SharePoint 2010 for Project Management, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Project Reporting

If you can interpret project status data in several different ways, only the most painful interpretation will be correct.

—Anonymous project manager

In the previous chapter, you learned that consistently gathering project status information in the areas of schedule, risks, and changes allows you to understand where the project is compared to where it was planned to be. Once we have all this status information, how do we make sense of it? Can the customer review key project status indicators anytime without going through every single status update? What if upper management just wants to see a summary of the project schedule or budget?

Reporting on the project status and performance is a key responsibility of every project manager. SharePoint can automatically generate project reports—each time the project status is updated by a project resource, a graph or indicator will be automatically generated, and the project sponsor can be alerted to review it. Sweet, isn’t it?

With a SharePoint PMIS, we can enable these capabilities through the use of:

• Custom views

• Project management-related web parts

• Alerts

In addition to these topics, we will discuss how to leverage meeting workspaces to greatly improve and enhance project meetings.

Custom Views

A view specifies how list items will be displayed in a list or document library. For more about views, see the section Using SharePoint Lists in Chapter 3. In addition to built-in views like the All Items view, custom views can ...