Live reporting with a fully automated rollup and interpretation at the dashboard level, with histograms, progress meters etc. is fully attainable today.  Live reporting is clearly best practices for Project Management Reporting.  I can only assume those who accept less simply don’t know what they can have, or they would insist their IT team provide a live solution.

Here’s a quick analogy of untimely reporting to make the point.  Suppose you new car’s gas gauge only worked on Mondays, and only reported the total of 7 days consumption ending the previous Friday?  Pretty inconvenient!  I’ll bet you’d quickly start a paper process to track miles driven to determine when to by gas so you don’t end up stranded.  Here’s the point:  Your accounting and IT folks will defend periodic updating to correspond with timesheet entry (if you even have them) or various monthly updates, etc.  This might make the software happy, and might be perfectly acceptable for the ongoing process part of the business, but this is not a way to run a project.  You would never agree to that Monday gas gauge in your new car.  Don’t accept periodic updating for a live project management environment.

Lastly, the PMI (Project Management Institute) has developed an excellent reference called the PMBOK (Project Management Body Of Knowledge) which refers to this step as Controlling and Monitoring.  I prefer to use the term Reporting as non-project managers, particularly executives, see this as reporting.  Further, I believe controlling and monitoring can be applied to all of the steps and with an automated environment can be institutionalized across all of the stops.  So, how about we Control and Monitor: Planning of the plan, Approval of the plan, then Execution of the plan, reporting on progress against the plan, etc..