Project Reporting: Quality over Quantity

Let’s face it: most project managers in small- to mid-sized AEC firms wear many hats in addition to the PM hat. Most likely, your team consists of Engineers, Architects, Design Professionals, RLS Professionals, and various other technical and professional designations – who also have Project Manager responsibilities. After years of experience working with AEC firms, my guess is that those team members are juggling all their project responsibilities, client management, and staff development.

Simply put – your project managers are swamped, and their time is precious.

Project Performance Report = Project Success

One of the most valuable features of the Deltek Ajera software is that it offers “real-time” reporting to your team. Ajera offers standard reports as well as dashboard reporting with easily customizable widgets. Having this type of visibility into project performance is key to successful projects and makes life much more manageable for the busy project manager. Implementing robust, easy-to-access, and easy-to-use project reporting is essential for project managers to deliver projects on time and on budget. And, while the rich offering of reporting options in Ajera is one of its many benefits, you can go overboard and have too much of a good thing.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Reporting is a fantastic way to provide your team with critical project performance information in an easy-to-understand format. But report overload can confuse and dilute the data or, even worse, result in your employees ignoring the reports altogether. With all the great reporting options in Ajera, how do you select the right one for your firm and avoid unintentionally offering too many to your team?

Out of the box, Ajera’s standard settings provide access to many reports in the PM (and other) security roles. Most reports in their standard format require a bit of “fiddling with” their options to provide meaningful results. Since your average Project Manager isn’t going to remember how to dial in the options each time they want to run a report, they may become frustrated and avoid the reporting tool altogether. In fact, I’ve worked with firms using Ajera where project managers confide that reporting is too challenging or they don’t trust the information being reported.

My diagnosis? They are suffering from report overload.

Next Steps

I’m happy to report some good news! There are many easy solutions that your firm can apply to get rid of report overload, confusion, and frustration once and for all.