What's an Exception Report and do you use it in your projects?

Project performance exceptions reporting enables project managers to view a summary of problems and issues on a project through visual status indicators that denote exceptions. These status indicators provide you with an immediate understanding of critical, at risk, and on track issues on the project. The status indicators are tracked at three different levels:

- Measure Level: The status generated for each measure is identified as an exception. Status indicators are reported on key metrics such as cost variance of actual versus budget and the difference between estimated and schedule project end dates.

- Key Performance Area Level: Status indicators are reported for key performance areas such as financial and schedule. The status indicators are determined based on all exceptions that have been recorded at measure level within a particular key performance area.

- Project Level: A single status indicator is available for the project. The status indicator for project level is determined by choosing the worst indicator among all key performance areas as the project indicator. You can use the Project Performance Status client extension to modify this logic.

Project performance exceptions reporting features enable you to focus your time and energy on solving critical problems faced on a project. These features inform you about the problem areas and enable you to focus your efforts on solving the problems instead of finding them.

You can set up performance exceptions reporting to communicate key performance area performance statuses and exceptions to key stakeholders via e-mail. To accomplish this, your implementation team must create an automated report type with a layout that includes all information that you want to send to your stakeholders. You can schedule the Generate Performance Scores and Notifications concurrent program to send automated status report notifications to the recipients that you designate.