Project Reporting: Delivering Insights, Not Just Data

How many project-based organisations can say they have a really good grip on the status and health of all the projects in their portfolio? From my experience, I would wager not a lot. Time and again in my line of work, we come across various issues in project reporting that hamper its usefulness, issues like inaccuracies in the information, data that provides little actual insight or even reporting that is too retrospective instead of looking at what is to come.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. With just a few weeks’ worth of effort, organisations can put in place reports that tell leaders what they need to know, when they need to know it. And with a clear view of project status and health, project teams and leaders can make effective interventions early, helping to keep projects on time and on budget.

When we’re asked to take a look at a project that’s in distress, one of the first things we do is go through the recent project reports to see what they tell us. How is delivery progressing against the plan? Is it on budget? How much change and delay has the project suffered so far? And so on.

More often than not, project progress reports are text heavy—full of potentially biased commentary from project teams—lacking the objective and insightful data required to really understand what’s going on. The few KPIs that are presented are typically backward-looking and narrow in focus, concentrating for example on how late the project is against plan or how much of the budget is left to spend, giving little indication of whether the picture is good or bad. This can leave leaders struggling to spot areas of risk or which questions to ask at project review meetings.

Even well-established project control metrics—like CPI, SPI, EV v. PV v. AC, EAC v. budget, key milestone tracking, risk exposure versus contingency—are sometimes overlooked by organisations, including large and seemingly mature ones.

Without these, project leaders are flying blind and inevitably discover surprises (of the bad kind) when it’s too late to do anything about them.

With this in mind, once we’ve completed the initial turnaround of a struggling project, we often help contractors/owners put in place stronger reporting to help them better understand project status and health.

This might include establishing more useful KPIs, which provide better insight into project performance and help management to spot future problems much earlier; making sure data in reports can be relied upon for decision-making, meaning it is current and reflects reality by connecting directly to primary data sources; and setting up an effective way to spot red flags using targets and trends and identify problem areas, helping management to focus on priorities.

Project reporting must provide a 360° view of a project’s status and health, including financial, commercial, schedule, risk, quality, safety and sustainability aspects.And, of course, it’s vital to focus on leading indicators of performance, so management can identify and intervene in issues early.

If proper project management and controls are in place, most of these indicators are easy enough to determine without new processes or complex systems. But it’s vital that these KPIs, in fact, any KPI, are derived directly from the base source datasets, avoiding any manipulation along the reporting chain and enabling ‘live’ monitoring.

As many organisations have added data analytics tools and cloud computing to their tech stack over the last few years, it’s now much easier to set up comprehensive and dynamic project reporting environments without needing industry-specific platforms. There’s a lot to be gained from simply standardising data, hosting it in a common repository and integrating it for presentation in a single dashboard-type interface.

Most organisations are already paying for the technologies needed to achieve this.Clearly, this space is ripe for disruption from AI. Tools that can distil hundreds of pages of project progress reports into a highlights summary in seconds already exist. And many startups are developing solutions that draw on large datasets to spot delays and attempt to predict risks that may occur in future. Early adopters will likely gain in the long run, but many in the construction sector are reluctant to invest or suffer short-term disruption.

In any case, project reporting is an essential tool to monitor the health and status of an organisation’s projects. But whether or not a project owner, developer or contractor decides to go for state-of-the-art reporting or just tried-and-tested, there are three actions they should take to strengthen their systems: