Project management is a key enabler for efficiently managing the volume and velocity of business efforts and delivering ambitious growth rates. With growing data volumes, more project managers are adopting data analytics to make better business decisions.
With advanced project analytics, project managers (PMs) can harness the power of BI and gain a more comprehensive understanding of their projects. The Project Analytics Compass is a robust analytics framework designed for projects, and it empowers PMs, providing them with 360° analytical insights into their data.
Project Analytics Compass
The Project Analytics Compass focuses on the following 4 key levers to streamline processes and keep track of important project metrics.
Projects
Tasks
Bugs
Resources
Projects
Project managers usually have multiple projects in hand. By analyzing the project domain, PMs gain an overall outlook on all their projects and a single source of truth. They can then compare projects with one another, and track important project KPIs, like time, budget, and revenue. Here are some reports and dashboards that help them effectively track these metrics.
Project health report
Among the first reports that project managers usually look at, is the Project health report. This report brings all the projects under one roof and offers insights into the performance of various projects compared to one another. With this report, PMs can easily identify the projects that are performing well as opposed to those that need more focus.
The pivot view is generally the chosen visualization for this report, as it offers a comprehensive way to visualize project KPIs alongside their respective projects. The pivoting capabilities include the collapse and expansion of individual rows and columns to facilitate easier comparison of projects. Additionally, by color-coding the Project Health column, PMs can easily identify projects that are on track, off track, and at risk, in a single glance.
Watch our webinar to explore essential project KPIs and reports in more detail. You can also learn about advanced analytical capabilities to better enable analysis and data-driven decision making.
Tasks
Under the projects domain, PMs gain project insights at a macro level. However, in order to improve project performance, it’s helpful to take a narrowed-down approach by tracking ground-level metrics, like tasks.
Advanced project analytics equips PMs with a set of reports and dashboards to track task-level metrics that can help in identifying specific project focus areas, breaking down the project into smaller milestones, and prioritizing work.
Task completion monthly trend report
An important report under the tasks wing is the Task completion monthly trend report, which presents the running total of tasks completed in a given period. This helps PMs measure their team’s productivity, and also gives them an idea of how much closer they are to achieving the targetted number of tasks each month.
Additionally, project managers can also predict when they will reach their target by employing forecasting capabilities.
Bugs
Bugs are a great indicator of project quality—the fewer the bugs, the better the project’s going. This is why teams must drive their efforts to close bugs faster, to ensure seamless project delivery and prevent subsequent bottlenecks from arising as a result of an existing bug.
Bugs by project name and severity
A key enabler to closing bugs faster is the Bugs by project name and severity report, as it provides PMs with insights into the number of bugs across various projects. They can further be classified based on severity, such as major, minor, and show-stopper.
Traditionally, such reports were created by IT professionals—but then came self-service analytics with drag and drop interfaces. Today, we’re stepping into an era of conversational analytics, where people with even minimal tech know-how can analyze data and create reports with the help of intelligent assistants.
Zia is Zoho Analytic’s very own ML-powered AI assistant, and you can watch the following video to discover how we’ve created the Bugs by project and Bugs by severity reports using the platform’s conversational analytics interface, Ask Zia.
Resources
Organizations are known to waste 12% of their resources due to ineffective project management. The final leg of the Project Analytics Compass is resources, helping PMs manage and maximize resource efficiency, and track team-wise and individual-level employee performance.
Timesheet logged by users trend
Productivity is a driving factor for the success of any team. With the Timesheet logged by users trend, PMs are equipped with the right report and analytical capabilities to effectively monitor the productivity of their teams. The report provides a weekly analysis of the total number of hours logged by the team, which can further be analyzed as hours logged by individual users every week.
For a PM, the analysis doesn’t stop here. To get into finer details, they can view the projects worked on by each user, and further, the total billable and non-billable hours for each project by user, with the drill-down capability.
Try it out for yourself with the report embedded here:
Click on a user name
Select drill-down by “Project name”
Select drill-down by “Status” to view the number of billable and non-billable hours
Summary
In this article, we’ve given you only a peek at all the possibilities you have when you place your project data in the Project Analytics Compass—and when you further place the compass in a robust analytics platform.
Check out the complete webinar, where we explore powerful analytical capabilities like data blending, automated insights, exploratory analysis, and much more, for your project data.
We have a free personalized demo for those who are interested. Sign up for Zoho Analytics today.
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