Uploading Reports to Wipbi

In the following posts we explain the usage of Wipbi, and we start by explaining its most important functionality: how to create a new project and upload new reports, to create the dashboard with project health metrics.

At the moment of writing this post, Wipbi has been tested with MS Project native files and XML interchange files exported from GanttProject and OpenProj.

Why we are developing a specific platform for Project Control and Reporting

 

We are finishing the first release of Wipbi that will be available in short time. It has some functionality to get a good idea of how Wipbi will grow in the future, and some users have already connected and given very useful oppinions.

But there is a question that many people might ask, and although the answer has always been in our mind, we think it is important to tell it explicitly: Why are we doing this? There are so many Project Managament products (commercial and Open Source) available…

The reason is that we want to achieve that projects, as a fundamental base for the innovation process and progress of every company, help to develop more efficient enterprise ecosystems. And we think this is not happening in many situations, despite the existence of great tools and methodologies.

Starting a project has more or less risks, risk of not managing to finish the project, risk of not getting enough value, etc., but at last, it is the risk that not only the invested resources and time are not rewarded, but that the consequences of not allocating those resources to other important tasks or the fact of losing any time that is often very valuable, could affect the competitiveness of the company in the long term.

We firmly believe that we can contribute to improve project results, focusing in the communication mechanisms between stakeholders and in the control of the project status. So, we are developing a platform that unifies the information generated by the project and which may come from multiple channels, then transforms that information into an effective communication, fitted to each stakeholder´s needs, and automates those tasks that because of being considered as repetitive and with little value, they are often not performed at the right time.

A simple concept complementing other great Project Management solutions.

This is our aim. Do you share our point of view?  

Work Progress Indicators

This post is about building and presenting information about the current progress of the work, which is one of the most important parts of a project progress report.
The presented approach for project reporting is to use indicators, which are numerical and graphical representations of information. They are also called key performance indicators (KPIs), and they are built from project metrics. They present the information in a way it is very quick to read and understand, which improves the effectiveness of the project progress reports.

Project Progress Reporting

This post is about how to create good project progress reports.
Progress reporting is a very important activity in project management. Project planning is generally recognised as the main management activity (and it is supported by most project management tools), but an effective tracking of the project progress plays also a key role, as well as the communication to the client and other stakeholders.

In my experience, many problems affecting projects are related to a lack of visibility on the real status of the work, and to a bad communication of that status to the clients. The creation of good progress reports periodically can significantly improve those areas, because it helps to understand the status of the project, and it provides effective communication with project stakeholders, to evaluate the progress and issues, and take decisions according to it.

Introduction

This blog has been created with the objective to share information related to the Wipbi platform. Wipbi is a project and portfolio management (PPM) application, focusing on project tracking and progress reporting.

The idea behind this blog is to provide information about the platform, including its development and usage, as well as general topics related to project management and reporting. We hope to provide interesting contents for the readers, regardless they are users or not of the application.

A little bit of history about how we arrived here: project progress reporting is the usual way to formally communicate information between the project manager in charge of a project, and the client. There are many different ways of reporting, normally based on delivering progress reporting documents. Project management methodologies and organisations usually provide templates to standardise the contents. In 2007, the European Space Agency started a study about the applicability of Business Intelligence techniques to improve the visibility on the status of their software projects. The key idea was to formalise reporting interfaces with the contractors, to be able to automatically process the information and analyse it to generate organisational information and reports with added value. The idea was developed in the next years, and the resultign system was called BIRF (Business Intelligence and Reporting Framework). It has been applied to real software projects at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC).

We are some of the developers originally involved in that project, and we had the idea to generalise the concept, to create a web platform for supporting project progress reporting, and the interaction between clients and contractors. The result is Wipbi...