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Purpose

The dashboard report is a report to senior management that provides an at-a-glance perspective on the current status of the project in the context of predetermined metrics for that project. Depending on the organization, those metrics may include cost, time, requirements, risk, customer satisfaction, or other measures critical to the management team. It provides management with a quick understanding of the current project posture, without a detailed explanation of the causes or solutions.

Application

In organizations where multiple projects limit the amount of management involvement, dashboard reports are used to allow managers and executives to examine and assess project status. It facilitates discussion by highlighting only metric status points, encouraging management by exception, where deviations from the norm become the focal points of discussion. Those metrics should be established early in the project and applied as the project takes form.

Content

A dashboard report relies on metric content built on detailed reporting from the project team and the project manager. Dashboard reports frequently include earned value data, including the value of the work completed to date (earned value), the amount of work scheduled to date (planned value), and the actual costs. With those metrics and the overall project budget, basic information regarding schedule variance, cost variance, and updated estimates at completion may be generated. Other metrics may include:

•  Number of change requests;

•  Staff overtime;

•  Team member loss/turnover;

•  Defect rates;

•  Risk reserve consumed;

•  New high-impact risks identified;

•  Anything else that can be measured by the numbers.

Dashboard reports often include graphs and graphics that quickly highlight where there are concerns, as well as the degree of those concerns.

Approaches

As the name implies, the dashboard report often takes on the look and feel of an instrument panel in a car or plane. It is a set of graphic representations of the metric information of importance to management.

Considerations

Perhaps the greatest danger associated with dashboard reports is that management may believe they understand the intricacies of the project by virtue of this limited amount of information. They sometimes must be reminded that reading a dashboard report no more makes one aware of the details of a project than reading the indicators on a car’s dashboard makes one a mechanic. It’s a quick, effective overview of critical metrics.