Types of Project Report
When people think of project management, it’s often the on-the-job client delivery that springs to mind: creating assets for clients to use, installing solutions and getting the work done. However, there is a large part of running a project that is desk-based and administrative, but just as necessary.
Project reporting is an area that is essential to the smooth running of your project as it helps surface insights and get the buy in required to take decisions. Here are seven types of project report you need to keep your project moving.
1. Project status reports
Whether you produce them weekly or monthly, for internal stakeholders or your client, project status reports create a cadence in the life of a project manager. Sometimes it feels as if we’re writing them all the time! However, they serve a very good purpose which is to ensure that everyone knows the current status.
The content of a status report varies depending on what your stakeholders want to see, but a good starting point for input is the variance report. Run that from your BI Publisher installation and you’ll be able to see the schedule variance for current activities.
Typically, stakeholders will want to know what tasks are deviating from the baseline, and including that in your status report shows you are on top of project performance and (hopefully) taking action. In fact, BI Publisher can create the whole project status report for you, covering project code values, costs, issues, risks, milestone status and more.
As this is a very common type of report, consider automating it where you can and minimizing the amount of admin time spent on creating it.
2. Cost management reports
There are many financially-driven reports you can create with project management tools. The baseline summary is a good starting point. This shows you the current budget and the original budget so you can compare them. You can also generate expense reports that show different cost codes.
The amount of financial information available to you as a project team will depend on how much data is put in to your tools.
3. Resource reports
A weekly resource loading report shows who is scheduled for how many hours and what time they have available for additional work. This data is helpful to ensure that resources are being used efficiently and that they are not overloaded or at risk of burnout.
Skill set reports are another useful output from your system. They show the list of resources along with their primary and other roles and proficiency level as defined for each role. Many project managers rely on these reports when assigning individuals to tasks as it is important to match skill level to activity. If you assign the wrong person to the work, it could take longer or even be done to a quality standard that does not match the requirements for the project.
4. Activity reports
Primavera P6 comes with a range of sample BI Publisher reports, including a set of reports that are specific to activity management. For example, you can create:
- Activity look ahead: shows activities with dates and statuses scheduled for the upcoming time period of your choice for the selected projects
- Activity relationships: shows activities with predecessor and successor tasks as well as lag and float
- Cross project relationships: shows activity relationships across projects
- Duration analysis: shows the comparison of planned and actual activity duration
- Activities that can work: shows tasks that can be started as all predecessor tasks are complete.
5. Earned value reports
We do not recommend creating earned value (EV) reports by hand, from scratch. Unlike some of the reports in this list which you could create manually if you had to, EV reports are better and more reliable if they come direct from your enterprise project management system and an integrated set of tools designed to capture the data and maintain its integrity.
BI Publisher can pull the relevant information together for you to prepare a project earned value report. It shows:
- Planned value
- Actual total cost
- Earned value
- Estimate to complete.
BI Publisher can display the information for the period as well as cumulatively in chart and table format.
EV reports are one of the most valuable types of project data for tracking project performance, so set them up correctly at the beginning, make sure the inputs are working as they should and you’ll be able to share rich and accurate data during the project execution phase.
6. Summary reports
Summary reports could be in the form of a dashboard or an executive summary presented at portfolio level or during a management meeting. Primarily, these reports are used for communication at high level so they don’t need to include a lot of detail. The contents should match the audience. For example, a presentation to the Chief Financial Officer should be tailored around what they would like to know, which is probably the budget!
7. Timesheet reports
BI Publisher can generate timesheet reports for you using the data in Primavera P6. Use the sample templates as a starting point or create your own timesheet reporting. Timesheet reports are useful as a way of ensuring compliance with any time recording policies. For example, you can show the timesheets submitted along with their review dates and who reviewed them.
You can also get a detailed timesheet report out of BI Publisher if you need to see all the timesheets for a date range, down to activities and hours worked per day.
The value in timesheet reporting is not simply to check that people are filling in their working hours. (Although that is helpful to stop revenue leakage.) If you are using an earned value management system, it’s likely that hours worked are one of the key inputs to that as a way of tracking project progress. Without that level of work data, you may not be able to accurately produce the earned value management data and track performance on particular tasks.
Project management tools like Primavera P6 have a vast reporting capability and when you learn BI Publisher you’ll be able to tap into all the options. Creating reports doesn’t have to be time-consuming. When you know how to use the tools, you can generate reports on auto-pilot and balance your time efficiently between the administrative activities of project management and delivery.