Portfolio Reporting: How To Create a Project Portfolio Report

For project management offices (PMOs), project portfolio reports are a critical success factor. The right portfolio reporting keeps everyone informed, provides visibility into key success metrics, and creates alignment with business goals.

This post will walk you through how to create project portfolio reporting that is effective, timely, and relevant.

Project Portfolio Reporting: What It Is and Why It Matters

Project portfolio reporting is the strategic documentation that provides a comprehensive overview of all ongoing and planned projects. It covers critical project information, offering insights into project status, resource allocation, budget utilization, timelines, and strategic alignment.

Unlike project-specific reports, project portfolio reports go beyond simple project tracking and reporting to enable:

1. Monitoring strategic alignment: They ensure that all projects are aligned with the organization’s goals and objectives, preventing resource allocation to initiatives that don’t contribute to the overall strategy.

2. Optimizing resources: By providing a holistic view of resource allocation across all projects, these reports help identify overallocation or underutilization, enabling more efficient resource management.

3. Managing risk: Portfolio reports highlight potential risks across multiple projects, allowing for proactive risk mitigation strategies at a portfolio level.

4. Providing support for key decision-making: When teams have data-driven insights they can readily make go/no-go decisions for new projects and help prioritize existing ones based on their strategic value and performance.

    

What are some common types of project portfolio reports?

While every Project Management Office is different, the types of reports needed  to stay on top of the project portfolio management (PPM) process and portfolio reporting are fairly standard:

• • Status reports: These reports are used for tracking progress, issues, and updates by project

• • Risk reports: Highlighting project risks and mitigation plans is an ongoing process helped by regular reporting

• • Financial reports: Monitoring budget, expenses, and financial health keeps projects aligned from a budget and benefits realization standpoint

• • Resource management reports: Staying ahead of potential staffing issues is done by tracking resource utilization and capacity

• • Executive dashboards: These vary considerably by organization but are generally high-level overviews for leadership decision-making

     

An example of a portfolio view of financial tracking 

 

Examples of Key Metrics and Data in Project Portfolio Reports and the Stakeholders They Help

Effective project portfolio reports should include an aggregated set of metrics and data that provide a comprehensive yet focused view of the portfolio’s performance. Here’s an expanded list of key elements to include:

Report Type	Description	Audience
Project Status	Indicates project health, including whether it is on track, at risk or delayed	Project Managers, Project Teams, PMO Leaders
Budget	Tracks planned vs actual budget, forecast to completion and cost variance analysis	Project Managers, PMO Leaders, Project Stakeholders
Resource	Shows current staffing across projects and utilization, may include skills gap analysis	Project Teams, Project Managers, Resource Managers, PMO Leaders
Timeline and Milestone Progress	Provides visibility into progress toward key deliverables and dates, surfaces critical path status	Project Teams, Project Managers, PMO Leaders, Stakeholders, Executives
Capacity	Projects resource demand and capacity, surfacing overutilization and shortages	PMO Leaders, Executives, Resource and HiIring Managers
Risk Assessment	Indicates potential risks, including probability and impact, to aid in mitigation strategies	Project Managers, PMO Leaders, Project Stakeholders, Executives
Financial Assessment	Tracks and projects ROI	PMO Leaders, Project Stakeholders, Executives
Strategic Alignment Score	A quantitative measure of how well each project aligns with organizational strategic objectives	PMO Leaders, Project Stakeholders, Executives
KPI Tracking	Used to track project and portfolio KPIs	Project Managers, PMO Leaders, Executives

Best Practices for Project Portfolio Reporting

Ensure your reports are effective and actionable by taking into account:

• • Is the data accurate and consistent across reports?

• • Are you using visual elements like graphs, charts, and dashboards to enhance readability and comprehension?

• • Is the report tailored to the audience for which it is intended? 

• • Is the timing of your reporting adequate to keep everyone involved updated but not overloaded?

Challenges in Project Portfolio Reporting and How to Avoid Them:

The easiest way to get ahead of challenges to effective PPM reporting is to make sure the following questions are answerable:

1. How do the metrics influence each other and what are the tradeoffs between competing metrics? For example, an overdue milestone might be acceptable if the team is performing actions that address risk mitigation

2. What specific metrics should trigger action and who is responsible for that action? Determine an escalation plan as part of your project governance strategy

3. How often should reporting be updated to ensure numbers aren’t “stale.”

4. Key success metrics can change as the PMO processes mature. How frequently should reporting metrics be assessed?

5. What’s the appropriate baseline for comparing data and how do seasonal or external factors affect it?

6. How do we avoid information overload and what is the right frequency for reporting? Real-time data is excellent but should be meaningful, not a distraction.

Getting to effective reporting is just one of the important challenges in project portfolio management that PMOs have to tackle. Getting it right, however, is critical to growing and maturing your portfolio alongside your business goals.

How to Automate Project Portfolio Reporting

Creating project portfolio reports is often a manual process, pulling data from disparate sources such as spreadsheets, time-tracking software, financial systems, and project management tools. Many PMO leaders include status reporting as the primary focus of their jobs, yet few have yet to automate the tasks that would help them focus on more important work. 

