Sign Client Progress Report Made Easy

E signature web development progress report

good afternoon welcome everyone this is Steve too bad you with wicker soft pleasure to have you join us here today for a special 30 minute webcast on saving time with automated project status reports pleased to have you join us this session is being recorded and will be made available for download following the session we're going to jump right into the demonstration and discussion here today we're not going to bury you with slides but rather we want to make this a high-value session please do feel free to use the chat window to ask any questions during the presentation and we'll have our presenter and demonstrator Erin Harkleroad take pauses during his presentation to answer any questions Erin you have the floor thanks Steve okay so I've got my screen share going and hopefully everybody can see this so the platform that we're gonna use today so automating project status reports I'm going to show you how you can use power bi against project online data to automate not only project status reports but also portfolio program level status reports resource utilization basically the whole spectrum of project and portfolio management so most of us I'm sure are aware that power bi is part of the office 365 suite but if you're not aware it is so I'm signed in here to just an office 365 portal page and if I click over to the app launcher or what some people refer to as the waffle here in the upper left I can access power bi and in power bi you have different workspaces that can be configured you can sort of think of those is like shortcut areas or you know sites if you will but in your different workspaces you can have reports that power bi report builders have have built and/or dashboards and share with you so you can organize your different types of reports into different workspaces if you are building reports power bi is a very rich bi platform for building reports against all types of data out there so for instance when I click get data here and I browse some of the service um that I have my disposal you'll see there's quite a long list of different types of services and databases that it can connect to so imagine if you would that you want to see you know perhaps a dashboard of users that have not logged in you know with our office 365 account in the last 30 days or maybe going down through the list here you want to have a dashboard where you can see you know trends of how people are utilizing your public website if you're using Google Analytics or maybe you have some you've got some scrum teams you're doing some agile software development and they might not even be using in Microsoft platform might be using something like JIRA and you want to have you know as part of your portfolio reports the ability to do things like take a look at burn downs show your your velocity stuff like that and of course you know we've got Microsoft Dynamics essentially every service and application that's part of office 365 you can report against in power bi okay now what I'm gonna focus on in this webinar is reporting against project online data before I just jump straight into a report though I'm gonna go over to my project online environment and just you know very quickly kind of paint a picture for you so imagine if you will in project online you've got project and program managers that are painstakingly keeping your project schedules up to date so they're managing work breakdowns or assigning resources they're tracking and making sure that you know milestones are being met on schedule or hopefully they're perhaps doing you know risk management so they're utilizing the out-of-the-box risks issues lists and you know managing risks for those projects so a risk is observed you know assigning it to folks and hopefully mitigating or closing those risks out and then you've got other types of resources like project team members I might be an analyst a ba or a developer on a project and I typically use the tool to do things like fill in a timesheet or perhaps collaborate on some documents like maybe I'm helping some folks build a build a project charter for my project so I'm using project online you know to record information as well and of course my resource manager is also keeping tabs on you know making sure that if if I'm needed or my skill set is needed for upcoming projects or current projects that I'm not being over utilized you might even have other departments like finance or legal taking part in governance workflows so if you have certain types of projects that need to collect approvals for perhaps regulatory compliance reasons or things like that that can all be baked into the processes that you have built in project online and of course all of that information gets stored in databases in the backend so you can use power bi as a very rich tool to gain insights and to visualize what is going on in project online with regards to your portfolio performance project performance etc so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to I'm going to navigate into a couple different reports and dashboards that we have so on my workspace okay I'll start with this Microsoft Project online dashboard and on the dashboard what you're seeing here is quite a lot of aggregate level detail so I could see the total number of projects I have in the project online environment that I'm reporting against how many resources I have in that environment and then across all projects active risks and issues if I want to you know decompose this information a little bit and drill down into specific projects and look at individual risks and issues we can do that as well okay and I've got several visualizations here that will chart out things like okay resource assignments by the different types of projects that were running the resource assignment work that I have across my different application portfolio so I can see which application portfolios are utilizing the resources most heavily and which of those application portfolios are actually getting their work done since I'm depicting the bar chart here in terms of plan and also actual work can also take a look at what my resource demanding capacity over time looks like and these tiles on this dashboard okay are are part of a report that surfaces all this information so for instance if I was to click on on one of these tiles it will take me into the detailed report where I can glean more information from my portfolio so you notice several things here this particular report we've got multiple pages across the bottom I'll take you through a few of those okay and on the report itself more able to do things like add slicers at the top so if I did want to filter down on perhaps Department or the different types of projects that were running or you know focus in on a specific project manager I can use the slicers for that okay not only that but I can also use some of the visual charts that are on the report as well so for instance I can see I've got a donut chart here of my different projects by the type of project that they are so in project online you can configure what's known as an EPT or an enterprise project type and that's what you're seeing in this all the various enterprise project types that I have so for instance if I was the portfolio manager for application type projects I can click on that and then all the other details on the page so whether or the whether we're talking these tile counts on the left-hand side so things like overall project cost the number of projects or the details table down below they