How Much Do You Trust Your Projects Dashboards?

You would rarely find any project, particularly in the engineering and construction industry, that does not have a dashboard to report and share the status and performance of a project. The question is, how much can we trust the information presented to us in those dashboards. This little trust that most of the stakeholders would have in those dashboards stem from the concerns that they usually have in the quality and validity of reported data.

The MS XLS Approach

Using MS Excel as method for capturing the data details of the different project management processes is always a concern. To start with, and assuming that the organization has standardized all of their data capturing templates, for which most of us will agree is almost to do, there always a concern that those tables are incomplete in terms of the data fields that will be captured. For example, the Request for Information log might not include the data fields of RFI query, proposed solution and answer or even the fields to capture the dates of when those fields were captured. Now imagine the same concern for the meeting minute log, submittal log, change orders log and the many other logs that an organization needs to report on.

The second concern comes from the fact that there could be entry mistakes either intended or by accident. Those could be mistakes in entering the right amounts, correct dates and complete text. Mistakes could also happen from spelling mistakes, wrong date format or using the comma at the wrong place. The third concern is the concern of deleting a cell by mistake or even intended. This could result in moving the cells or deleting a row or even a column.

Another concern would be when working on the same file by two different team members as the option for locking a specific record is not there. There is also the concern that the file size might become big where it not only will become slow to access but also increase the chances of crashing. There is the concern of saving the file under the wrong name or place.

The other concerns come from the fact for needing to have many MS Excel files to capture the data from the many project management processes that are in place. Those are usually maintained and updated by different project team members who are not using the same terminologies for data attributes that are common across all logs like company name, resource name among others. Actually, they might be using the same formats for dates, numbers and text.

Another concern is that those MS Excel files are located at different physical locations and computers. Those silos of data need to be extracted, integrated and prepared to ensure that they provide the needed information by the stakeholders. Having the data at different computers also increase the concern of how frequently the data is backup up and secured. There is another concern which would result from the fact the cut-off date for the data content of each file might not be the same. In other words, the RFI log file could be reflecting the data as of yesterday but the change order log reflects the data as of a week earlier.

There are other concerns where there is a need to report on the project history where there is a need to know what data was captured at a specific time period rather than having the latest status of the data shown. There could be a need to create trends charts to assess project’s performance, efficiency and transactions growth.

In other words, the concerns listed above and for which there are many others make the starting point of a having a semi real-time single version of the truth project dashboard almost impossible. Now if the need was also to have a projects portfolio dashboard to report the status and performance of all projects that are managed by the organization, this would be a dream unless the organization is willing to accept missing data.

It is no wonder that organizations who continue to use MS XLS as their projects’ data repository, waste on the average more than 60% of their most valuable resources to capture, review, verify, associate, blend, prepare and share their projects performance data. The information shared by those dashboards are never real-time and always carry high-level of mistrust as it is almost impossible to trace the source of the reported data.

The Project Management Information System Approach

Using a Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb will address all of the reported concerns above by providing a single web-enabled platform where the data for all project management processes are captured and stored on a single platform. This data will be captured using the many out-of-the-box forms as well as the many other user defined forms to capture other data that PMWeb does not provide a default form to.

In addition, all supportive documents such as drawings, documents, pictures among others will be either attached or linked to the input form. Those documents are usually uploaded and stored on PMWeb document management repository under the correct folder.

To ensure that the right project team members are involved in the right sequence in capturing the data on each document template, predefined workflows need to be associated with each document template. Those workflows which will be aligned with the project’s responsibility assignment matrix (RAM), will detail the steps for submitting, reviewing, sharing and approving each document template. Knowing that the responsibilities for reviewing and approving the same document template could vary depending on the project’s authorities and approval levels, each workflow could include conditions and branches to emulate those authorities.

This will ensure every-hour projects’ data captured in the right format, by the right project team member and at the right time, organizations need to have document templates to capture data, ability to attach all related documents and records, and to ensure that the document template will be received by its intended recipients.

A process that organizations who use MS XLS to report their projects’ status and performance would need to have the resources to manually capture and fill the appropriate MS XLS file with the new projects’ data. If the organization decides to ignore the cost of the man-days and wasted effort needed to complete this process, the organization cannot ignore that without having such automated process, there will be no transparency and accountability on the captured projects data.

Having the data logs which is the starting point for those using MS XLS to create their projects dashboards. The layout for those logs are completely customizable and they can be design to include grouping with the option to have filters to limit what transactions to display. It also means that instead of having to be limited to the MS XLS file that was created to capture the data, the organization can have different tabular and graphical reports to display the data for each project management process.

Tabular reports can be also created to combine data from more than one project management process. This would like trying to create a MS XLS file that will be linked to the data source of those files. For example, the organization might need to create an earned value analysis report where the report would require data from the planned budget spending, the earned value and the actual cost or progress invoice spending. Data will be associated at the Cost Breakdown Structure (CBS) or Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) along with the project financial periods. There is no needed to copy the data from where it is stored as the PMWeb BI reporting tool is just extracting the data from the original data source.

Of course, the same data captured on those processes will be used to create the different dashboards that an organization might need. For example, there could be a need to have dashboards to report on the different project management processes groups. For example, dashboards for cost management, schedule management, document management, risk management, procurement management among many others. They could be also dashboards that are specific to one of the project life cycle stages, for example design development, bid and award, construction stage among others.

 The same data source will also be the basis for creating the project, program and portfolio dashboards. The layout and content will depend on what information the organization needs to have on their projects status and performance. The one thing that using a PMIS like PMWeb will assure the organization is that they will be having access to real-time single version of the truth of their projects and programs portfolios status and performance.

One of the important features that PMWeb would bring to reporting projects’ status and performance is the trust it will build in the data sources by enabling what is known as “traceability using drilldown”. The concept behind this approach is that the stakeholder can start at the projects portfolio dashboard where it shows the overall projects and programs performance.

For the specific project that the stakeholder needs to have more details on how this project is performing, the stakeholder can click on the specific project name and then the project dashboard similar to the one shown above will be displayed. Now assume the stakeholder is interested to have more details on the project’s cost status, clicking on the cost KPI indicator will display the cost management dashboard which can be in desired format similar to the scheduling dashboard shown above. Again, if the stakeholder is interested to have the details of the change orders issued to date, he/she can click on the total value of change orders to date. This will display the change order log which will display all change orders with their particulars as per the design report layout. If the stakeholder clicks on any of those change orders, the change order form will appear. This will also enable the stakeholder to click on the attachment tab and view all supportive documents that were attached to that particular change order.

You Need to Decide

Organizations understand that projects data must be trusted and traced to its source for them to have real-time single version of the truth performance and status reporting. They understand that for them to have the insight to make better and faster informed decisions, they need to have timely information that they can trust.

Those organizations understand that MS Excel is not the solution that they can risk their projects investments with. But they also know that unless they take the initiative to end this bleeding of valuable information and knowledge, their chances of encountering the risk of project failure will be always on the increase.