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Project reporting is very important because it enables us to keep our stakeholders informed as to the project progress, decisions, achievements, and issues. However, often reporting is done around a certain specific format that you as a project manager, or your stakeholders, may find to fall short of the information needed – or worse, provide a lot of extraneous information that does not add value. It is important to capture the essence of project objectives and map them to the reporting routine.

Choosing Appropriate Project Metrics

Many of us like to start with templates. If you prefer that, then yes, pull out one or more project reporting templates and use that as a starting point. However, at some point, put aside the template, refer back to the project charter and project plan, and ask yourself, your team, and your stakeholders what the essential success criteria are for the project. Whatever you come up with – and I generally like to brainstorm a list of items – these will represent the keys to project success and the key metrics on which you should be reporting.

Example #1 - Performance Improvement Project

Two immediate things come to mind:

1. What are the milestones for this project?
2. What is the product of the project?

With a clear vision of the end state of this project, it is likely that you will need to report on progress on the listed milestones for this project. Such milestones may have nothing to do, at this point, with actual achievement of process improvements. But, they will at least involve completion of a step that moves you closer to achievement of that ultimate goal. On the other hand, it may be that your project is complete when process costs have been slashed by 40%, for example. In that case, your progress reporting on the project should definitely include the percent improvement.

So, there are two types of metrics involved in this performance improvement project. One is milestone reporting and the other is product oriented reporting, where, you are reporting on the status of the product - in this case, process improvement, or percentage of process cost reduction.

Example #2 - New product Launch

There are many things that need to be done to launch a new product. All of these things that need to be done will be part of the project schedule and will be represented by a number of key milestones. Some of these milestones may reflect preparation work being done, such as: pre-launch promotions, working with distributors or retailers, coordinating with manufacturing, performing market research, preparing promotional materials, building websites, and the like. This preparation work simply needs to be done and the completion of the work represents the achievement of a milestone.

Alternatively, the product of this project may really be to penetrate the market to a certain degree, or say, to achieve a certain sales level or certain market share percentage. Thus, the project will continue until that is achieved. This latter metric is more of a product oriented metric, where achievement of results rather than completion of tasks is measured.

In this project, just like the first, project reporting is once again based on achievement of milestone tasks as well as achievement of certain project bench marks in progressing toward the goal of delivering the final product of the project.

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John Reiling, PMP

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