Trying to create a report which pulls the recent submission of the status report of every project

[RamyaSa]

Trying to create a report which pulls the recent submission of the status report of every project. Thinking DMAX function applied on entryDate might be helpful. Since I am newbie to Workfront reporting, struggling here. I appreciate if anyone can help me with this.

[RamyaSa]

To add some more details, Every project submits Status report in different cycles like few on weekly/biweekly etc.. My requirement is to pull the latest submission of every project. Regards, Ramya

[Kelly_Wehrmann]

I'm really interested to see what gets posted on this one, as we have a similar problem. Our Status Reports (updates) are added to Projects as Issues (I'm guessing that is what you are referring to). Workfront consultants assisted us with this implementation as it is something that they did as well. The only way we found to include the latest status update in a report is to pull it from a reporting database that we load select Workfront data to every morning. I really wish there were an easier way to do this within Workfront so we could keep the users focused on working in the tool instead of having to bounce them out of it to see reports that we just can produce in Workfront. :)

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Kelly. Since you're already using Issues to capture Status Reports, it sounds like you're using a technique to the one I described in my Automatic Weekly Status Reporting blog post. Given that, could you (as I've done) not then create charts that show the trends of those status reports over time, using standard Workfront charts (based on such issues), or is there something else you're trying to report? Regards, Doug

[Kelly_Wehrmann]

Thanks Doug. We are using some of what you described....but not exactly. We pull key project info using calculated custom fields on the Issue custom form. However, the qualitative info (similar to your highlights this week) is on the actual Issue Form, not the Project. Based on your blog I don't think this difference is anything to radical. The challenge we face within our Department is that one group does a really good job staying on top of status updates to ensure they are provided each week on key projects. So there is no problem generating a report to show status reports entered for the current week or for the past two weeks for management. The fly in the ointment is the other group is more relaxed on when status updates need to be created; they are not monitored or required to complete a status report each week. This poses a problem when attempting to generate similar reports for their group (status reports for current week and status reports for prior two weeks). For example, they may have status updates for 10 projects created for the prior week and only 1 for the current week. If we run the report for the status updates for the current week, we are effectively missing 9 projects that were included the prior week because the dates are out of range. Management would still like to have these 9 on the report even though they are stale by one week. It would be nice if we could somehow create a report in workfront to pull the latest Issue (status update) for any given project. This way they would still see all of their projects with the latest Issue that was created, regardless of how different the entry dates may be. Especially if the latest on for a project was more than a month old. Then we could highlight the entry date or something to indicate how stale the update they are reading may be (red for more than a month, yellow for more than a week). The info you have on the blog is good, however, on the surface it doesn't appear that it would help us in this situation, especially since Executive Management is really more interested in the qualitative updates, more than the other snapshot fields. I'm I missing something here? Thanks! :)

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Kelly. Sounds like we're using similar approaches -- nice! In our case, since the latest status report is always maintained at the Project level, what you're looking for would be quite easy: rather than the "status report over time" Issue-based reports, you could just make a Project level report report showing the latest status report from each Project. In fact, we do just that in a grid, and colorize the row of the update based on the date of the last status report (a custom data field), making it "lighter and lighter grey" the older it gets: essentially, the dated information starts "fading". Regards, Doug

[DagmaraGa]

Hi, I would like to make similar report to this what you're talking about. Dough, could please expand a little bit more points highlighted on pic attached ?

[KarenRu]

Doug, or anyoe, Can you post examples of such status reports? I'm trying to visualize. I'm trying to get my PM's to post weekly status notes. And we might be a bit primitive- but I added a custom text field at the project level that the PM's post to each week, over writing the previous weeks note.....if there's a better way to capture status notes (and actually keep a record of it) I'd love to figure it out. I'm trying to use the issue's tab to keep track of our "lessons" learned. Is it possible to use issues for multiple things? i.e- status notes and lessons learned? tks Karen

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Karen (and Dagmara), I don't have any examples handy (it was from a client a couple of years ago), but in essence, imagine "grid with one row per project, with a status comment cell for each, with the text color of the comment being black if the comment was updated within 7 days, dark grey if within 14 days, light grey if within 28 days, and very faintly grey if older than that". The visual analogy is that the comments are so old, they "fade out" (e.g. are no longer relevant). As for a better way...as I'd mentioned above to Kelly, we've taken the Automatic Weekly Status Reporting technique I described to make it easier for Project Managers to track a number of KPIs over time. Regards, Doug