Leveraging Your Oracle Cloud Investment
In part three of our Oracle Project Portfolio Management series, we’ll dive into the Project Performance tools and reports, and give an overview of these tools and interfaces. Understanding these tools and their functionality will help provide a foundation for successfully utilizing all of PPM and its capabilities.
There are multiple tools to access Oracle Cloud Project Performance Reporting. These include Project Management Dashboard, Infolets, KPIs, Review Project Performance, and the BI Catalog. The Project Management Dashboard (shown below) is a combination of delivered Infolets which were created to assist in reviewing all aspects of the project. This ranges from missing Time Cards, uninvoiced costs, Budget tracking, team allocation and project management.
This is a personal view which can be tailored to hide infolets which are not relevant, or create custom ones in OTBI which can be added to the dashboard. It’s important to remember when reviewing these infolets to run Update Project Performance data prior to doing any analysis, this ensures you have the most up to date information.
The Review Project Performance Area in Project Financial Management is also heavily used by our Project Managers for their True-Up Process to review hours and expenses being consumed on projects.
The three views of the page (Task, Resource, and Period Performance which is what is shown below) allow for personalized views of how the resources on their project are being used against the respective budgets. For example, we are able to see how estimated hours worked, by period, were under for a period of time which allows for the PM to know they have extra hours for another period.
Each tool is designed for the Project Manager to quickly be able to assess the health of their projects and make decisions upon these tools. There are other delivered Project Roles which offer the ability to review some project performance data, or creating a custom role to grant additional team members access if desired is a great option to extend the tool.
To populate all of these reporting tools Oracle offers hundreds of performance measures to use in the Project Performance Areas. This is due to different time dimensions and performance measures offered in the application. So what is a performance measure and time dimension? Standard Project management measures are things like Budgeted Costs, Actual Revenue, and Margin Percentage Variance(which shows the difference in baselined budget versus actual) Time Dimension examples are Inception to Date (ITD), Estimate at Completion (EAC) and Period to Date (PTD).
These measures are combined with a time dimension to become a performance measure, for example EAC Budget Revenue which would show the project manager, at the end of the project, how much revenue is budgeted. Once that measurement is baselined it can be tracked during the duration of the project to see how aligned it was from the plan.
These KPIs are a great way to assess information at a glance, against defined ranges, for checking on performance and then drill into items which are out of range.
It’s important to let the data drive your reporting as that allows uniform analysis. This also helps ensure you are focusing on data which is relevant to your organization. Cloud is a powerful tool created for companies of all sizes and industries they operate in; however, this means
We recommend first asking simple questions to determine what matters most to your organization. Come up with 5-10 top things as a Project Manager you care about. From there you can determine the appropriate measure which will report that data point. A targeted approach which has purpose is more useful than a plethora of data which isn’t relevant or hard to interpret.
With Oracle Clouds robust BI Catalog, there are also lots of reports which come out of the box for use in reporting. We’ve found the Project Income Statement, though simple, is useful for our project managers to understand Net Income on our projects. Our Operations team has another view which shows for all projects to look through the lens from the top down.
Review more information on Oracle Project Portfolio Management by reading our recent article detailing an Overview of Project Portfolio Management. Learn about the different features and benefits PPM has to offer at at a high level. Discover what it is and how it can help your organization.
Additionally, dive into how to Understand a Project Plan and Budget in this detailed post featuring the importance of developing and maintaining a Project Plan and Project Budget, which are oftentimes critical to preventing a reactive strategy of dealing with challenges which can cause delays in the project.
View the webinar recording of our PPM specific webinar, “Get Your Projects Back on Track with Oracle Cloud Project Portfolio Management”
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