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Or: Who Does What When It Comes To Project KPI Reporting
So many KPIs, so little time! There are reporting requirements at every step of the project and at all points in the hierarchy. Not sure who on the team should be involved in what kind of progress tracking? Here are some pointers for who should report what. Adapt these to fit your team, but it’s a good starting point.
Team Member
They should analyse the work they have done themselves, so they’re reporting on progress made and work still to do. And time sheets, if you use them.
There’s an overlap here with skills required, so you’ll need to get them involved with upcoming planning to ensure that they are capable of doing the tasks – otherwise it will take them muhc longer and with much worse outcomes in terms of quality.
Project Manager
Project-level analysis relating to project planning and budgeting. If this is you, you’ll complete the project dashboard and summarise the project performance metrics.
Programme Manager
If this is you, you’ll be doing programme level reporting, using inputs from the project managers. As your programme is probably broken down into stages, you can report actual progress (on all the projects) against the forecasted progress for the stage. Do this for time and budget as a minimum.
There may also be other programme level key performance metrics that you choose to track such as resource allocation across the project with a view to managing skill levels.
Portfolio Manager
The kind of thing you’re reporting on is even more rolled up than that of Programme Manager. You’re looking at analysis by the type of work carried out, progress across phases and stages of programme against forecast and juggling the budgets across the portfolio so you’ll want to know top level budget performance to feed into portfolio metrics.
Look at metrics related to time to complete work so you’re also keeping an eye of capability and performance as well as time/cost/quality of the work done.
Director/Executive
As a project sponsor, you’ll want to digest the project-level reporting from the project manager. But as a senior exec responsible for diverse portfolios, your data needs are more aligned to the governance and strategic functions you perform.
Look for metrics that analyse time for the different types of work that you have in the business. Splitting activities by runners, repeaters and strangers is a good starting point, and then you can apply the governance metrics to those.
‘Runners, repeaters and strangers’ is a Lean technique to help you know where to concentrate your efforts.
- Runners are things your team is working on all the time: normal processes and tasks you require to be completed every day. For example, the fundamental customer service processes for selling your products.
- Repeaters are the activities that you see regularly but they aren’t daily occurrences. For example, handling complaints or the change management process.
- Strangers are activities that rarely happen, like a one-off project to close down a facility and lay off 100 staff.
As an exec, look at the time/cost analysis relating to these tasks to see if the business is spending its resources wisely.
Posted on: September 26, 2017 08:00 AM |
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