Moment in Time / Snapshot report??

[amybillmayer]

Hello! I'm looking to build a Work in Progress report for our Marketing dept. They're looking for monthly "snapshots" of what projects were In Progress during each month. Not the month they started, not the month they finished, but an overall "In Progress".

An example would be a project may have started in March and completed in June. We would want that project to show up in March, in April, in May, and in June.

We are talking about a LOT of projects, so listing out the individual projects on a chart-style report is not an option - ideally it would be a bar chart showing work in progress by month. Here's an example:

Let me know if I can clarify further!

Thank you.

[Madalyn_Destafney]

Hi there, my first thought was a baseline report, which captures what the project was when it started vs any other time you decide to capture its state. More on baselines here. But if you're looking for something more high level, could you just do a project report grouped by status? You're capturing the status they're in dynamically, so if it shows 30 are in progress today but are completed tomorrow, they'll show with the completed bar tomorrow. You could add another grouping and choose a stacked bar chart, like what you have here. So could be projects by type and status (or owner and status, whatever makes sense for your use case) and group by those 2 things, then use those in a stacked bar chart.

[amybillmayer]

Hi Madalyn - I will definitely check out the baselines. Hopefully that's what I'm looking for.

Unfortunately, we're not looking for a dynamic report that will change as the projects are completed. We want to be able to look at everything that was being worked on in any given month, or across multiple months.

Thanks for your speedy reply!!

[Madalyn_Destafney]

What if you use tasks instead. Could make a task report grouped by project. In the chart, group it by project name and planned completion by month to see which projects show MoM that had tasks due (ie they were in progress at that time). Then you can show same projects repeatedly that may span more than one month…

[skyehansen]

I think the problem is that for Workfront reporting, the same object can't show up over and over. You can't run a project report and then expect to have that project show up 4 times from March to June. While Workfront briefly dabbled in offering an Analytics section that did more, I don't think they've moved forward with it. You should probably ask @Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore  if he has anything you can use.

[amybillmayer]

Oh! Great suggestion Skye, thank you!

[skyehansen]

you're welcome. The only other thing I can suggest is that you can have different reports, like a March report, April report, May report, and so on, and then report on which projects were being "worked on" in that month. You can't simply say "which projects were in progress" -- it would have to more be "which projects had changes in tasks, issues, files, or time" but you get the point, which is that you can get the numbers but you can't get a pretty chart (that would be more on Doug). 

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Interesting challenge, @amybillmayer, and thanks for the tag, @skyehansen: I do indeed!

• one option that would build on the baseline suggestion @Madalyn_Destafney mentioned is our Multi Baseline Report solution that will let you track what we call "Baseline Drift" over time across key tasks on multiple Projects, and there's a video there (swipe left) that shows it in action
• should you go that route, you might also consider our Baseline+ solution to automate taking your baselines on mass...including capturing some key information beyond Workfront's standard functionality (hence the Plus)
• another option would be to leverage the "Guitar Hero" feature of our Executive Status Report solution to periodically create the type of "Snapshot" information over time you mentioned (right in Workfront), and -- with such data available -- could then easily be used to create the exact chart you've illustrated, using standard Workfront reporting
• the latter is based on this Automatic Weekly Status Reporting concept (which I would recommend), which was the successor to the earlier Project Management Time Travel approach (which I would NOT recommend), but both are quick, interesting reads

I've got more, but that's probably a good start. Happy to chat further via doug.denhoed@atappstore.com when you're ready.

Regards,

Doug