Sami:
I have found that Stephen is exactly right, there has to be one single reporting date or everything gets fouled up; we can't measure different scope of a project or program with different reporting dates. For me this comes from multi-prime construction where we are importing contractor work into one master program schedule. Here's a horror story: on a large multi-billion-dollar program, we updated nine contractor schedules and the owner PMO schedule (which contained all the procurement, design, ancillary project data.
We built our master program schedule, developed the process for imports, ran tests and started work on the program, and everything was great. Several months later, the PMO started updating their schedule weekly and publishing it to the owner but not to our program, and we didn't know that there were any other PMO schedules available. The owner started criticizing our program schedule updates, saying that they were not accurate and it took a while to figure out what was wrong. By the time we figured it out, our program had been labeled as inaccurate. It was harder to convince the owner that "real-time" was only once each update, and it was not reasonable to try to update all the contractors' schedules and the master program schedule weekly, so we had to run a weekly comparison report to evaluate the prediction of work in the master schedule with the actual updated work in the PMO schedule.
One single Data Date has to be the requirement for good reporting, used for any reporting, and if there is a need for interim reports (between the official updates), it has to be recognized as a comparison against the planned progress.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that our original program always showed a single monthly update reporting period identified as the Data Date for all reports. We required the contractors to use the official Data Date and requested the PMO to use that date. There was initial resistance to our choice of date but it was resolved and worked well until the PMO started weekly updates. I think the PMO had not been tasked to issue a regular report on the same relative date each month so it took some handholding and education to bring them on board, all of which was forgotten when they started weekly updates. That was an unpleasant lesson learned, provide continuous training and stay in touch with all reporting stakeholders to ensure they are really in agreement with the approach.
------------------------------
Christopher (Chris) "Chris" Carson CEP DRMP PSP FAACE
Director of Program & Project Controls, Vice President
ARCADIS, U.S., Inc.
Virginia Beach VA
(757) 342-5524
Chris.Carson@Arcadis.com------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 12-06-2022 04:14 PM
From: Stephen Beck
Subject: Power BI and Data on Demand......is it the way of the future with Cost Engineering Reporting
My experience shows that all data must stay on the same end date. If the project or program needs/wants weekly data, then all data would need to be synchronized. If one system cannot refresh data weekly (say the actual cost system), you have no choice but to follow the limiting systems' update cycle.
------------------------------
Stephen Beck CCP
President, Project Controls and Change Management
pmXperts, Inc.
Knoxville TN
(865) 770-0469
steve.beck@pmxperts-inc.com
Original Message:
Sent: 11-28-2022 06:58 PM
From: Sami Jaroudi
Subject: Power BI and Data on Demand......is it the way of the future with Cost Engineering Reporting
Just in the past few years Power BI have become the leader in reporting and analytics for projects reporting and especially in Cost Engineering. However, we've seen where data is stagnant sometimes and in needs of a refresh to stay current. The question is: do the community value data on demand in these reports or stay with conventional period close. i.e: each report will have a period ending date......etc. ? How that will affect other contributors to these reports - like scheduling.....and others - do they progress daily? and can they provide that data for these reports to be live and on demand...any insight ? anyone dived into both scenarios?
------------------------------
Sami Jaroudi CCP
Project Services Leader - Systems
FHR (Flint Hills Resources) a KOCH Company
Houston TX
(281) 668-7316
------------------------------