Nicole LashbrookManager PMO| HD Nursing, LLCLittle Rock, Ar, United States
I'm standing up a PMO at our young company. We are using MS Office 365. What are the best applications within that suite for Project Dashboard Summaries? Saving Changes...
"Best" is difficult to answer. Your stakeholders most likely get reports from other people/groups. What are the other groups using? Do your stakeholders want something different than what they are currently getting?
Understanding the needs of your stakeholders is your starting point. I built out some tools using Teams, SharePoint, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, and Forms; it turned into a learning exercise for me (which I enjoyed), but didn't change the behavior of my stakeholders. One of the things I was trying to do was get some people off of Excel and PowerPoint and onto Power BI, but now they just use Power BI to populate their slide decks... Saving Changes...
Nicole LashbrookManager PMO| HD Nursing, LLCLittle Rock, Ar, United States
Aaron, currently our team is using excel for all reporting. We have an outside platform for CRM (Insightly) that exports to excel. I interviewed stakeholders who all agree they want something visual and real-time.
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1 reply by Aaron Porter
Jul 14, 2021 9:28 AM
Aaron Porter
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Have you looked into the Insightly content pack for Power BI?
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Nicole,
as you are starting the PMO and probably experimenting with some functions, I would recommend to stick with Excel until your processes are stable.
If you move to tool selection too early, you might overload yourself and the project managers you are serving. And there are more than 200 PPM tools catering dashboards, most of them come with licencing, hosting and training costs and it may take up to year to select and install one.
There are Excel-based dashboards and - in my experience - it is not difficult to create your own.
Good luck.
Thomas
(BTW, did we met in 2019 when I presented to the Little Rock Chapter?)
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1 reply by Nicole Lashbrook
Jul 09, 2021 2:31 PM
Nicole Lashbrook
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Thank you, Thomas. We did meet! Thanks for your sage advice.
I feel pulled between setting up standards and providing visibility to the team.
Saving Changes...
Nicole LashbrookManager PMO| HD Nursing, LLCLittle Rock, Ar, United States
Jul 09, 2021 1:48 PM
Replying to Thomas Walenta
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Nicole,
as you are starting the PMO and probably experimenting with some functions, I would recommend to stick with Excel until your processes are stable.
If you move to tool selection too early, you might overload yourself and the project managers you are serving. And there are more than 200 PPM tools catering dashboards, most of them come with licencing, hosting and training costs and it may take up to year to select and install one.
There are Excel-based dashboards and - in my experience - it is not difficult to create your own.
Good luck.
Thomas
(BTW, did we met in 2019 when I presented to the Little Rock Chapter?)
Thank you, Thomas. We did meet! Thanks for your sage advice.
I feel pulled between setting up standards and providing visibility to the team.
...
1 reply by Thomas Walenta
Jul 09, 2021 2:55 PM
Thomas Walenta
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Hi Nicole
nice to connect again. It was a special meeting with spouses recognized!
Main targets and expected benefits should come from the PMO sponsor.
Visibility may be among them but real time? When and how often is project data updated? This might give a hint what is possible.
Without basic standards it is hard to produce a meaningful dashboard.
Thomas
Saving Changes...
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Jul 09, 2021 2:31 PM
Replying to Nicole Lashbrook
...
Thank you, Thomas. We did meet! Thanks for your sage advice.
I feel pulled between setting up standards and providing visibility to the team.
Hi Nicole
nice to connect again. It was a special meeting with spouses recognized!
Main targets and expected benefits should come from the PMO sponsor.
Visibility may be among them but real time? When and how often is project data updated? This might give a hint what is possible.
Without basic standards it is hard to produce a meaningful dashboard.
Saying both visual and real time in the same sentence will make this a very difficult problem if you're trying to integrate data from multiple sources, and combine them on a high level dashboard. Office has some very powerful capabilities, but the better graphics and data management are split into different tools. Systems and programs need to be linked, which creates a lot of problems for the people trying to link everything.
Combining real time data sources, processing the data, and putting them in a nice graphical format has stumped a lot of organizations and companies with big IT budgets. It often gets reduced to, "We will do a database extract daily/weekly" because of how long that takes."
I was part of a large initiative to build interactive dashboards and we wanted to model ours off the nice one our CEO showed in press releases. When we asked their IT team how they did it, we learned that they did the data analysis in one system, then they manually built a dashboard out of graphics arts tools (PowerPoint being a useful but clumsy one).
What we did in a prior job to somewhat work around this was that each group adding a health gauge on the dashboard, would produce their own metric, and we would share them in OneNote. It's not *Real Time* real-time, but it solves a lot of complexity trying to combine and format data, and if each group has an efficient way to build their own piece, it's easy to update ad hoc in a pinch. Saving Changes...
Aaron, currently our team is using excel for all reporting. We have an outside platform for CRM (Insightly) that exports to excel. I interviewed stakeholders who all agree they want something visual and real-time.
Have you looked into the Insightly content pack for Power BI?
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