Business Intelligence and Reporting Features and Functions
Business intelligence (BI), visualization, and reporting defines, evaluates, and monitors portfolios through a combination of customizable reports and dashboards that provide real time performance to all stakeholders. Some built-in reporting engines allow the retrieval and strategic analysis of live data at the people, project, and organization levels. Reporting features enable users to analyze project status, individual tasks, resource utilization, issues, risks, and other project-related items to help improve the efficiency and profitability of organizations.
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Reporting
Regular written or verbal (minuted) reports are an essential part of project monitoring and progress. It is worth spending some time at the start of the project defining report templates to ensure that the right information is communicated at the right frequency and to avoid collecting superfluous information.
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Dashboards and Analytics
Project dashboards show key performance indicators (KPI) for projects.
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Views
Project management view tools capture the views of relationships between work products, such as functional specifications, risk assessments, and project plans. Views are comprised of graphics, charts, calendars, resources, individual and group views, and web views.
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Charts
Charts are useful tools for analyzing and planning more complex projects. For example, when a project is underway, Gantt charts help monitor whether the project is on schedule. If it is not, users can pinpoint the remedial action necesssary to put it back on schedule. The main chart types in project management are Gantt charts, program evaluation and review technique (PERT) charts, timelines, etc.
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Gantt Chart Reports
Gantt charts are a project planning tool used to represent the timing of tasks required to complete a project. Because Gantt charts are simple to understand, they are used by most project managers to illustrate completion or progress.
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Portals
Portals provide access to an organization's project management knowledge base via the Internet. Project information that was scattered in different formats and at different locations becomes visible to everyone from one central place.
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Printing
Printing program evaluation and review technique (PERT) and Gantt charts can be difficult unless they can be adjusted on-screen for printing (to make the best use of pages). Reports, PERT charts, and Gantt charts may be either printed directly or pasted into other programs for printing. They may also be distributed by "printing" to the Windows print driver, which comes with a fax card; to a portable document format (PDF) print driver such as Jaws PDF Creator; or to similar products. PDF files may be easily uploaded to a web site.
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Search
The search tool is a powerful feature, because it enables users to search for information in the entire project. Users can search for a particular task, resource, or document. Searches can be further refined by the date or time the item was last modified.
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Calendar
The calendar is an interactive feature that shows task deadlines. Tasks' start and end dates are displayed for each month. Tasks can generally be opened from within the calendar and can be moved.
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Reporting Types
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Performance Analysis
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Knowledge Management, Collaboration, and Analysis Features and Functions
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