I built a custom project status report to link with our Workfront system using Javascript and APIs which helps keep our project managers stay productive and save them a collective of ~100+ hours per week per customer.
- Improve visibility into project risks that are leading indicators to adoption risk.
- Create more meaningful project review meetings with specific action items.
- Provide a standard "score" across projects.
| 7 Categories | Report Highlighting Risks |
|---|---|
| Questions are broken into 7 categories that are deemed critical to project and long-term customer success. | Each score is highlighted as red, amber, or green based on the calculations and ranges determined by our management team. |
| Series of Yes/No Questions | Calculations |
|---|---|
| Questions are answered/updated by our project managers prior to project reviews. | Each category has a calculation behind it to generate a numerical score. |
In Workfront, create a custom form with all of the questions separated by category/section. Each section will represent each major risk category.
Each section must add up to 100 points. Evenly spread points per question. and assign points for each possible response choice.
After many iterations, I found simplicity made building the Delivery Index easy for all users (myself and the users entering data). Create 5 to 7 sections to make calculations easy to manage and use Yes/No questions to make it easy for users. The Yes/No questions and the sections will be weighted with a numerical value. The Yes value will be evenly weighted based off a total of 100. The No values will be weighted with 0.
- 6 questions in section 2 * 16.667 points per question = index score of 100
- 7 questions in section 3 * 14.29 points per question = index score of 100
Each section will average to a total with will represent the score for that section. The total of all the sections will average the to a total overall index score of the delivery process.
You will find this will create a score with a decimal. Keeping with the simplicity model, I rounded the overall score to the nearest 10 to produce a clean number.
Section 1 index: 60.00
Section 2 index: 66.67
Section 3 index: 71.45
Section 4 index: 40.00
Section 5 index: 83.34
Section 6 index: 20.00
Section 7 index: 75.00
Overall index score = 59.49% or 60%
I asked my management team to decide what scoring values should represent Red, Amber, and Green. With that information, create a report and add each section from the custom form. In the Advanced Options tab for each section, add conditional formatting to highlight each category/section as red, amber, or green and input the values decided from the management team.
Red = < 35
Amber = 35 - 65
Green = > 65
To do this, I created another report of roughly 300+ lines of code.
Once this is created, I then created and applied a dashboard to layout templates to paper on all project
