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Progress reporting

A steering group that asks for a project status usually gets a slide. Someone built that slide the night before, from what they could remember and a couple of spreadsheet tabs they still had open. By the next steering meeting, nobody is quite sure whether that picture was even still accurate when it was shown.

Migreat! from Promigion builds that report from data already sitting in the system — risks, issues, deliverables, finances per phase — instead of from someone's memory.

What a status report actually needs to do

The problem with most progress reports isn't that they contain too little. It's that the report gets rebuilt from scratch at every steering meeting, by whoever had time that week, from sources that have already moved on by the time anyone reads it. Risks live in someone's head or inbox. "Status" is a colour someone picked just before the meeting.

A report pulled straight from the system doesn't have that problem: it shows what's actually on record at that moment, not what someone remembers.

What's in the report

There are two versions, and the product already has a name for each: the project dashboard, for a steering group that wants to discuss a single project, and the portfolio dashboard — one row per project — for anyone who wants to see at a glance which projects need attention. They're two of the four reports in every plan; the full picture of all six is on the portfolio management software page.

The per-project view draws on separate registers in the system: risks, issues — each with its own comment thread — and the deliverables assigned to each phase. These aren't loose notes; they're their own entities, each with its own status.

For issues, something is genuinely calculated too, not set by hand: an open issue with impact sets the indicator to red, a resolved one to green. On the portfolio-wide view the same principle applies to dependencies between phases: is a phase already under way while something it depends on hasn't finished yet? Then that indicator flips to red.

Alongside that sits a financial view per phase — budgeted, realised, expected remainder, and expected total — built up from the underlying calculation lines, not typed in as a single figure.

What you configure yourself, and what's fixed

On the portfolio-wide view you choose which columns you see, and that choice is saved as your own preference. That only applies to the portfolio view; the per-project view has no column selection.

What isn't configurable: the statuses and categories for risks and issues are fixed in the product. That's a different kind of field from, say, the statuses in the idea funnel, which you define yourself — here you pick from a fixed list.

What this report is not

What else does and doesn't exist as a separate list alongside risks and issues in Migreat!, and why there's no assumptions register, is on the portfolio management software page.

The report doesn't send itself. You generate it when you need it; nothing goes out automatically on a fixed schedule.

It exports to PDF only.

And this report doesn't sit behind a plan boundary: unlike the strategic portfolio overview, it's available to anyone who can sign in, whichever plan you're on.

How to tell whether this is happening in your own organisation

You don't need to generate a report to know whether this applies to you.

  1. If you looked up a risk from last month's project right now, would you find a record, or would you have to ask someone?

  2. Does the status the steering group sees differ from what's in the system, because the slide is a week old?

  3. Can you read back when an issue was actually resolved, or is there only the latest update?

A "no" to one of the three is normal. A "no" to all three means the report is more of a story than a system.

Why a report needs to draw on the same data as the place a decision was made is covered in the guide from strategy to delivery. More on this subject is in the guides. If you're a project or programme manager yourself, the page for project and programme managers covers what this saves you in status work specifically.