A communication and analysis tool, project reporting aims to report regularly on the progress of a project and to present information relating to the latter in a relevant manner. It is an action-oriented tool that should allow a Steering Committee To make wise and rational decisions.
If you are a project manager, or have to do project management on a regular basis, you know that today, project-related information is no longer a rare commodity. It is its analysis, formatting and interpretation that are the real challenges of well-constructed reporting, Project management mastered.
Project reporting therefore remains a delicate exercise: an overabundance of information and the multiplication of reporting tools can have an unfortunate tendency to dilute information without arousing the interest of recipients. By reading this article you will know what a project report is really for and how to improve the quality of your reports to make them really effective and interesting for all members of your team.
And in addition as a gift you can download (100% editable in power point format) our template of Project reporting here.
Project reporting is now a well-established element in business culture: Product Manager, Product Owner, Developer or Manager, you have all already received project reports in your email inbox or via a collaborative tool. And sometimes you have to develop some of them.
Reporting could be defined as a staging of information and data relating to a project, collected at a given moment and presented enough for other people to use them and make decisions.
The bias of project reporting is that by relying on performance indicators (also called KPIs for Key Performance Indicators), we can measure and manage the trajectory of a project effectively, or conversely, identify certain bottlenecks.
In all cases, the purpose of project reporting is action, task planning and decision making. To do this, the best project reports all have one thing in common: they allow the reader to visualize information at a glance so that everyone at their level in the company can make the right choices.
Reporting is therefore above all a decision-making tool, and not at all a control tool as we often think. It should lead the stakeholders to ask themselves questions: “What follow-up should be given to the project?” , “What skills do we need?” , “Why did we lag behind on this specific point?”. “Why is the delivery rate decreasing?” These are all questions that project team members must be able to answer if the reporting is relevant.
Writing a project report is a good idea, but what information are you going to select, and which will you highlight more? This is probably the most important point addressed in this article, how do you get the right information and the right messages across to the right people?
Reporting is not a tote bag in which data is collected. It is not up to everyone to sort it out but it is up to you to order the information to give overall consistency.
It is therefore necessary to make a direct link between the choice of data present in your dashboards and the needs of the various recipients. So the first question to ask yourself is not “What data should I include in my reporting?” purpose:
“Who is going to consult these indicators and what do they expect from them?” , “What are the possible solutions that my report provides in relation to the issues raised last week?”... And only then: “What key information do I need?”
For a CEO, a financial director and more generally top management, time is rare and precious. Surely they have a full portfolio of projects to manage. This type of population needs to quickly get an overview of a project in order to make macro decisions.
On the other hand, an operational team - such as developers or programmers for example - will pay more attention to efficiency and productivity indicators to assess their performance.
Finally, a manager will use project reporting as a tool to involve project stakeholders and make visible the challenges and decisions to be taken of the project.
Developing project reports can quickly become a very difficult task if you are poorly organized or do not have the right tools.
One of the keys to saving time is knowing where and how to collect the data you need, and what indicators you are going to highlight.
An integrated reporting tool (such as AirSaaS) makes it possible to intelligently automate the collection of the information you need to develop your reporting. Connected to the collaborative tools you use every day, it's probably the safest way to quickly aggregate data and make sense of it.
The frequency of sending your report is based on two criteria: the period you want to analyze and the period during which your interlocutors need this report.
So make sure you also have access to the information you need on a recurring basis in order to avoid “holes in the racket” the next time you send.
The best teams using AirSaaS send the flash report to the various stakeholders once a week. (Yes yes not once every month...!)
In project management, there is only one key word, regardless of the reporting you are developing: Be synthetic ! A small number of indicators does not mean that your reporting will not be relevant.
On the contrary, you will show that you took the time to choose your KPIs carefully and that the project is important to you. The flaw with a lot of reports is that they tend to drown you in a flood of useless information, don't fall into the trap of an overabundance of data, it's THE trap we all fell into at the beginning.
Good reporting presents information whose level of granularity of information has been correctly selected. Remember to organize your indicators in order of importance.
For a project report sent to very heterogeneous populations, the development of a project report in summary form with access to more extensive reporting that is easily accessible if necessary is strongly recommended.
Project management specialists know that the true health of a project is also measured by the indicators that are least visible, the hidden performance indicators. Of course, it is impossible to know what exactly is going on in the heads of team members, but some signs are not deceiving: attendance at meetings, recurrent delivery delays, the multiplication of functional bugs, or the accumulation of careless errors, or the accumulation of careless errors, or the accumulation of careless errors, or the accumulation of careless errors, are all indicators of the (good) health of a project and the level of involvement.
With all the tools for presenting and sharing information that exists, austere and difficult to read project reports no longer exist.
So the form counts as much as the content. Effective project reporting makes you want to be read, commented on and shared. It is above all an analysis tool and its added value is to enable action to be taken. To do this, several points should be taken into consideration:
Don't be afraid to use your creativity to draw attention with colors to highlight the most important information and developments. Reuse the same color code in all your reports to get your audience used to the way you work.
In project management, key ideas must be illustrated in a simple and powerful way in order to be remembered.
Some project monitoring and management tools like AirSaaS offer different ways of visualizing data relating to your activity so that information circulates more quickly within a company. From one report to another, the data is updated automatically to save you time.
The best project report is one that spends as little time as possible but that everyone agrees on.
By involving stakeholders in project monitoring, you benefit from a double advantage: up-to-date data on which the actors concerned are committed, and the establishment of a collaborative process in which everyone bears their part. Use collective intelligence!
The use of integrated tools allows you to spend very little time on project reporting and to focus on the added value of the tasks at hand. And yes it is not “normal” to spend 3 days a month doing power point...
Moreover, we talk more about project monitoring since the data is updated and can be consulted at any time, visually and continuously by all members of the team. With these types of tools, the level of employees increases and the team really has the means to focus on its real mission.
Among the tools generally used in project management, we find in particular:
- The todo on paper, and yes! It works very well on projects where you are alone and everything depends on one person.. Endangered :-)
- Microsoft Excel - this is the most used but also the most static and the most difficult to update. But hey..!
- Monday, Asana, Wrike in SaaS, or other open source solutions that focus on task management.
They are indeed project management tools, but not project management tools. Project management tools focus on tasks and Gantt charts.
AirSaaS, the project management tool, is focused on decisions and reporting.
Well used, a project management tool makes it possible to align the IT department and business teams, top management on the same objectives and better communication by breaking the silos of an organization that is sometimes too heavy or compartmentalized.
With a common tool on which to share numerical data from your projects, it is then easier to build a common vision and move forward in the same direction, with the same Project approach.
