Top 3 Steering Committee Reports by PM3

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The Portfolio Management Office (PMO) will often need to produce a set of reports for a programme board or steering committees.

The reports may be produced by the programme director or portfolio manager but typically the PMO will help produce these reports.

This blog describes the top 3 reports from our PM3 that our clients use for these steering committees.

There can never be a one-size-fits-all, but reviewing the report usage from our PM3 tool, there are three reports that are heavily used for presentation to senior management in various committees.

Each organisation is different in terms of culture and how they want information to be presented, but there are some standards that should be used.

For example, steering committees or portfolio boards will consist of relatively senior people. Therefore, drowning these executives with too much information is not a recommended approach. They are busy people, so you need to present information that is high level and then go into increasing levels of detail, if needed or by exception

When I have presented at these boards, for example, on the health of a portfolio that I am running, I want to show the following information:

• Very high level or heat map of the portfolio;
• One-line summary of every project in the portfolio; and
• By exception, a detailed project report on each project that is at RAG red status.

Portfolio or Programme Heatmap
This is the highest report in terms of granularity and shows each project in the programme or portfolio and the RAG category against each RAG factor. Each row represents a project.

Programme / Portfolio Summary and Planned Next Activities
This next report shows more detail against each project in the programme or portfolio. Its name is the Monthly Change Board although, in PM3, this name can be changed. For each project, this report shows the RAG, a commentary on why the project is at that RAG status, the sub RAGS, and the activities next period.

Detailed Highlight Report for each RED Project

The third report that you need is a detailed highlight report for each project that is at RED status. I have only included one of these reports below, but the report would typically include all projects that are at RED status.

As you can see this report has a lot of information on this RED project. In addition to the RAGS it includes:

• Financial Status
• Project Goal
• Summary of why the project is RED
• Key achievements this period
• Key targets for next period
• Topics for escalation to management
• Next five milestones
• Top risk and issues

Summary
Although organisations will have different reporting standards, these three reports are very good candidates to present at your steering committee. PM3 has a wealth of reports that are automatically produced saving a significant amount of time.

There is a lot of efficiency to be gained from standardizing on reports and even more productivity to be gained if the reports are automatically generated from a PPM tool, like PM3.