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Microsoft Project 2010 Series: Session 9 : Report project performance through Reporting Features

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Introduction:Microsoft Project 2010 Series: Session 9 : Report project performance through Reporting Features

Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Techgig webinar series, our endeavor to empower techies. We believe that sharing of the knowledge is the key to enhance our skills and grow us as professionals. With this principle in mind we have initiated a series of webinars conducted by industry experts to give you all a crisp insight of various domains. The topic of today’s session is Microsoft Project 2010 Series: Session 9: Report project performance through Reporting Features.Our guest speaker today is Mr. B Sai Prasad, Senior Manager – Learning & Development at Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. So without further delay I introduce you all to our guest speaker. Hello everybody I welcome all for the session 9 on project 2010 series. So today we are going to focus on how report our project performance to stake holders and to sponsors.In the last 8 sessions we are looked at how to build a schedule and how to baseline it, in session 9 we are going to look at how do we report the project performance and the next session is going to be looking at how do we manage multiple projects using the shared resource pool in project 2010.So let’s quickly look at the key takeaways of this 1 hour webinar. First let’s look at how do we identify the variance of a schedule by using standard views and reports. Followed by we will customize the views and the reports based on our requirements we also might have a need for formatting, printing and changing the layout of a views and the reports. Finally we will conclude this webinar with how to make use of the organizer option to rename copy the objects reporting objects from one file to another file.

Quality of baseline is important

So before we get into reporting the project performance I think first we need to look at the quality of the baseline and how to important it is in terms of evaluating the true performance of your project. Let’s look at the scenario first. So the scenario is if a project manager deliberately pads the base lines by 50% estimate and then he boasts that he delivered this project in 30% less time, then does it mean that this is a peak performance or poor planning?So as you can see that when you are try to deliberately add some estimates to your baseline without any rational and you report it to the management and to the customers that you are completed ahead of time I don’t think it talks about a true performance of the team and the project manager.In voice down to you are doing a poor planning so in these cases naturally you have to save time and cost your company rather you are trying to spend more time and most cost with respect to the company you are working with. So naturally the executive needs to be involved both in the planning and base lining of your projects. So it is their job to ensure that we plan what has been base line and realistic but also challenging so which means that we ideally should not add buffer as a part of your project so that’s where we are trying to down to.The next question is do project managers need time buffer? The answer is obviously yes. The reason is every project is a temporary handover undertaken to create a unique product so every project is having some amount of uncertainty and for those unforeseen events you need to have some time buffer. So the next question is should I make the time buffer visible or not in my schedule?The answer depends on what type of contract you have with your customer. So there are two often used contracts called one is a fixed price contract and other is called as time and material contract. So in a fixed price contract naturally the cost is fixed by the customer and the customer will not be over seeing how much effort you have spent the reason is the cost is already finalize.Whereas in a time and material basis the cost is more going to be based on the how much of effort you are going to spend on the job so naturally the customer will be behind your back inspecting what work you are doing every day and every moment. So if you are in a fixed bid contract naturally you need some kind of time buffer going by the same rational of why project is temporary.But generally in a fixed bid contract you are even expected to hide the buffer from the client the reason is it might be a policy or the client need not know about how much of buffer you are added as a part of the project. But you should not hide this buffer to your executives so that is something which you need to remember when it comes to a fixed bid contract.Then next is a time and material contract where you need to make the time buffer visible to the customer. Some of you might have doubts here but in my project we are not making it visible remember the only reason why you are making visible is so that there is a cross relationship created between a customer and the project team and that to you are very transparent and telling them that there are certain unforeseen event that might happen in a project and the only those events happen we are going to take that buffer from this project.So now we have understood that how important a base lining is and how buffer should be ideally added. So there are certain methods of hiding time buffer if you are working on a fixed bid project. So the order is which I have listed down the options this is such a way that as you go along this list the chances of identifying a buffer by the customer will ideally increase so the first option is you can be taking the most pessimistic estimate in terms of your dead lines or your material delivery dates or some key mile stones. So when you are taking the pessimistic dates naturally it is assumed that these activities will be delayed as late as possible. The second option is you can add some soft dependencies between your activities so there are certain discretionary dependencies you might have between tasks. So in those cases rather than making it more aggressive dependencies you can go for a more soft dependency.The third option is you can pad duration you can have some extra work estimates naturally you can keep the work hours of your resource low. So generally when we talk about schedule we say a resource works or your team member works 8 hours per day but truly speaking no team member work 8 hours per day that’s reality so you might want to take the realistic number let’s say that on an average he works only 6 to 7 hours so naturally go through to the calendar of the resource and change the working time from 8 to 6 hours or 7 and try to ignore the learning curve of certain activities.Certain activities in your project plan might be repeatable generally when you have repeatable activity the estimate should come down when you do the same activity again and again. So due to some unforeseen events you can just assume that all these activities are totally unique activities so that the buffer is still there as a part of your schedule. The last one you can add some additional holidays as a part of your calendars also.Now let’s go on to today’s topic so the today’s topic is going to be on how do we communicate the project performance to stake holders? So the order in which we are going look at the components first we at views followed by the tabular reports, visual reports, how to make use of the copy picture in a timeline view and finally we will look at the exporting the project data into spread sheets or some PDF formats.Now let’s talk about views I hope all of us do know views are ideally an integral and major components terms of working in Microsoft projects.So let me go back to my schedule. This schedule is already prepared and it is also base line so what I mean by views is if you go to the view tab you can see that there are two groups called task views and other group called resource views. The task view ideally consolidates all views related to task and the resource views at all views related to resources. So through these views you will be able to understand the schedule performance in different formats. For example if I change my view from Gantt chart to let’s say tracking Gantt.You will be able to see the critical path automatically highlighted in red color and you would also be able to know the percentage complete with respect to your activities. So each view has been created for a specific purpose.Now these views if you look at it will have some sub components within it. The first one is called as a table. So currently the table you are looking at is called as the entry table so the table is all about the group of columns that are visible within this current view. So the current table we are looking at is entry table so in order to change the table to something else on the same view tab you can access the other tables by making use of a table’s button. For example if I change the tables to cost you will be able to see cost related information of these activities.

