Here Is Why You Need to Automate Project Report Generation

Project management technology has come a long way ever since it first came into picture. So has the technology behind report generation. Long gone are the days when experts used to sit together and take hours before extracting meaningful information from a bundle of project related data. Today, managers can know the status of a project within seconds, literally.

Enter projects reporting tools! These nifty software are perfect for efficiently and effectively monitoring projects by generating reports in no time. Take a look at the ways in which reporting tools help out project managers -

• Stay on top of everything - Who is handling which department? Which tasks are currently in progress? Who’s in charge of what things? How far along has everyone come? A manager can get answers to all such queries and more by just one good look at a project report. Reports help you stay on top of everything without having to talk with a bunch of different people and waste time in the process. 

• Automated report generation - Why sit with a pen and paper, and keep scratching your head until you’re done preparing the reports? That’s simply waste of time, energy, and resources. A project reporting tool automates this process, thereby, eliminating the manual work altogether that goes into report preparation. It just picks up the data fed into it, runs the algorithms, and ta-da! You have reports in no time. Absolutely no fuss at all!

• Accurate, error-free reports - Humans make arithmetic errors, not machines. If you go the old ways of manually calculating everything, the chances of errors and miscalculations are high. Smallest of mistake can set into motion a chain reaction where you go on wrongly estimating everything. But, we want accuracy and precision in everything. And for that relying solely on human work can’t be a good idea. Go with a project reporting tool and you will get to see the change for good.

• Better time management - What does a project report tell? It gives you numbers that paint a clear picture of the project’s entire timeline. You can see how the time is distributed against all the tasks and whether certain tasks are taking longer than expected. Accordingly, you can spot problem areas in the project where things are moving slowly or not as expected. Managers can implement corrective measures to better utilize time. The conclusions derived from the report can be used as references for future endeavors, and save time in the future as well.

• Draw comparison between expected vs. actual performance - A comprehensive report is the best thing you can have at your disposal for drawing comparisons between how you wanted the project to move on and how it actually went. By comparing the expected and actual performance, managers can better predict the outcome of a project. Any deviations from the desired results can be analyzed and corrected at the earliest to avoid running into unexpected problems.

What report generation tool do you use? How has it helped you? Let us know in the comments!