Project Status Report produced from Clarity

[Anon Anon]

Our Objective

We are working on migrating our Project Status Report (PSR) from paper to Clarity. We are mapping the data from our paper report to Clarity and identifying where we will need modify Clarity and add fields or identify fields already in Clarity that we can use. We then plan to use a reporting tool (Crystal reports) to generate the PSR.

What are we asking for?

We're asking the Clarity user community for examples of PSR's they have developed. We are also interested in any lessons learned from attempting or completing the generation of a PSR from Clarity.

[Anon Anon]

We worked with Clarity to develop our Project Dashboard and Program Dashboard Reports. I think it took about a month to solidify the requirements and implement the Business Objects Reports. We needed to add a number of fields that were either text input fields or status indicator fields (red, green, yellow, and blue). None of the fields were "smart". We kept it simple. What I mean by "smart" is that we chose to not have the status indicator fields be calculated. We rely on the project manager to input an appropriate status indicator plus an explanation on why the indicator is the color that it is.

The report is cross-functional across the two partitions that we have in Clarity. Lessons learned in development of the report would be:

1) Define the process in which you are going to use the report prior to creating it.
2) Define what decisions are going to be made based on reading the report
3) Define who is responsible for ensuring the report is complete for each project (a RACI)
4) Define who is reading/reviewing the report

[Anon Anon]

Thanks for the reply and information. Would it be possible to see a sample of one of your PSR reports and ideally a list of what all clarity fields used to create it?

Let me know........thanks.......Bob Litz

[Anon Anon]

Unfortunately I'm unable to provide the dashboard since it is considered proprietary. I can tell you characteristics about it that make it useful:

1) Schedule information - schedule information and status are included. This allows the PM to comment on overall schedule status and why the status is the way it is.
2) Cost information: what was the project supposed to cost (an estimate in the form of a baseline; what have you been approved to spend; what have you actually spent, and what do you think you will spend in the future.
3) Risks and Issues
4) Overall comments on what has happened in the project and what is anticipated to happen next
5) Critical milestones and how the project is tracking to them
6) Other project attributes such as status, progress, business driver, the key people sponsoring or championing the project

The detailed dashboard works best when you have a portfolio summary report that list the status of all the projects in your portfolio. You use the status indicators to go over projects in review session, with senior managers, that are red or yellow in status.

Hope this helps
Jim

[Owen_R]

We have done a similar custom progress report, giving the following information

[list]
[*]Basic project information such as name, number, manager, next key milestone, budget etc
[*]Commentary - executive summary, progress this period, outlook for the next
[*]RAG statuses
[*]Key task/milestone data - name, baseline, latest date, status
[*]Effort and Cost - baseline, ETC, actuals in effort and cost, by phase
[*]Risk, Issue and Change Request information
[list]

This is produced by running an Actuate report. All the PM has to do is enter their narratives and RAG statuses. We capture this using a 'progress report' sub-object of the project object. v12.06 has something similar out of the box, but we developed our own on 8.1.

The users can run this as an ad-hoc report for themselves for their own project, but we also run a scheduled version which outputs all the projects in to one (large) file in the report library on a weekly basis.

We have since developed an enhanced report which makes use of the project hierarchy to pull in data from associated sub-projects. We give the user the choice by report parameters of what level of detail to show, and they can also choose their effort units of measure, and even hide entire sections if they are not using these components in Clarity.

I would send you a copy of the output Bob with cleansed data but this new board seems to have removed the ability to send private messages :sad

Hope this helps

Owen

[Anon Anon]

Sorry I didn't respond sooner, but I've been out of the office.

Thanks for the additional information and I've passed it along to the people working on this.


Thanks......bob

[Anon Anon]

Another approach is to keep the report internal to Clarity. We took the approach of enhancing the Page Layout: PMO-Project Storyboard, which drives what data is shown within a particular project "Dashboard" tab. As a result we configured the Dashboard with the following portlets:

Project Information Project Milestones

Project Manager Rating Project Risks

Alerts Project Issues

Project Effort Project Change Requests

When necessary we create .pdf's of this information to share with non Clarity users.

[Anon Anon]

Sorry I didn't respond sooner, but I've been out of the office.

Thanks for the additional information and I've passed it along to the people working on this.


Thanks......bob