Marco Piantanida
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 12
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A key area of project communication management is project performance reporting. Performance reports need to provide information at an appropriate level for each audience. When projects involve several internal and external stakeholders, it is often necessary to prepare and distribute many different reports containing subsets of similar data and information. Moreover, different audiences might require different reporting formats (slides, forms, documents, tables, graphs). Each report needs to be periodically updated (e.g., on a monthly basis) as the project progresses; this manual process is time consuming and error prone. This paper proposes a smart approach to project performance reporting that can minimize the efforts of preparing and distributing consistent and reliable reports leveraging on a modularization concept through the following ideas: (1) organizing the reports into units (sections, chapters, slides) that can be incorporated within several reports across different stakeholders; (2) organizing the content of each report with "live" links to performance data (e.g., CPI, SPI, and milestone dates) from the project planning tools; and (3) creating performance reports through the composition/aggregation of the most appropriate sections/chapters/slides for each audience. This approach is easily achievable with the current document and presentation editing tools on the market and can be implemented within any organization. The smart usage of the Office Business Application (OBA) and Master Data Management (MDM) technologies, along with an appropriate organization of project data and information, allows the optimization of the Project Performance Reporting process by removing a number of time-consuming and error-prone activities.