Project Performance Reporting (Oracle Project Management)

Project managers need to monitor and control projects to ensure completion within the scope of defined budgets, forecasts, and schedules. Project performance reporting provides you with an at-a-glance comparison of actual versus planned performance as defined in project budgets and forecasts. You can view performance in the areas of effort, cost, profitability, earned value, billing and collections, or capital costs.

Note: You must use the project performance reporting feature to track the performance of your projects if you have not created budgets and forecasts that use budgetary control and budget integration. For such projects, see: Project Status Inquiry.

The insightful information provided by project performance reporting enables you to make informed decisions. You can view project performance information at the project, task, and resource levels by time period. After viewing financial metrics for tasks and resources, you can drill down to view detailed transaction information such as commitments, expenses, and events. This enables you to analyze expenses already incurred for a particular task and to be aware of future expenses that are currently pending (for example, commitments).

Project performance reporting provides the ability to report performance metrics for a project based on a user-configured resource hierarchy (resource breakdown structure), as well as the financial structure of a project.

You can view amounts for project performance reporting in global, project, and project functional currencies. You can optionally enable a secondary global currency to view project performance information in an additional currency. This enables you to view critical project information in local currency and business unit currency, as well as in the global currency for your enterprise.

You can view information based on the global calendar, project calendar, or a fiscal (GL) calendar. If you perform project planning on a weekly basis and your fiscal reporting is monthly, then you can use the project calendar and fiscal calendars to view project performance information for the different periods.

You can view cost, profitability, and earned value information at the project level. This enables you to make informed decisions on controlling costs, generating revenue, and managing risks for the project as a whole. You can drill down to analyze cost and profitability information by task, resource, and time. This capability enables you to identify the specific tasks and resources that contribute to variances, and determine performance trends based on periodic (for example, monthly) amounts. You can view earned value information for tasks to understand how each task is performing in terms of cost and schedule.

Project performance reporting also enables you to choose one reporting dimension (for example, a task) and analyze that dimension by other reporting dimensions (for example, resources or time). To identify the cause of an actual versus budget cost variance for a task, you can select the task and view cost information by resource for only that task. For example, if a task reflects that the percent spent is 150%, which means that you are spending 50% more than what you had planned, then you can analyze the cost by resource to identify the resources that are causing the overage. You can then use this information to take corrective action.

The project status parameter enables you to process the projects that are marked for performance reporting and hence eligible for summarization. For example if the status is Active for four out of six projects, then only four projects with the Active status are summarized.