are all now respective of that application project type that I selected up top okay and if I just click on the same or a different slice in that donut chart it will either change the filter to a different selection or if I click the same one it will undo the filter so I can see of all the projects that I have in my portfolio on this first page you know some high-level KPIs total costs when they're expected to finish okay and I can also use some elements within the report like for instance if I wanted to sort these in a different order by finish date or by cost I can click on the column headers and the report to change my sorting as well if I navigate over to the next page portfolio timeline here what I'm seeing is sort of a Gantt representation at the project level so those of you that use project online you know full well that there are Gantt charts in project online but if I'm you know sharing with a sponsor or perhaps an executive stakeholder you know where we are in a particular portfolio or a specific project those users are probably not signing into project online so they're probably not going to see those Gantt charts that are over there so you have the ability to to you know depict timeline information power bi as well so I can hover on different projects here okay and again if I wanted to focus in on let's say specific project departments here like maybe my product development projects again I can use one of the slicers or the drop down filters at the top to select what it is I want to focus on ok not only that but power bi has the ability to capture snapshots over time so whether we're looking at a timeline report like this or you're looking at a report where we have you know collection of risks issues or I'm looking at project cost details you know financial metrics you can take a look at that information with respect to periods of time so in this case if I wanted to say okay where were we with our projects and you know last quarter of 2015 all the way through you know the four quarters or you know first two quarters of 2016 I can use my little timeline selection up here to focus in on specific quarters or specific time spans actually I'm clicking on months here I can see but if I wanted to go up drill up a level to the quarterly level I can go here and change from months to quarters and again take a look at whatever details are on the page here in this case it is a Gantt chart that's showing me the overall duration of the project and what percent complete we are in addition to some other things like which resources are on it but I can view that information over a different time slices so very powerful particularly with things like status reports where if right now you are viewing a particular status that's you know maybe not showing exactly what you would want to see what the project you could see okay how did we get there what were we looking like a week ago a month ago a quarter ago so you have the ability to do that in power bi if I go to the portfolio cost page what you're seeing here is a lot of project detail information rolled up with regards to costs of things like the overall project cost okay baseline cost you see some calculations in terms of KPIs being made automatically at the top here so any of my projects that are currently less than 10% over baseline cost I can click on that KPI and it will filter down the table below to show me what those are or if I want to see my projects that are kind of flying without a net so to speak those that don't have a baseline so we're not really able to track variances I can I can click on just that alone it'll focus the report down below to just the projects that do not have a baseline value so it makes it really really easy to interact with the data and get to exactly you know what it is you want to see here one of the things we get we get requested a lot is is to do roll-ups of information risks and issues are good examples so for instance if I go over to the portfolio risks page here those of you that use project online you know very well that the risks and issue logs they're maintained at the individual project level so you have a risks list for each project which if I'm reporting on a specific project it's easy to get to that information but if you want to roll up risks across multiple projects maybe to a program level or a portfolio level you know it's very difficult to do that in the tool itself as a matter of fact in the tool there you really can't do that and by - I'm referring to project online but again with power bi reporting against the project online data set we're able to do in this case a roll up of our risks are issues basically any of the project metrics up into a department level a portfolio level and still be able to interact with that and drill down to specific details so for instance if I wanted to view risks by you know specific category values like maybe you know scope category or Hardware related risks I can use the category chart up here at the top not only that but I can also use this power bi page to interact with the actual data itself so for instance if I'm looking at this risk this year okay and I'm seeing this extra legal resources have not been hired and I'm suspecting I thought we closed that risk out it shouldn't be showing on this dashboard anymore you'll notice that I have a hyperlink right here I can click the hyperlink and it'll actually open up that particular risk item in whichever project site it exists on so if I needed to go straight to editing that item maybe changing the status or changing any other value for it I can do so okay and then when I come back to the report and I refresh the report I'm able to see that new detail were selected in here so on that note you can manually refresh any of the details that are showing in a power bi report you'll notice there's a refresh up top you can also schedule refreshes to happen in the background okay in addition to that in power bi you'll notice at the top if you're looking at a report there is a subscribe option here so one of the nice features is via email you can get power bi basically delivered to your inbox if certain triggers happen so for instance if the data that is rolled up into this particular report changes like we've had some new risks logged in this particular instance hey or some risks closed out things like that you could get an email delivered to your inbox you know letting you know that the data has changed you can select frequency here you can set different types of triggers and criteria okay so rather than having to you know reactively log back into power bi and refresher report and and you know keep tabs on what's changing in the environment you can proactively have alerts delivered to your inbox and of course all this information that can be rolled up you know particularly project level information so one of things we haven't really looked at in this particular report is the resource availability okay so viewing across my resource pool if I wanted to see which resources are being you know over utilized under utilize if I want to use this for some strategic planning to say I do we have enough we have enough business analysts to take on a couple new projects in the next next month next quarter okay I can use the insights the power bi delivers to me to make those types of decisions and again I can you know drill into specific details here so if I wanted to take a look at a particular month of this year August of 2017 and see you know in that month you know generally speaking looking ahead but maybe in the past month you know which