Your new project management office (PMO) needs to be able to define and justify its success, and this is done through reporting. Setting up reporting in your new PMO with Agile consulting services can make sure your office is set up for the long run.
Reporting is there to tell you if projects are on-track and to tell your sponsor, C-suite, and stakeholders that your PMO is delivering. You want to get your reporting set up correctly from the start to prevent issues justifying your office’s existence in the future.
Here, we’re going to be covering:
- The reporting that an Agile consultant can work on with you
- The work that an Agile consultant can do to support your new PMO
- The reasons you should consider working with an Agile consultant to establish reporting
What reporting does a PMO need to consider when working with an Agile consultant?
Every PMO’s reporting needs will be different. The information that needs to be reported will depend on elements like:
- The activities your PMO will undertake
- The PMO’s goals and objectives
- Project priorities
- Stakeholder data requirements
- Legal requirements
An Agile consultant will be able to help you establish reporting such as:
- Project status reporting – you can work with your consultant to define what metrics and milestones you want to know about your projects and build a way to efficiently report the data on the timeframes you need.
- Resource reporting – keeping track of where and how your resources are deployed is important, and you can set up the reports based on the metrics that are important to your PMO with your consultant.
- Time and work tracking reports – however you decide to measure the outputs of your project teams, you can make sure it is reported accurately and the same across all projects when you have reporting set up from the beginning.
- Portfolio health reports – you can create top-down views to make sure you and your C-suite understand where the successes and challenges are coming from. Pulling in the right data from each project can take time, and a consultant can streamline the process long-term.
What value does an Agile consultant bring to setting up PMO reporting?
While you likely know how you’re going to measure success across your projects and for your office, it isn’t always easy to implement that reporting. Setting up a new PMO is a challenge enough, but working to get the right tech and triggers in place for reporting can take time and know-how that may not be at hand.
An Agile consultant will be able to:
- Assess the technology you have at hand and how best to use that to measure success.
- Understand your PMO’s goals and see how to tease that information out of the data that’s produced.
- Design dashboards and visual representations to make your reporting accessible to all.
- Automate data collection, potentially in ways you weren’t aware of, to reduce admin work for your office and projects.
- Produce templates for manual reporting when it’s needed, and make sure that everyone who uses the templates understands how and where to gather the right data.
- Implement feedback mechanisms, including setting up triggers to warn your office and project managers when reports are going off-track so action can be taken.
- Set your PMO up for scaling in the future, with the right datapoints available to be reported on as your PMO becomes more complex.
Why do I need Agile consulting services for reporting in my new PMO?
You may know what you want to measure, but knowing how to measure it regularly and efficiently can take a lot of work. Agile consultants are aware of the tools you need to gather data, including if you need to have software on your systems and if there is software that can take over manual reporting.
The time an Agile consultant spends setting up your reporting frees you up to get on with the work of getting your office functional – giving you something to report on!
Setting up reporting in your new PMO can be well-served by Agile consultants because it is a on-off task that will help you understand your long-term success.
