The Pain of Project Status Reporting

We’re happy to report a better way to do ServiceNow Project Status Reporting.

VividCharts takes the pain out of Project Status Reporting.

Imagine you’re a Project Manager. It’s 2pm on a Thursday.

Two of your four projects recently kicked off and are on track. One is yellow with a clear path to green. But another just went from yellow to red, creating significant executive concern. With a possible path to panic.

You are already over budget, your planned end date is fast approaching, and you just lost a key resource who was critical to get you to the home stretch. So, you’ve spent the entire day in risk mitigation mode.

Your inbox is blowing up, you have meetings until EOD, a back-to-back Friday morning on deck, and status reports for all projects have to go out by Friday at noon. You start working on your status reports at 5:05pm on Thursday.

You’re an efficient PM, so drafting and submitting four concise status reports to ServiceNow would usually take you about 45 minutes, but there’s a problem.

Your stakeholders expect status reports in company branded PowerPoint format. So after submitting each of your status reports to ServiceNow, you proceed to copy and paste your status report info into the PPT slide template deck.

This wouldn’t be so bad if all the data was accessible in one place, but status reports include information from the project record, the status report related list, and other related lists for RIDACs, etc. That is, critical report data is all over the place.

So, you go from page to page, opening countless browser tabs and waiting (and waiting) for pages to load, just so you can copy the current data into your PPT slide.

Over the course of your four status reports, an hour and a half passes. It’s 7:35pm and you're finally done. With no mistakes. Hopefully.

Sounds painful. Sound familiar?  

Now, imagine you are a key project stakeholder. You have eight major projects currently in flight for your department, but three different Project Managers are running the projects.

Throughout the week, you are in various conversations where you’re asked about different aspects of the in-flight projects. When you have a question about what’s going on, you first dig back through your email inbox to find last week’s status reports. If that doesn’t contain the answer, you send an email out to your Project Manager who then drops what they are doing to track down the piece of information you need.

In the back half of the week you get three different emails from each of your Project Managers at different times, each containing hard copy status reports.

Each week, the cycle repeats.

Now Portfolio and Program Managers have their own set of closely related challenges which we will be covering in an upcoming post, but looking specifically at the Project Status reporting process from end to end reveals a frustrating, manual, inefficient workflow that isn’t great for anyone involved.

There is a better formula

ServiceNow + VividCharts = Project Reporting Problems Solved.

Together, we’ve developed a solution that doesn’t require any copy/pasting, doesn’t sacrifice on the report aesthetics and file format (PPT or PDF), and even provides a self-service interface that empowers PMs and stakeholders to view and bundle any status reports they need— whenever they need them.

By automating precisely the right reporting output, the workflow for the PM is simple.

Just input the data in ServiceNow, and let VividCharts take care of the rest.

With VividCharts, project managers now have more time to manage projects.  

Reporting is automatic with real-time ServiceNow data connecting the dots, and telling compelling stories with highly visual reports, charts and dashboards. Which all help your key decision makers get to more positive business outcomes.  

‍