Customize Views, Tables, Filters

So what we have seen so far is we have looked at how to customize the tables, fields and views. We are not looked at how to customize the filters. For example let’s say that we have that particular table which we customize we had a table called executive and we try to apply it. So let’s assume that so naturally let’s say that this is the executive tables I have applied. So remember this table lists all the activities on your screen. You might want to only filter out those important activities on your screen. So what people generally do is they might have a column here called marked ok and they will just say whichever activity that needs to be reported to the management they can just change it to yes.For example I will just take a couple of activities and mark it as yes. So you want that this particular view which we are going to create needs to display only those task where the mark this yes and we need the executive table to display this current data.So what we can do is we can create a new filter. Let’s assume that the name of the filter also executive and I will say the name of the field is marked and if it equals yes which will be listed.So if I try to apply that particular filter naturally you are able to see only those set of task are being displayed. So if you want this summary task also to be displayed naturally you can say show related summary task. So what people generally do is they don’t disturb the current view so what they do is they go back to they created new view for executives where they use the new tables for executives and they try to use the filter what they have applied. So the benefit is whenever there is a requirement for you to let’s say whenever there is a requirement for you to report with executives just people go to the views and they just apply the executive issue naturally it will apply the right filter or right table so that the list of activity that means we monitored or automatically shown.Another view that might be useful for you is called as the timeline view. Ok so I am just going to look at the timeline view first. So let me go to the view you have an option called timeline here so let me select timeline. By default timeline will only tell you the start date and the finish date of the project separated by months or weeks so the benefit of timeline is when you try to freeze in a scales freeze out you are able to zoom in and zoom out your complete project plan.And you are also able to see how long you are going to take to complete this project. Apart from that a timeline can also be used for reporting the status of your project for example I want to report the I can say the key activities in your project let’s say that the summary activities in your plan let me select those summary activities first.Yeah so let’s say I will selected a few set of activities so these are the activities that I want report it to the executives so I can just right click those task I can say add to timeline. So the moment you say add to timeline depending on how long those activities take a bar is automatically drawn in the timeline.So once you select the timeline you can see on the format ribbon you have a few option through which you can customize the colors and this details displayed on the timeline. For example I can give a different color to each of these bars.Apart from that if you have some mile stones within any of your activities you can just right click those mile stones and say add to timeline you are able see there are milestone is being displayed.Sometimes you might want the project summary task also to be displayed here. So you can just right click your level zero and say add to time line. So as you can see as you add more bars it might took bit better so what people do is when they have too many bars I the time line they select one of the task bar and they just change that design of that particular bar.Currently it is been displayed as the bar they just display it as a column so that it is much more easy to read. So the benefit of using timeline is you can just try to add the important activities to your time line and you can just report it.But please remember it will not really tell you the true percentage complete or the progress of your project. It will only tell you the set of activities and it would be very easy to communicate to your executives.The second point is it will not tell you the baseline data with respect to your current project. So once we have created the timeline you can just say copy timeline for email or for presentation or full file.Let’s say for percentage I do it and let me go back to my word document and let me paste it. I hope you are able to see that the timeline gets automatically displayed on your word document and you can just paste it in a presentation or in word document based on your requirement. So this is the benefit of using the timeline view ok. So before we move on to other option right I think we will first look at the tabular reports and the visual reports.

Communication Features

So tabular reports as you will see is useful for looking at the project data in a tabular format so naturally these reports can only be printed you cannot export it to excel or to tool where you can do any decision making work. So I will go to the project ribbon and I will say that I want to look at all my activities that are clipping now. So let me go to the project ribbon and let me click on reports. When you click on reports you can see there are 6 categories of reports that are been displayed, overview current cost, assignments, workload and custom.So let’s take one of the tabular report and see how this can be done so I am just going to double click my current and I am going to ask project to list down all the slipping activities in my projects. If I select slipping task and I say select. So when you say slipping activities are select I will list all the activities that are correctly splitting in your project.For example when you see this current example here ok I hope you are able to see the list the first activity along with the successor with start finish dates. So you might have a requirement that these column should ideally changed or the details that are displayed in these report should be change. It’s quite easy you just go to the project reports you just double click assignments and you click on edit. When you click on edit you are able to see the same set of filters and table that is been used here. So you can say that I don’t want the summary task should be displayed on my reports you can also say I don’t want the successor or its notes will be displayed. In case if you are interested about the row totals or a column totals you can just have these check boxes enabled.Now let me run this report. Now you can see that the report containing is less data compare to the old one. So the tabular report that you can see it will display the data more in a sheet format you will not have any graphs or as a part of this particular report.Another report that would be useful in tabular report is called as the top level task report. So i double click overview I am just going to run the top level task report of overview. This report lists all the level one activities in your project that is your phases of your project which is scoping, designing development. So through this particular report you would be able to understand what is the performance of your project at a phase level also.

