Merging multiple MS project files to Project Dashboard
I am looking for a good tool to merge ms project files into a "project dashboard" for reporting purposes.
The dashboard should be able to update its reporting as projects progresses within the individual mpp-files.
If anyone can recommend a solution for this, please let me know.
Answers (4)
I don't know of a COTS product that can do this. However, my company has built a custom application for customers and for ourselves that does this. If you're interested, I would be more than happy to talk with you about it.
Links:
Clarification added October 18, 2007:
After posting, I thought of a COTS product that would probably do this. MS Project Sever should be able to do it but I have never used the product so can't say for sure.
Bob B
Product Development, Engineering and Quality Executive and Consultant
Best Answers in: Organizational Development (6), Product Design (4), Change Management (3), Planning (3), Labor Relations (2), Project Management (2), Staffing and Recruiting (1), Business Analytics (1), Manufacturing (1), Supply Chain Management (1)
Adding onto what Andrew mentioned, MS Project Server can certainly do this but implementing it is a big investment you wouldn't make unless it was more than reporting, rather was the way you managed your resources and portfolio. There are a number of other PLM tools with ways of doing this but the ones I'm aware of are all pretty heavy relative to what it sounds like your need is.
Bob
Alex D
15 Years of Project/Program Mgt. Experience
Best Answers in: Project Management (4), Planning (1), Enterprise Software (1)
eProject will let you do this quickly with a low investment of cost and hardware compared to MS Project Server. PPM6 integrates directly with MS Project and then has 4 layers of reporting that enable a variety of "dashboards".
PPM6 is a web-based collaborative application providing not only PM tools but also comprehensive resource planning/management, time/financial tracking and document management. More than 700 companies are using our collaborative platform worldwide.
The link has an overview of the products and services offered.
Links:
Daniel F
Sr. Consultant at Capgemini U.S. LLC
Best Answers in: Project Management (3), Offshoring and Outsourcing (1), Career Management (1)
As noted, ideally other tools - Clarity or MSP Server - would be better suited.
However, if those aren't near-term options, you could simply insert each project as a sub-project into a master "reporting" project, and utilize built-in MSP reports (such as the Top Level Tasks report), customize/write your own, or just use it as a mechanism to display/extract data to Excel or otherwise. The Top Level Tasks report does a reasonable job of this, and would just represent each sub-project in a master project as a top-level task, and thereby present aggregate information about each project.
Thus, whenever you opened your "master project", it would include any updates from the respective sub-projects.