resources were over utilized and underutilized again I can interact with the reports very intuitively and getting some more insights into what's going on in my project online environment so all of this automation that's you know already baked into the report you know is very rich but a lot of times you know users might a bit of self-serve as well so for instance if you know if I have a multi-page report you know given to me sometimes it might be difficult for me to remember where exactly in the report do I go to see you know I just want to see total costs perhaps broken down by a department or or a portfolio or things like that so if I navigate back to the dashboard that I was using here to interact with all that data okay when you're on a power bi dashboard one of the things you can leverage is the natural language query which is part of the power bi feature set so at the top of the dashboard what you'll see here is ask a question about your data and it will give you hints as you're entering information it'll it will you know keep suggestions over time to help you you know help you hone in on what it is you're looking for specifically so if I click here and I start typing a query show total project let's say I'm looking at baseline cost by project name okay you'll notice it takes my you know my natural language input here and it gives me a bar chart of projects from the one at the top with the highest baseline cost all the way down to the one at the bottom with the smallest baseline cost and if I want to change you know to say cost rather than baseline cost you notice when I click on one of the terms here it gives me other selections so maybe I want to look at you know baseline work and set a baseline costs okay I can change that very easily also if I wanted to see this depicted in a different manner so rather than a bar chart perhaps what I want to see is a pie chart okay all I have to do is type the different visualization type that we have in here okay so again maybe you know yes we have risks on a particular report but I know that I can quickly and easily get to risks information by saying hey show me the risk names may be sorted by costs okay and what I can do is you know see again from whichever projects have risks with the highest cost impact I can view that information visually okay not only that but any of the visualizations whether it's a natural language query or one that's in one reports again one of the nice features that you have in power bi is the ability to pin that visualization to a dashboard so if I wanted to put this on a new dashboard so I could quickly and easily open up a page that shows me the risks sorted by whatever their cost exposure is power bi makes it very easy to do that couple last things here so if I navigate back to my workspace and I go into a different dashboard here I'm still rolling up and aggregating some project detail but into a different dashboard I realize that a lot of folks are using more and more mobile devices these days so when we're when we're not sitting at a desk if we even have an office desk anymore you might be interacting with this information or wanting to interact with this information via our own a tablet so power bi can automatically if you come into a dashboard page here display what your data looks like in a mobile view so if I switch over to the phone view for this particular type of report you know it's responsive so it doesn't just simply shrink the page down to fit on the phone but it reorganizes the data to make it a little bit easier to interact with from a mobile device and finally for pure automation or total automation so imagine if you are I'm a project manager and one of the things that I do on a frequent basis is you know I need to report status not only to my team but also to perhaps sponsors or executives stakeholders so I might use power bi or and have somebody build a project status report for me okay but you know I've got to continuously keep coming back to power bi logging in here opening up my project status report wouldn't it be nice if I could just open up a slide deck and utilize that as my project status report so one of the capabilities in power bi is the ability to export and embed a report into PowerPoint you can also embed reports into SharePoint so if you're on a SharePoint site you could create a web part page on a SharePoint site and display in that web part the contents of the power bi report but in this case and continuing with my scenario I'm wearing my project manager hat and you know I want a quick and easy way to share project status on a weekly basis with my team with stakeholder so I can take one of these power bi reports export it to PowerPoint ok and when I do so I've already done that ahead of time whatever details are in that power bi report that will be presented in the power bi deck you can you can see on the landing page here there's a link to go to the actual report in there the lit the starting page of the deck will tell you when the data was last refreshed when it was downloaded ok but as I step through the different pages so the different pages of the deck what I'm seeing here are the different pages of the actual power bi report and also I've got the same filtering and refresh capabilities in the power bi deck so if perhaps a different p.m. that's who's collaborating with me on this project has just published some schedule changes or just perhaps closed out some issues and I want to make sure that I'm viewing the most up-to-date information in this deck before I share it with the team or sponsor again I'm able to refresh that information in the deck and weekly my process could be that I just simply open up this PowerPoint slide deck when I start the status meeting share that information out and it can you know really streamline how how we can report on project performance program portfolio performance and you really like now to not only make project managers life simpler but regardless of what your role is a resource manager program manager portfolio manager any of the various hats that you might be wearing in an organization the automation capabilities can really cut time cut down on effort so with that I'll open up the floor for any questions and also turn it back to Steve for any housekeeping and closing comments thanks Erin we robotic arm rods here today so if you have any questions please go ahead and put those into the chat window or you can use the questions panel inside of GoToWebinar we invite everyone to visit WWF online including reporting through power bi we'll go ahead and take any questions that you might have here now before we drop and thank Erin for the demonstration certainly what we've seen is a lot of organizations save a lot of time automating those project status reports through the use of power bi and PowerPoint together we also welcome you to visit wicker soft comm to learn more about our organization today's presentation was very focused on the capabilities of the tool but we're happy to engage with you to support your efforts around project and portfolio management including reporting you can visit us online at WWF comm or as I mentioned before ww project online comm you can also reach me directly at any time for my email its ste EB AG y at wicker soft comm we welcome a conversation with you to learn more about your project and portfolio management initiatives and how we can support those through the use of Microsoft's technology with that said Erin we don't have any questions we'll go ahead and wrap up the show here and thank you for the presentation thanks everyone