5 Must Have Project Management Reports

Creating project management reports is second nature to project managers. 

Ever happened to stop by your project manager’s desk? I am sure you would have almost always found him battling with report generation.

And if you talk to one, you can hear them fussing over the number of revisions, data massaging, frequency and format changes for same datasets being requested over and over by different stakeholders.

The situation has improved to quite an extent but not at levels I would have personally liked.

Primarily because, 

• we are still caught up with too much “adminocracy”
• not using the project management & collaboration tools to their full extent
• sticking to conventional report formats
• losing focus over –“what’s actually needed” vs. “what all can I have in a report”

 “Ad hoc project management reports have been an acceptable part of a Project Manager’s KRA. It shouldn’t be. Period!”

The need is to rather identify the right set of reports that would benefit the project & meet expectations of all stakeholders involved.

“Smart thing would be to define these reports at the beginning of the project itself and get sign-off on them. With their desired frequency, of course!”

This would prevent distractions, last minute requests & efforts that would drive focus away from more impactful items on the to–dos.

So which project management reports must one choose for meaningful representation of critical success factors of a project?

The ones that come to my mind are:

• Executive Dashboards
• Project Overview
• Task Progress
• Time & Resource Management Report
• Bugs & Issues Report

 Read on……

Executive Dashboards

Project Sponsors and the Business are the most important stakeholders of all. Their reporting needs must be catered to in the most impactful manner possible. Truth is told:

One, they are the ones with their hands on the plug.

Two, keeping them engaged, preventing their anxiety is in the best interest of the project.

At the same time it is important to understand “them” and what is it that they look for in project management reports. Or the end of your status meeting would be something like this:

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Are Team Collaboration Tools Over Rated

The very need for having a “team” or groups of employees in a company is testimony to the fact that the “I” cannot achieve what the “We” can.  Rightfully so, team collaboration is the corner stone to help you achieve and excel in a sustainable manner.

As leaders, managers, project managers we focus heavily on getting the strategy right, making robust plans with no scope of error, breakdown our plan to the smallest of chunk possible and deploy the best of processes and tools to track each aspect of our project. 

However, the success of the plan primarily boils down to the team executing it.

We all deploy the most fancy of tools and processes at our workplace but how much of it do we bae into our plans. 

Have you seen a project plan with any mention of the so called collaboration factor?

The point being, it is an unspoken, unwritten assumption by all of us. Because we know we cannot go far without it. 

The question now becomes, how effective are we in enabling collaboration at the workplace?

Let us take cognizance of the contributions project management collaboration makes to the success of a project.

Projects are executed by the “Project Team”

To have the individual members of the project work as a team, we need to ensure they first stay as one.

"No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team." – Reid Hoffman

What should be some of the parameters to look for in a collaborative workplace?

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OrangeScrum Gets Awarded for Customer's Choice and Great User Experience by SoftwareSuggest

OrangeScrum – the project management and task management software has been awarded with two prestigious awards by SoftwareSuggest the best B2B product and customer review directory.

OrangeScrum has received the “Customer’s Choice for 2018” and “Great User Experience Award for 2018” among the top Project Management Softwares.

SoftwareSuggest is a business software discovery and recommendation platform. Software Suggest evaluates by:

• Shortlisting the features any business owner requires.
• Comparing those features with multiple software.
• Asking for quotations from vendors.
• And finally presenting the perfect report of evaluation.

OrangeScrum is simple Project Management and Task Management Software that brings all your teams on a single platform with dedicated support in SaaS and open source versions.

It facilitates quick task management, time tracking and end to end project planning. With transparency and visibility to multiple projects helps to boost the team performance with helpful features such as – Kanban view, Gantt chart, Executive Dashboard, In-App chat, Time Management, Resource Management and Invoicing.

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How to use Project Template in Project Management App Orangescrum

As a Project Manager, you may come across long and complex yet identical projects. It takes a long time to create a complex product workflow, marketing campaign, employee onboarding etc. And creating the same content and workflow over and over again is a cumbersome affair and complete wastage of time and resource.

To get away from creating these repeated projects and tasks, we have Project Templates for you.

Project Templates enable you to replicate and reuse the structure and content of existing projects, including milestones and task with start date, end date, estimated hours to speed up new project creation and standardize workflow processes.

The most use cases of Project Template are

• Business proposal
• Web Development Project Template
• App development Project Template
• Product Development Workflows
• SEO Template
• Audit or QA Template
• Meeting Agenda
• Event Planning
• Marketing Campaigns
• New Employee Onboarding
• Interview Questions
• Installation Checklists & so on

How to create custom Project Templates in Orangescrum?

To create a Project Template;

• Navigate to left menu panel and click on Template and select Project Template. 
• Click on Project Template

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How To Import Your Projects To Orangescrum

You can import all your existing projects from any other project management tools to Orangescrum by following steps. Before importing your projects, you may ask why you need to import your projects to Orangescrum if you’re not an Orangescrum user!

In brief, let me explain what Orangescrum offers to you.

For effective and effortless project management, you can do the following with Orangescrum:

• Project Management with Executive Dashboard
• Task Management with Real-Time Task List and Kanban page
• Time Management with Time Entry, Timer, and Timesheet
• Resource Management with Resource Utilization and Resource Availability
• Schedule Management with Gantt Chart
• User Role Management within Orangescrum
• Workflow Management with Task Status Group
• Expense Management
• Real-time chat with users
• Invoicing with role-based hourly rates
• Recurring Task and Project Template to save your time to create same tasks/projects
• Mobile Apps

Idea>Design>Plan>Execute>Deliver, all you can do within Orangescrum. And of course, you can collaborate with your clients as well. These are the very reason why you need to import your projects into Orangescrum.

Orangescrum has a flexible import feature.

How Orangescrum import works?

To import a project to our SaaS (Cloud) edition,

• Navigate to “Company Settings” and click on “Import & Export” 
• Download the “Sample CSV file”
  
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