Project Insight Status Report Feature

Customize and Automate Status Reporting for Stakeholders and your C-Suite *Report consistently to your client or executive team *Easily access as a project view in the tool *Configure the project elements you want to show *Flag project issues to show up on status reports *Automate report elements so you don't need to assemble items *Navigate stakeholder preferences *Save time for more important project management responsibilities.

Transcript:

Yes, so you know what? Diane was just saying that you definitely want to be able to report during your project with a consistent format that you want to present to your client or your executive team. One of the things that we've added recently in our views—again, it requires the add-on status report feature—but you can see the status report down there. In our tool, you can actually configure various different options of what to show. Up here, I'm showing the schedule and then the status with the health and some basic information, such as what the comment is and what the milestones were.

However, if there's a new issue that comes up and you want that to show on the status report, you can actually flag it at the bottom of the issue. When you're editing one, you'll see this option, "Visible on Status Report." This is how you decide which issues you want to show. I'm currently displaying all milestones, but in the configuration, you can choose to show issues only if they're flagged, or you could decide that when you create your status report on a project, you want to show all issues. Again, as Diane mentioned, this option varies depending on who the audience is.

This flexibility helps you not have to manually create reports. We have out-of-the-box capabilities for this, but many of our clients ask us to go further than this basic setup. Very often, most of our enterprise clients will say, "Well, we want it to look a little different," or "We need this particular feature." It is usually not the project manager; it's typically the executives who are very particular about what they want to see and how they want to see it. That's what we discussed in the stakeholder section—it’s going to be different for different audiences.

So, I think that's awesome, Steve. But I mean, a lot of us have been doing this for a long time, and I tell you, project managers spend an awful lot of time managing these reports. If we can at least offload some of this, maybe you have a really particular executive that wants it a certain way, but the other executives are okay with another format. Then, at least we've saved you time on all your non-critical projects, so that the special requests go only for the special people. The whole point is trying to automate things to make it a little bit easier—not to completely automate everything you do, but to give you more time to focus on the important tasks.

This is just one of those ways. I'm not having to recreate reports all the time. I'd like the project managers to spend more time reviewing those status reports and contemplating what the status report is telling them. It’s important to analyze what should be acted upon and what information needs to be communicated. If the system can generate this in a nice visual format, and I don’t have to spend time working with PowerPoint, I think that’s amazing. Let it present the information for you, and then you can leverage your expertise to interpret what the data is saying, spending more time doing that rather than assembling the report.

What’s great too is that when you're ready, you can go to the print-friendly option, which prints out well. We have it designed nicely enough to save as a PDF that you can attach to an email, because not all executives are always in our tool. You might need to send this to an executive or a client. Another thing about these status reports is that our project management tool, Project Insight, has a client capability that almost mirrors this feature. Clients can come in and see a view of what’s going on in their specific project, similar to this overview. Best of all, it doesn’t require a license for the client to use it.

That’s cool! Very cool. Awesome! So, let’s share—or let’s...