Communication Features

Another report that would be useful is called as visual reports ok but before we look at visual reports I just wanted to tell you that the view what we are currently looking at can also be printed also.So if I want to print it let’s take a view called task usage or the resource usage which we have been using in the last session. So I am just going to change my view to task usage as you can see the task usage is displayed then list of activities with their resources and their each activity. It also gives you a time phase representation of how this effort is distributed across the week.If we want to take a print of this particular report naturally go to the file and do a print when you do a print generally it list all the activities as you see on the screen. So there will not be any change in the data that is been displayed. Sometimes you might have a requirement that I just want a row total or a column total to be displayed or how many pages should be displayed here.So you can just click on the page set up on that page set up you have options where you can change the orientation either to landscape or portrait, if also change the margin levels if you want to have more data as a part of the margin. In case if you want to have some standard headers like the name of the project additional detail you can provided either in a left, center or in the right.On the last tab views you can just tell whether to print all the sheet columns or to print only the first 3 columns of every page should be blank pages be printed or not, should it include the row totals or the column totals.So now let me say ok you are able to see the title is been displayed and if I just move to the other side you are able to see that the row totals are being displayed here as 24, 8 and 8, similarly if I go to the last page of this particular report you will be able to see the common totals also. Another report that would be useful for you is called visual reports, remember visual reports is available from project 2007.So you go to the project tab you click on visual reports there are 3 formats of reporting visually those 3 reports are one is called as the pivot diagrams and another is called as pivot chart and third one is called as pivot tables.Remember pivot charts and pivot tables are part of excel and pivot diagrams are part of the video I am just going to clear the video so that I can look at a few excel reports here. So when you select any of these reports the data get exported to an excel application and pivot chart and a pivot table will be automatically drawn. But before the exported data naturally you might want to understand what are the fields that are going to be exported.Let’s take the example of the baseline work report. So you can click on the edit template here which will ideally list of fields that is going to be exported. For example it would take actual cost, the actual over time work, the actual work so and so.In case if you want to include some additional fields you can just try to add it as a part of this particular template. In case if you had any custom fields which you want to export to your visual report just use the bottom areas to export it also. Before you export ask yourself till what level of data should it be exported should I have a data till the day level or week level or month level. So that level of detail is generally represented in this dropdown where you say years, quarter, months, weeks or days so let’s say it is days and I just going to say view.Now the data is getting exported in to an excel work book. So before you get into this chart there is a sheet that automatically getting added here called as assignment usage. On my assignment usage you can see that top level activities are being displayed which are the phases of your project where it tells the baseline work, what is the estimated work and what is the actual work spent on this activity.So the convenience you have in this pivot table is you will be able to filter what type of activities do you want. For example do I want to look at only the 2012 or 2013 also. For example I can turn off I just want 2012 data alone. Point 2 is you can try to filter the data that is being displayed within scoping and analysis. So I can say that I want to look at only few set of activities in scoping and few set of activities in the analysis.So it’s only those set of activities will be included pivot table. So based on this particular data if you go to the chart you can see the report automatically changes here. So where the column sort of which you see that where now displayed as columns in this particular graph. So you are able to see the first bar represents the baseline work, the second one represents the estimated and the third one represent the actual work. So you can try to add more fields to this by making use of the pivot list that been displayed to your right.Another report that would be useful for you in visual is called as the video report. Remember video by default is not installed along with your Microsoft office so you need to get video installed in your visions first. So once video is installed you can try to choose any of these different categories to understand how you are doing with respect to your project.So let’s take a report like a task status report so as you can see the task status reports tells you the health of the activities in your overall projects. So here also you have option to edit the templates you can choose what fields should to exported to this video diagram. So I will select at the views let’s wait for the report to be displayed here.So this is the legend that will be used for each of this boxes so the bar ideally represents how much percentage is complete and the smiley different smiley indicate how much of work has been completed so the first one indicates that the work is less than the base line work whereas the last says the current work is more than the baseline work.So as you can see that the current work is more than the baseline work and that is the reason you see a different symbol here. You can see it’s only for the scoping you are doing batch but with respect to other activities you have just on target. In case if you want to add some additional details as a part of these elements you can just scroll down and you can just add it. For example I want to have the baseline work the moment you included the baseline work you can see the baseline work is automatically added to all these elements.In case if you want to know the list of activities under designing and how is the effort distributed the individual activities you can just select the design and you can just right click and you can say add the list of activities under design.You are able to see that under design these are all the different activities and this is the work that has been estimated. So the benefit you have in review here based on your requirement you will be able to decompose each element of your video diagram to the level of detail you ideally want.In other report that will be useful for you is called as the cache flow report. Remember this cache flow report if you are tracking cost information as a part of your project 2010 you can go to the reports and you have an option called cost and you have a report called cost flow report. So you can edit this report and say I want the data to be simulated more in weeks or days so let’s say I am doing it in weeks and let me say select.    You will be able to see how the data gets simulated over the different weeks of your project. So in case if you want to look at only the summary activities as a part of your cache flow you can just go to the cost cache flow and the edit and you can say that the filter that should be applied is I want to look at only top level task in this particular report. So let’s wait another report is that same cache flow report can also be seen through your visual reports so go to the project visual reports and in excel you have the cache flow report here also. So I do a view here and let’s see how the cache flow of this project is so I a just going to break further saying that within each quarter how is the cost being spent so this is the cost and this is the cumulative cost here so let me see that. So this is of the cost expenditure of this project and the line just represents the cumulative cost in terms of it.So some of you would have learnt that as a part of your TMP preparation that we talk about as cost baseline or an s curve so generally this would be more of an s curve representation where cost will be very minimal at the beginning of the project and will be minimal at the end. So as most of the work is done during the execution phase you will see the shape of the curve more at a form of a s cure.Another piece of information which you might want to know when you want to circulate the performance to different stake holders just to give them the overall health of the project to know the overall health of the project you just click on reports double click over view you have a report called project summary when you double click your project summary you are able to see how much of percentage of work has been completed with respect to your duration also with respect to and your work it also tells you overall by how many days are you behind your project or ahead of your project.So in this example it says that the baseline starts at 213 your actual stat is also 213 so the variance is zero but look at the finish variance. Based on the flip ages you are planning to finish it on 430 whereas the plan completion is 426. So the number of working days when which your projects are going to delays is 2 days here. So it also tells you with respect to your duration what is the variance and duration and in terms of work also.It also gives you a crest statistic of how many activities are completed how many in progress in terms of resources also how many resources are completed or overloaded how many resources are material and work also.The last piece of information which I would like to give here is you would like to just take the copy of the view what you are now looking at and just past it in a power point or something like that. So generally people do a print screen. So let me first change my time scale to days so when you do a print screen what generally happens is the all the list of activities will not be copied initially so you need to scroll to your right and copy it incrementally.So this is where there is a copy picture option available so you go to the task tab and you have an option called copy and say copy picture.When you click on copy picture you have an option to copy for screen or for printer or for a GIF I will say for screen. You want to copy the rows from the screen or selected rows I will say rows on the screen here and you can give a timeline here for example I can say from 26th to end of January. So the moment you have said ok it will have got copy to your clipboard.So now I am going to open my excel and paste it. Now you area able to see that from the given range the list of activities what you saw in the screen are automatically getting copied here so this might be quite useful if you want to quickly share the status or snapshot of your plan to people who don’t have Microsoft project also. So this is what we have seen we talked about views we also talked about tabular visual copy picture time line and how to export the data also.

Video length - 00:49:10

523 attendees

Conducted on - 26 Dec,2012

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About Speaker
B Sai PrasadSenior Manager Learning & Development, Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd
B Sai Prasad, Senior Manager – Learning & Development, has been with service provider Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd since 2001 where he was named winner of the company's Global Trainer of t...
You are now ready to show the schedule to your executives and project stakeholders by creating reports. These reports need to created again for every status cycle. In the earlier series we observed Microsoft Project behaves like a database in that you can pull data from it to focus on any deliverable, any period or any resource you want. The type of information in a report can be changed as well. In this webinar, you wil learn how to customize and publish your schedule

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Project ManagementMicrosoft Project 2010

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