Everyone involved in a project needs to see slightly different information based on their specific roles and responsibilities on the project.

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Team members prefer to focus on their tasks on a particular project, while senior executives will hone in on the high-level status of many projects.

Make role-based project reports useful to everyone involved in the project by getting rid of clutter and providing them with the right project reports, with relevant data, at the right time.

For the rest of this post, we will look at three main roles in a project team and the key role-based project reports each audience is likely looking for.

3 Key Project and Portfolio Reports on SharePoint On-Premises

1. Senior Executives

A common challenge for senior executives is having to trawl through multiple channels to get status updates regarding projects across the organization.

Unless a standard tool is in place, the information they receive is often of varying quality and timeliness.

Frequently, reports are received when it’s too late to save a failing project.

With BrightWork, senior executives get more visibility with real-time high-level portfolio dashboards across any combination of projects or portfolios.

The dashboards present high-level information with the option to drill down for more detail.

BrightWork extends portfolio reporting on SharePoint even further with Power BI dashboards.

The BrightWork Power BI pack for SharePoint is a pre-built report with six dashboards for project and portfolio managers.

The pack connects to the three BrightWork project data sources – Project Cache, Work Cache, and Project Status Report Cache – and other data sources as needed.

The BrightWork Power BI pack includes:

• Portfolio dashboards with a roll-up summary of all project sites. The dashboard offers four filtering options: “Project Status,” “By Project Manager,” “By Project type,” “By Department,” and “By Priority.
• Portfolio timeline, a Gantt view of all project sites. Drill down by year, quarter, month, week, and days.
• Project and Task Timeline, a Gantt view of projects and tasks. Filter the data by project name, project type, project manager, and task owner.
• Work Reports allow project managers to check the status of tasks, risks, issues, and goals.
• The Status Report Dashboard includes weekly Status updates, overall status summary, highlights, lowlights, and next steps.
• The Issue Report helps project managers to get further information on issues, including task-owner.

2. Project Managers

The responsibility of a project manager is to deliver the project successfully.  Project managers need a clear set of project reports to easily track the status of a project and re-plan.

When it comes to tracking project progress, project managers need a set of dashboards showing items like overdue work, issues, risks, KPIs, and metrics.

These project dashboards should be easily editable, so the project manager can re-plan to keep the project running smoothly.

Project managers also need to save time when creating reports.

A project manager should able to create a status report within 3 to 5 minutes, or they just won’t bother.

With BrightWork, updates from the project status report automatically roll up to the project homepage and portfolio dashboards for increased visibility.

3. Team Members

Team members sometimes struggle to understand what the point of the project is and what is expected of them.  Often, they have no easy way to keep track of their assigned work and when it is due. This is especially challenging for individuals who are juggling multiple projects and day-to-day tasks.

For team members, reports should support their three primary responsibilities on a project:

• Find their work
• Do their work
• Update the progress of their work.

Reports like”My Work” show team members all the work that is assigned to them on single or multiple projects.

Ideally, these work reports can be filtered for different views, such as Open Work, Work Due Soon, and Overdue Work, so team members can prioritize their task list.

It’s also important that team members can easily update the progress on a project, and more importantly, flag a risk or issue as soon as it arises.

Conclusion

Having accurate and up-to-date project reports is critical to project success.  If you want stakeholders to read reports and act on the information, consider tailoring reports for different audiences.

To see how BrightWork can improve project reporting, watch our free video demo.

In just 20 minutes, you’ll see key BrightWork features in action like:

• Project Request Management
• Real-time portfolio dashboards
• Flexible project and portfolio templates
• Automated reporting
• Collaborative team sites.

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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in September 2017 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.