Project visibility to executives

Governance

Subha krishnamurthy Houston, Tx, United States

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

Management wants full visibility of the status of all our projects (some operations support and some new projects). They are asking to see a Gantt chart by major task
and by resource for all future tasks.

In addition, I want to show them a list of achievements since the last meeting. I am communicating with a group of senior managers.

BIG QUESTION:
What format is best suited to provide this information? Does anyone have any examples to post/share? Any templates/software that will automatically create such a report for me? I tried MS project but with changing priorities it seems hard to manage it everyday. Any thoughts on a best path forward?

Posted: Jul 3, 2006 11:24 PM

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Anne Barks Dallas, Tx, United States

Hi Subha, you are right! Doing of of that in MS Project is nearly impossible. There are a number of effective approaches and very good tools out there. For our small PMO, we use and are quite happy with Microsoft's Project Server and SharePoint for project and resource management along with BOT International's Processes On Demand for executive dashboarding and all of the various PMO best practices such as portfolio management and governance, PMBOK, SDLC, change management, collaboration and document management policies, etc. ~ Anne

Posted: Jul 6, 2006 2:16 PM

Johan Beijar Rydebäck, Sweden

Dear Subha,

One suggestion is to use the following format when you present your progress;

- Current situation

Give a brief and highlevel presentation of the curren status in the project. Summarize everything to two or three slides, incl one slide with the timeline.

- Complication

Also two/three slides describing the coplications/issues that you have in the project. Present the risk-list here, prefarable with a green-yellow-red-status.

- Way foward.

Present next step and how you plan to proceed.

This structure is valid if you present the status of one minor project or 10 major programs.

Futher more you shouldn't trust the automatic process of producing nice overviews too much... sometime it is better to do it the old fashion way just to stay in controll.

Good luck!

BR ThePM

http://www.theitcompany.blogspot.com/

About leadership and project management

Posted: Jul 10, 2006 2:39 AM

John Jankovic Irvine, Ca, United States

Hello Subha,

I also find sharepoint to be a very effective and easily maintained tool for communications, and for simplicity in presenting and managing summarized data of your portfolio you can reflect this high level data through an excel doc. With a little front work you can build a small model in excel that will show your resource levels in charts and house your financial / ROI & cost. I only recommend this for very small portfolios or very highlevel presentations. When presenting the data to an executive team always summarize it for them in power point and have the data available for any additional Q&A.

On the scale of automated solutions from small to the most robust you can find tools like Planview or some of the Intuit new project tools up to very robust like primavera (personal favorite) or a common alternative, Niku. Hope this helps & best of luck.

Posted: Jul 11, 2006 1:45 PM

Subha krishnamurthy Houston, Tx, United States

Thanks for the responses. I decided to go the manual route using Microsoft Project for this current presentation showing a high level schedule for the projects in the portfolio and doing bulleted lists for Current, past and future statuses. I was looking for a nice way to report by projects and by resources. MS project copy picture to office wizard seems to help with some of that.

Our company does use Primavera though not for IT development. Maybe that is something I can get my hands on.

Posted: Jul 11, 2006 6:38 PM

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