBA script interfacing between MS Excel & MS Powerpoint.
Doing this the total time to generate a Project Status Report is reduced to max 3 minutes per project. When I started as PPPM I needed per project a couple of hours … the time spend on the logistics incredible is reduced.
The benefit:
- all information is handed over on max 4 slides (if not interested in trend analysis nor the visuals then 2 are dropped)
- all information is managed using standard spreadsheets (no fancy tricks)
- all information about all projects is managed onto 1 location: a simple spreadsheet
- all information is re-used: register once, use many
In my previous blog I’ve assembled the technology of EVM.
Slide 1: SQERT reporting
Goals: to inform the audience about:
- What is being delivered –> S of Scope
- What is the quality so far of the deliverables –> Q of Quality
- What have we established / burned –> E of Effort
- What kind of new risks / issues we need to tackle, where/when we need decision support from the Project Management Team –> R of Risks
- The KPIs –> T of Time:
- If we are ahead / behind planning
- If we are over / under budget spending
And if the boarder really wants to understand the trend of your portfolio then we make a combination of Earned Value Management and Visual Planning into slide 2 & 3.
Slide 2:
Make a simple timeline to compare the forecast against the reality.
Goals: informing the audience about the planning
Option 1: standard MS Excel
In this spreadsheet we only enter the deliverables, the actual start, the actual end date and the quality (%completed) we are working on. The Gant chart is automatically generated.
We are able to see very quickly the status of some deliverables : ahead or behind.
Option 2: MS Powerpoint (free) add-on
Option 3: a planning tool
See MS Project, Project in a Box, and a lot of alternatives.
The disbenefit is to extract an manipulate the data to enable automatic reporting.
Slide 3 : next slides bring an overview of the KPIs (Earned Value Management)
- Planned versus Actual versus Earned
to have visibility onto the charges : planned versus actual versus earned
informs the boarder to rebaseline
- KPI : Cost & Schedule variances
- Estimation of end of delivery
Slide 4: risk overview of the program
| risk | short | Impact (0-10) |
Likelihood (0-10) |
Vulnerability (0-5) |
| supply chain disruption | R01 | 1,0 | 9,0 | 5,0 |
| customer preference shift | R02 | 10,0 | 5,0 | 1,0 |
| copper price rise > 10 % | R03 | 4,0 | 1,0 | 2,0 |
| work stoppage > 1 week | R04 | 3,0 | 1,5 | 2,0 |
| economic downturn | R05 | 1,0 | 1,0 | 1,0 |
| supplier consolidation | R06 | 5,0 | 5,0 | 1,0 |
| local competitors enter | R07 | 7,0 | 3,2 | 2,0 |
| new substitues available | R08 | 6,0 | 1,3 | 3,0 |
| cost of capital rise > 5% | R09 | 1,8 | 6,7 | 4,0 |
| tighter emission standards | R10 | 2,0 | 1,0 | 1,0 |
| overheating of server abc | R11 | 1,0 | 0,8 | 1,0 |
