Reporting is an important driver of insights and decisions the organization. However, it can be difficult to get a clear overview of hundreds of ideas and projects scattered across inconsistent Excel sheets with personalized definitions and logic.
That’s why the need for better reporting and a more effective overview often drives the need for better data.
The process of becoming more data-driven by moving out of Excel and into a more centralized solution is a difficult process. Excel is a good tool for project managers. It’s flexible and gives you a lot of options. A system is normally structured by a best practice or some kind of common denominator on how to best perform the task.
For some users, this means a move from providing key figures for status reports once a month to working in a live system with frequently updated reports; within a few hours from changing something in a system, it appears in a report.
These reports can then be used to drive decision-making. So, the move from Excel to a more centralized solution means more responsibility for the person providing the numbers.
This requires change management. It’s a new way of working that takes time and reason to get used to. The benefit is more value from your data. From being inaccessible in a personal excel sheet to now being shared with more people, it can provide new insights and learnings.
A new data foundation means that it’s essential to do the work of identifying the roles that will be affected by this change. This goes hand in hand with identifying the new report requirements. Being diligent in this phase can save you a lot of hassle in the future.
You should know
The information should be structured in a way that takes all this into account; so it’s not only easy to find the necessary information but easy to understand as well.
At Projectum, we have a set of standard reports. One report we always start with, is the portfolio overview. This gives you a place to see all your initiatives or projects in your portfolio with the most important status indicators such as KPIs or budgets as well as project owners and key milestones.
I also love the project status report that gives you a combination of KPIs and descriptive text to give a full picture of the progress.
These reports can be combined with more detailed reports, such as a risk report or a financial report.
Starting with basic reporting is an important step in your reporting journey. While it may be tempting to create complicated reports with deep insights, you should start simple. The biggest insight into your data comes from two things: trusting your data and working with your data.
Gaining the trust that the data you see in your reports is of high quality and you can use it to base your decision on, comes with practice. You only gain this trust by working with your data, asking questions, following up and continuously monitoring the changes as your decisions affect and change projects and processes.
Working with your data also means staying alert to different potentials or necessary changes. Do you need to add new fields or track different things for your reports? Being able to work with your data model to keep your reports relevant is the number one differentiator that takes you from simply reporting to actually becoming data driven.
It’s a process. It takes time to get used to a new way of working with data – and it takes time for the organization to be on-boarded into this new way of making decisions and seeing the benefit.
It requires trust – you need to be able to trust the reports and the data. So, take the time to gain this trust. The benefits are worth it. When you build trust, it helps support the move from disparate Excel sheets to a centralized system.
What we see is, once it’s settled in, once it’s a natural part of the way organizations work, we see this new hunger for more reports and for more data.
It’s only natural. It’s the next step.
