Previous chapter: Part 4 - The People
The most likely answer to the question “What does a manager need?” is reporting. Reporting is vital for managing anything. Without reports most forms of management fail. This is not only because without reports, it’s very easy to lose track of what’s going on, but also because most managers have to also report to their managers.
In previous chapters, we have already touched on what SharePoint can bring to the table when it comes to people and project management. But making projects run more smoothly and getting people communicating is one thing. You will want to see what benefits you get out of it. You still want to keep track of how things are working out on one project and on all projects combined. Furthermore, you will also want to keep track of the productivity of your people. Since your people and project management are already integrated in SharePoint, why not use SharePoint to get reports on them?
Of course, we don’t want managers to have to part with their complicated Excel sheets or other reporting applications. What it comes down to is that SharePoint can help you with day-to-day reporting (keeping track of) and provide you with the information to build the heavy managerial reports for monthly or annual reporting.
Day-to-day reporting
The day-to-day reporting that can be done in SharePoint is there to help a manager keep track of and on top of project and people management. Most of the features that you can use to do this are build-into SharePoint. Especially for project management these features benefit the project manager and the IT manager in more or less the same way. The features we will focus on are KPI’s and Excel Publishing. There are more possibilities but these two are the most important for reporting on a day-to-day basis.
Using these features in project management will provide you as a manager not only with a report of how the project is doing. It provides you with a 24/7 up-to-date view of what is going on. Where most reporting is done on a weekly or monthly basis, the KPI and Excel features in SharePoint provide the manager with a view on the project that is always up-to-date. The moment a project manager or any project member changes something, the reporting feature is automatically updated. That means that a manager can be sure that what he is seeing is not outdated, making it easier to keep track of the entire project.
Typically you will see a custom page being built on a project site that includes several KPI webparts combining information of the entire project site. Combined with information from published Excel sheets (for instance for budget control) these pages are basically a project report updated every day. Now of course, a report per project is nice, but an additional report combining all projects is going to make your life even better. SharePoint is very flexible in sharing information throughout site, so by building a “report center” (See 5.3 Report Center) that combines all the reports from all project into one site, will probably be indispensible for a manager.
This works very well for project, but it can also be applied to people management. Although this depends very much on what you want to report on people and of course, what SharePoint information is already available. If you want to see a KPI indicating how long people are working on a project, you will have to have a list or calendar keeping track of this information. So just like with everything else in SharePoint, it’s very important to think about what you want to get out of it before you start with it. But when you do, the possibilities, even on reporting, are pretty much endless. If not with default features, custom development can provide what SharePoint by default doesn’t.
Global reporting
As a manager, keeping track of projects or people through day-to-day reporting is fine and will make it much easier to interact with all parties concerned. But every week, month or year, you will need more. You will need to provide your managers with reports about your entire department. Although SharePoint might not provide you with enough detail to build the entire report there, since a lot of your department’s information is stored in SharePoint, most of the data for you report will be as well. The services that SharePoint can provide in this field greatly vary from what type of reporting you have to do and in what form. If it is Excel based, SharePoint provides a lot of possibilities to not only store, but also publish the reports online so that they are always up-to-date. If SharePoint is used throughout your organization, it’s even possible to have a site that combines all the reports from the departments. That way your CEO or board members can have the same 24/7 up-to-date view on their organization that you have on your projects.
Of course if the reporting has to be done in other forms, SharePoint might not have all the answers, but don’t forget that if all the information is stored in SharePoint, you can get it out in a structured way. It might take a little more effort than with for instance Excel, but it’s always possible to integrate data from SharePoint in your reports.
Report Center
As mentioned before you will need a central site that combines most of these reports you have, just to make sure that you don’t have to go around to every project site to check on the status. SharePoint provides you with a template for this type of site, the “Report Center”. The idea is exactly that which we explained before. To centralize all the reports from other sites into one site. Sure, on the project site, there will still be a reporting page for the project manager, but you as an IT manager will use this Report Center. Why search all of your project and/or people sites, when you can see all this information in one comprehensible site?
Other reporting thoughts
Reporting is important and as we mentioned before, you will have to think about it before you even start creating project, people or other types of sites. You can’t report on information that is not there. So think about what you want or need to report and make sure that information is in SharePoint and of course that your people keep the information up-to-date.
Although it is not really a managerial tool, I would briefly like to mention usage reporting here. This tracing mechanism in SharePoint is actually meant for SharePoint administrators, but you as a manager can actually use this information. If you don’t just see it as technical data, it can provide you with data about how much everybody uses SharePoint. Because SharePoint and any other collaboration application works best if used by everyone frequently, the usage reporting can tell you whether people have adopted SharePoint as their working platform or not. So don’t just discard this information, especially not in the first months after the introduction of SharePoint.
By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect