External Tasks and useful BI Reporting

[Brian Lukanic]

Let's say I have a single schedule that lists release milestones of all my
in-flight software development projects. Then, all of my implementation
project schedules that are going to implement that software use a
cross-project dependency to make it clear that the implementation is awaiting
on the completion of the particular software product in development.

This much we do currently. But what is the best way to get useful BI
reporting off that master schedule of milestones? For instance, I want to see
a listing of "all projects that are depending on the release date of the
software, the total revenue or NOI awaiting recognition of that
implementation project, and other project-level information stored in each
implementation schedule. I was originally thinking that I would simply insert
the custom enterprise-level fields in the milestone schedule to quickly show
Project Name, Cost, and other summary or project-level fields. But It's not
working for me.

Would a SSRS report off the database be better? I am hoping to be able to
quickly see the list of projects awaiting a software release, their revenue
on hold, and other summary-level information.

thanks
Brian

 

[Marc Soester [MVP]]

Hi Brian,
the question is good, but probably hard to answer from us, it is more a
question business related. If you like to have a report that is accessible
via PWA or your project workspace my recommendation would be Reporting
Services. SSRS allows you to create a nice way of ensuring that everyone has
access to the information using a browser. Whereby generating this kind of
report within the client will only allow users with Project Professional and
access to your project to view this information.

The short of the story is, probably a good idea to generate a reporting
services report.
Hope this helps

 

[Jonathan Sofer [MVP]]

My inclination would be to create an SSRS report because of the flexibility
of how to display the data and what data you can pull in. Sounds like you
want to pull in the data from the project level fields but if there is other
data related to the task being linked, you would create a custom enterprise
task fields for capturing more meta data.

As for the dependencies, I am not sure the data exists in the reporting db
so you might have to go into the published db for that.

Jonathan