Best Practices for EPMO Portfolio Dashboard as a start

Question

Hi, I am setting up an EPMO Dashboard to track portfolio progress on our strategic projects, which use a mix of waterfall, agile, and hybrid methods. Since EPMO (one person) is a new department within a non-profit organization (around 75 staff members), one of our main goals is to create and maintain executive project dashboards and provide monthly reports. Before diving in, I wanted to ask the community if there is a straightforward way to start and report on projects using consistent metrics for simplicity. This approach will also help train other project managers in our company by sharing tools and templates, and will support our PM Community of Practice as we build out best practices. If you have a dashboard or lessons learned from working with executive stakeholders, could you share your experience or examples?

Thanks in advance,

Sharone

SNg · Answer

Hi, thank you so much for your feedback. I really value your insight on this, and I'd appreciate any guidance you can offer. I'm looking for examples of EPMO dashboard content, especially metrics for reporting on projects that use different methods. It doesn't need to be complicated, since our EPMO is new and focused on standardizing tools, templates, and reporting to help the Executive team make better decisions.

LesGos · Answer

"I wanted to ask the community if there is a straightforward way to start and report on projects using consistent metrics for simplicity."

Are you asking for the technical capabilities in order to report consistently? Or are you asking what the content of the metrics should be?

For technical capabilities, I recommend using Control Center, from which you can create a Blueprint (a set of templates) that can be copied as many times as needed to create many different projects. I am currently using this for reporting on different areas of my business. (Each area has its own copy of the Blueprint, which includes a master sheet, a formulas/metrics sheet, several reports, and a dashboard.)

I personally didn't like utilizing Smartsheet's new Portfolios capability because it required that all projects be made in a new workspace, but if that's helpful to you, you should look into it.

As for content, it's hard to say without knowing what your business is. I use dashboards/reports to consistently report on KPIs that have been set by our company, with graphs showing how close we are to that goal, different line graphs showing financial information, and timelines showing when projects line up within the year.