How do you manage your project status reports?

[PaulaaO]

Hi Community,

I am interested in finding out how would you approach the following use case and if you have/had similar scenarios in practice and how did you managed them?

- our project users are finding hard to manage their status reports, as they start filling them out and saving them, but then they need to add more info onto the same reports, meanwhile potentially updating some RIDAC records, which means that to reflect any changes, especially on RIDAC, a new status report would need creating.

- our session time out is 30 mins, so our users get a bit frustrated especially if they get a call or get dragged into a meeting; we also restricted their permission to delete such records so in principle each time they fill in a status report, they should already have all their info and RIDAC records aligned, so the snapshot reflects the current status accurately

I am aware that as per product documentation ""The project status report acts as a snapshot, meaning the report preserves the status of various parameters for the date and time when the status report is generated and does not display the status of various parameters dynamically. For example, the project status report created last week retains the same status as it was for that week and does not update the status dynamically." so I don't expect much can be changed about that, therefore I am looking to see what happens in practice for other clients, if anyone might have found a way to make this work for them better.

Thank you.

Paula

[Namita Mishra]

Hi @PaulaaO ,

To respond to your point - they need to add more info onto the same reports,- I would like to suggest you to test the Tokyo functionality of generating project status report using PowerPoint templates.

Starting Tokyo release, you can create multiple powerpoint templates for project status report. Using these templates you can create the project status report showing the different fields, especially when the target audience is different for these project status report.

For more details, please refer below documentation:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/tokyo-it-business-management/page/product/project-management/task...

Please mark it as helpful / correct response, if it helped in resolving the query.

Thank You!

Namita Mishra

[PaulaaO]

Thank you Namita for your reply. We're actually exploring the possibility to implement the Export to PPT as we have recently upgraded to Tokyo. Unsure whether this would act as a solution to some of my questions above as my understanding is that once a project status report is created, only some fields can be further updated, but not RIDAC for example without creating a new report, however we will try and test various scenarios once we install the PPT plugin. Thanks

[martinjanke]

Hello,

here's what we added to Project status reports to address some of the points you mention:

• Add a state and lifecycle to status reports (Draft - Work in progress - Published) to give the project manager the possibility to save the report when in progress of creating it and then indicating with the "Published" state when it is ready.
• A UI Action "Copy into new draft", which copies a published report into a new one in draft state and refreshes the report baselines (RIDAC etc.). When a project manager wants to prepare this month's report, they usually copy the report of the previous month and then do the necessary updates
• UI Action "Refresh baselines", which can be used on draft reports to get the latest baselines in the report. This is useful if you start a report, then see that you have to add or update a RIDAC entry and want to have that included in the report. 
• Project managers can delete status reports, unless they are published. Published reports cannot be deleted and are read only

We don't use the portal page type presentation for the status report, though. We only use reports on dashboards, and some report data is exported for off platform reporting.

[PaulaaO]

Thank you for sharing this Martin. There is a bit of customisation for the solution you proposed, however it's helpful to know what others have done in practice so thank you again 🙂