“Our biggest issue is extracting value from our data to make informed decisions.” This is what we have heard from many project managers, and a similar issue you might have come across at some point of your project management lifecycle.
Project managers, today, need better insights into their resources to make the best decision and to keep projects on track. However, it has been found that typically a program manager spends over 25% of their time on administrative tasks in Project Management, as stated by Forrester. This is because, with the growing data size, the complexity of managing data is also increasing at a fast rate. Data expansion from various sources – Big Data, Social Media or Enterprise data such as CRM, ERP, and Project data – further adds to data complexity. This data expansion coupled with data complexity challenges project managers and PMOs to create an up-to-date project report or portfolio report.
To list a few, project managers are facing the following challenges with PPM (Project Portfolio Management) reporting:
- Project portfolio reports lack a holistic view.
- Project reports are static.
- Interactive visualization takes longer development time and needs specialized data query skills.
- Deploying and maintaining project reports cause administrative overhead.
It’s time to take control of your data at every level! With interactive reports and dashboards, Power BI can be a boon to your project reporting, enabling operational value. With enhanced visibility and insight, Power BI allows making informed decisions at all management levels right from the executives, project managers, PMOs, to resource allocation managers.
Let’s have a look at how you can achieve the most out of your Project Online with rich Power BI.
See live project data with interactive dashboards – Want to see the important aspects of your project at a glance? You can create personalized dashboards to view and monitor each of your project metric such as project by department, cost and work burn down, project health KPIs and many more in the form of tiles. It gives you a consolidated view of both on-premises and cloud data in a single pane of glass. To get a more personalized experience, you can even move, delete, resize, link or rename the tiles on your dashboard.
Search or query with intuitive natural language – One of the unique features of Power BI is Natural Query Language (NQL). This is basically – you type your project data questions into the QA box and Power BI gives you the real-time data in the form of charts and graphs. Take an example, “Project cost above $50k”. So, you see it’s just simple English language! This way it helps you to reduce the time and complexity involved in project data gathering.
Package and share your work – Do you share project reports via email to your team on a regular basis? Instead, try creating your project reports in Power BI and publish them as a content pack to your team. Not only reports, you can also, package your dashboards, Excel workbooks, and datasets and share them with your colleagues. All the features of Power BI are leveraged in content packs, including interactive data exploration, visuals, Q&A, data integration, data refresh, and more. In addition, you can also share live reports and dashboards using Power BI on your mobile devices on the go.
Get a multi-perspective view of your project reports – Today, organizations demand project reporting that supports deep data insights and creative visuals for a quick glance on the project status. With advanced reporting in Microsoft Power BI, you can fully leverage all your project management investments. Power BI reporting can be used with both Project Online and Project Online. You create diverse categories of reporting such as Portfolio report, project health report, yearly investment report, resource allocation report, and many more with your Project Online data.
Interact with your project data to find business insights – With frequent updates, Power BI is continually adding new visuals on a regular basis, enabling to have a centric visualization tool for all stakeholders including executives, PMOs, and PMs. With Power BI visualization, your organization can leverage the power of Microsoft Project to automate business processes, capture data from various LOBs, and define the relevant mapping between LOB data and project entities through customizations.
Interested to quick-start your business intelligence reports and dashboards, contact us now.
