Top 3 PMO Reports for Your Steering Committee

The Portfolio Management Office (PMO) will need to produce a set of reports for a programme board, steering committees or Portfolio Owners. This blog describes the top 3 Portfolio reports from PM3, our PPM tool, that our clients use for these steering committees. There can never be a one size fits all, but reviewing the report usage from our PM3 tool, there are three reports that are heavily used for presentation to senior management in various committees.

Each organisation is different in terms of culture and how they want information to be presented, but there are some standards. For example, steering committees or portfolio boards will tend to have reasonably senior people on. Therefore, drowning these senior people with too much information is not a recommended approach. They are busy people, so you need to present information that is high level and then goes into increasing levels of detail if needed.

When I have presented at these boards, for example, on the health of a portfolio that I am running, I want to show the following information:

• Very high level or heat map of the portfolio;
• One-line summary of every project in the portfolio; and
• By exception, a detailed project report on each project that is at RAG red status.

One of the key project reports that is needed by the PMO and senior management is a project dashboard or highlight report. There are literally hundreds of versions of these types of reports being used. There are, however, some common themes.

One of the benefits of a PMO that sets standards is that one version of a highlight report can be used by all projects. Many clients we work with still allow project managers to produce their own version of a highlight report in either Excel or PowerPoint. Not only is this a huge amount of wasted effort, but for stakeholders who are involved in many projects it is also confusing to be presented with different versions of a highlight report for different projects. Also, not having a standard highlight reports runs the risk that key project information is missing from the highlight report.

I’m not saying one size fits all as there may be situations where a RED project needs a more detailed highlight report. AMBER and GREEN projects may only need to have a more summary version of the highlight report.

If you implement a PPM tool like PM3, you have the advantage that the tool helps you to standardise the highlight reports. At The Project Bureau, we have recommend our preferred PPM tool, PM3 and below I have listed the most popular highlight reports that are used by PM3 clients. The first two highlight reports are one-page summaries but the last one is a more detailed report and is over 2 pages.