Eliminating data silos is a fundamental benefit of automation and a key component of project portfolio management. The best way to automate reporting is with a tool built for managing and optimizing a project portfolio. A PPM tool like WorkOtter will be able to aggregate project data in a meaningful way, so that every audience has the right cut of the data they need to make decisions more effectively. 

This example of an automated Resource Demand report shows staffing needs by skills type across all projects

How to create a Project Portfolio Report, a step-by-step guide

Much like a good news report, an effective project portfolio report will tell a story with the data. Here are some steps to follow when setting up your reports:

Step 1: Identify the objectives and audience for the report, keeping in mind that for the data to be actionable it has to be meaningful to the person who is consuming it

Step 2: Select the key metrics and data sources to include. For project status reports this might include a color coded red, yellow, green key for a quick read of overall health but also the ability to drill into the actual project plan to analyze and address any problems on red projects

Step 3: Choose the right tool or software for report creation. Will your audience benefit from data-rich reports that allow them to drill into details or is a dashboard surfacing KPIs more effective?

Step 4: Organize data into clear sections (e.g., financials, performance, risks) and make sure that the sections work together to tell the story of why something is happening.

Step 5: Incorporate visual aids (charts, graphs, etc.) for enhanced readability, and for surfacing potential problems or areas of concern.

Step 6: Review and validate data accuracy before finalizing, this step is critical for manual reports and even in automated reporting. Always check your sources!

Step 7: Share reports with stakeholders and gather feedback for improvement. Create a push-pull with your report consumers where you not only supply the information to them but get their feedback on how effective the reports are and where they can be improved.

Aligning project portfolio reports with organization strategy

Creating alignment starts with everyone from key stakeholders and executives to project managers and individual contributors understanding the business importance of the projects they’re overseeing and working on. Alignment is critical for driving business success and for creating a more strategic PMO. Here are some elements that contribute to reporting alignment: 

1. Clearly defined organizational strategies are communicated to every level of the organization. Everyone should have a clear understanding of mission, vision and strategic objectives.

2. Creating a strategic alignment scoring system will not only help the PMO prioritize the right projects, it will also allow measurement of key performance indicators and quantitative analysis

3. Track and report on your scores as a function of regular portfolio reporting, consider using visual representations to show alignment across the portfolio

4. Conduct regular portfolio reviews to specifically address the strategic alignment of the portfolio and to make adjustments to the project mix based on their strategic alignment

5. Engage key stakeholders regularly to keep them involved in defining and redefining strategic alignment for their department. And be certain to synthesize these definitions across the organization for a holistic understanding the entire business can understand

6. Link project to strategic objectives and implement a stage-gate process where strategic alignment is a key criterion at each gate. In portfolio reports, show how the distribution of projects aligns with your various strategic objectives

7. Use scenario planning to understand how best to adjust the portfolio to improve alignment. “What-if” scenarios can be used in WorkOtter to project the impact of changes across the portfolio, empowering the PMO, executives and stakeholders to make better decisions

8. Regularly refresh your strategies and reassess the metrics and data points in your portfolio reports to maintain alignment with the most current strategic priorities

Implementing these practices ensures that the project portfolio remains a dynamic, responsive tool for executing organizational strategy instead of a collection of individual projects.

Examples of Project Portfolio Reporting

Resource Management Reports:

Among the most important and impactful types of project portfolio reporting are Resource Management Reports. The PMO needs to show leadership by demonstrating that their highest priority initiatives are achievable (or not) given their existing capacity. A typical RM report might surface monthly % allocation by person or, more commonly, by role or role proficiency. This allows the PMO to understand if they have enough capacity over the next 6 months, 12 months, or 24 months to complete the work in their pipeline.

In WorkOtter, these reports include drill-downs so you can click into a role or person and see everything they are forecasted to work on during the specified period.

Business Value Assessment Reports:

As discussed, alignment with business goals is one of the key benefits of Project Portfolio Management. Business Value Assessment reports show business value scores and priorities for projects along with other metrics/attributes of each project. Examples might include “top ten” projects or might show a grouping of projects based on a common strategy, type, or department. These reports might also include estimated timelines and costs as well as a register of risks, issues, and changes.

Metrics typically include risk, financial impacts (ROI), customer impacts, internal impacts, resource impacts, and whether an initiative is mandatory (e.g. required for some compliance or legal standard). IN WorkOtter these metrics are captured in the optional business value assessments that can be filled out for each project. 

Project Status Reports:

At a more granular level, a portfolio-wide report of projects by status is invaluable for understanding in-flight projects and their progress toward completion. Whether the status is manually entered or derived (e.g. if workplan delivery <10% late then mark as Yellow, if workplan delivery >10% late then mark as Red), it is also helpful if reporting can surface actuals vs. plan. In WorkOtter this can be accomplished by creating a baseline for each project and comparing it to the actual plan to date to understand where deviations occurred.

Granular project status data aggregated for historical and forward-looking analysis

 

 

Streamlining Project Portfolio Reporting with WorkOtter

 

Unstructured data is difficult to compile and analyze, which is why many tools built for project and task management fall short when it comes to project portfolio reporting.

WorkOtter is the leading PPM tool built for strategic project and portfolio management with structured project data that aggregates easily for reporting to executives, stakeholders and project managers. 

 

We empower the PMO to drive greater alignment with business strategy, more efficient project delivery, and better insights for the business. If you want to learn more reach out to us to get a demo.