Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside out Ebook

Part 4 Reporting and Analysis 12 Reporting Project Information 355 13 Analyzing Project Information 401 353 Chapter 12 Reporting Project Information Establishing Your Communications Plan 356 Generating Reports from Project Setting Up and Printing Views. 358 XML Data . 395 Generating Reports. 363 Publishing Project Information Revising a Built-in Report . 389 to the Web . 397 Building a Custom Report. 393 By now, you’ve built your project plan and you’re using it to track progress and display project information. Because you’re now in the execution and control processes of the project, you’ll need to share important data with stakeholders. For example, your new test procedure might have worked better than expected, but your materials testing ran into some unanticipated slowdowns. All this information is reflected in the project plan. However, for different audiences and different purposes, you want to highlight certain information and fil ter out other information to present a particular focus with professional panache. You can print views and generate reports built in to Microsoft Office Project 2003 and use them as an integral part of your project communication plan. These views and reports lever- age the power of Project 2003 by presenting the specific focus and clarity required by corpo rate and program departments. By tailoring the views and reports to the interests of different groups (finance, human resources, and procurement, among others), you can feed the right information to the right people, avoid misunderstandings, and mitigate problems. Microsoft Project views and reports are often used for: ● Weekly project team meetings ● Monthly department status conferences ● Quarterly or annual executive reviews In addition to printing views and generating built-in reports, you can design custom reports to meet your specific project communication needs. You can publish project information to the Web. You can also generate reports using project data saved as XML. 355 Part 4: Reporting and Analysis Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out Establishing Your Communications Plan Reports are instrumental in effective project management. As a part of the initial project planning, you’ll determine the requirements for reporting, including: Report recipients. Who needs to see the reports? Stakeholders throughout the organization and within the project team need to see certain reports tailored to their areas of respon sibility. For example, you might generate one report for your team members, another one for team leads and resource managers, and yet another for executives and customers. Specific content of the reports. What type of information is included? The reports can focus on any aspect of the project, for example, tasks, resource allocation, assignments, costs, and so on. Reports might focus on past successes or current progress. They might pro- vide a forecast of upcoming tasks, costs, or workloads. They might present a high-level summary. They can point out areas of risk or current problems that need resolution. Frequency of report publication. How often should you generate reports? Regularly sched uled project meetings or status reporting often drive the generation of reports. Certain important issues that are being closely watched might warrant report generation more frequently than usual. Be sure to strike a balance between providing up-to-date infor mation often enough and overloading a stakeholder with too detailed or too frequent reporting. Establishing your communications strategy for a project helps you effectively communicate realistic progress and estimates. You can point to unexpected changes that present risks. You can avoid larger problems and understand root causes. Specifically, with reports you can: ● Review status. ● Compare data. ● Check progress on the schedule. ● Check resource utilization. ● Check budget status. ● Watch for any potential problems looming in the future. ● Help stakeholders make decisions affecting the project. Using the appropriate Microsoft Project views and reports on a regular basis for progress analysis and communication is a key component of effective project management. By imple menting a communications plan, including regular presentations of reports to stakeholders, you can keep interested parties aware of crucial information and trends. Chapter 12 356 Part 4: Reporting and Analysis Reporting Project Information Project Management Practices: Communications Management Communication is a vital element of successful project management. Effective project com munication ensures that the appropriate information is generated, collected, and distrib uted in a timely manner to the appropriate project stakeholders. Different stakeholders need different kinds of project information—from the team members carrying out the project tasks, to customers sponsoring the project, to executives making strategic deci sions regarding the project and the organization. Your stakeholders don’t just receive project information; they also generate it. When all your stakeholders share project informa tion, people are linked and ideas are generated—all of which contributes to the ultimate success of the project. The first stage of effective project communications management is communications plan ning. This stage should take place in the initiating and planning processes for the project, in conjunction with scope and activity development. As you develop and build your project plan, you also need to determine what types of communication will be necessary throughout the life of the project. Determine what tools you have at your disposal and how your project team communicates most effectively. You might have weekly meetings and weekly status reports. Perhaps you’ll also have monthly resource management and cost management reviews. Other possible communication vehicles include presentations, e-mail, letters, and an intranet site. You’ll likely use a combination of these vehicles for different aspects of project management and different audiences. If you’re using Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Project Web Access 2003, you have a very effective and targeted means of communicating electroni cally with your team members and other stakeholders. You can automate the flow of progress information about the project, including status reporting. You’ll post certain views of the project periodically to Project Web Access 2003 for all stakeholders to review. If you’re also using Windows SharePoint Services with your Project Server 2003 implementa tion, you can store reports, manage risks, and track issues. While the project is being executed, you’ll be executing your communications plan. You’ll report on current project status, describing where the project stands at that point in time, especially as it relates to the schedule, budget, scope, and resource utilization. You’ll also report on overall progress, describing the accomplishments of the project team to date and what is yet to be done. Finally, you’ll make forecasts by using project plan information to predict future progress on tasks and anticipating potential problems. Tasks will be completed, milestones met, deliverables handed off, and phases concluded. Your communications management strategy provides the means for documenting project results and the receipt of deliverables as each stage of the project is completed. apter 12 Ch 357 Part 4: Reporting and Analysis Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out Setting Up and Printing Views Suppose that you’ve been tracking and managing your project for some time now by using the Gantt Chart, the Resource Sheet, and other Microsoft Project views. You can set up one of these views to contain exactly the fields of information you need and then print it to create a kind of report. By printing views, you can share pertinent information with team members and stakeholders. You can include printed views in project status reports and in progress meetings. Note Form views, such as the Task Form or Resource Form, cannot be printed. Neither can combination (split-screen) views. You can print one part of a split screen at a time, but if one part of the split screen is a form (such as Task Entry), it cannot be printed. To set up and print a view, follow these steps: 1 Open the view and arrange the data as you want it to appear when printed. For more information about available views, and arranging information on those views, see Chapter 4, “Viewing Project Information.” 2 Click File, Page Setup to display the Page Setup dialog box (see Figure 12-1). Figure 12-1. Use the Page Setup dialog box to set your margins, legend, head ers, and more. Chapter 12 3 Specify the options you want for the printed view using controls on the different tabs of this dialog box. You can adjust the view orientation, page scaling, margins, header and footer, and so on. When finished, click OK. 358 Part 4: Reporting and Analysis Reporting Project Information 4 On the Standard toolbar, click Print Preview. A picture of the view as printed appears, reflecting your Page Setup options (see Print Figure 12-2). Preview Figure 12-2. The Print Preview window shows the printable layout of the current view. 5 To make further adjustments to the print options, click Page Setup at the top of the Print Preview window. 6 To make further adjustments to the view itself, click Close on the Print Preview toolbar and work in the view. 7 When finished with your adjustments, print the view by clicking Print on the Stan dard toolbar. Print Page Setup Options The following list describes the options available on the six tabs of the Page Setup dialog box, which controls how your view looks when printed. To display this dialog box, click File, Page Setup: Page tab. Specifies whether the view should be printed in portrait or landscape orienta tion and whether the view should be scaled up or down to fit on a page. Margins tab. Specifies the size of each of the four margins and whether a border should be printed around the page. apter 12 Ch 359 Part 4: Reporting and Analysis Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out Header tab.

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