What is a progress tracking report?
A progress tracking report is a tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., project management software, time tracking tools, CRM systems) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., task completion rate, milestone achievement, resource utilization), enabling teams and organizations to monitor project progress and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
Progress tracking reports are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a progress tracking report?
An actionable progress tracking report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and team members) and their use cases.
Executive progress tracking reports
Executive reports for CEOs, project sponsors, and stakeholders show the overall progress and impact of projects. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Project ROI analysis: by phase, using metrics like cost variance and schedule variance for large projects.
- Resource utilization analysis: efficiency, allocation, and productivity of resources
- Cohort analysis: progress, completion, and performance by project phase or team
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Project manager reports
Manager reports have cross-project views with drill-downs to see performance by team, department, project phase, and task. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-project reporting: overall project, team, or department reporting across phases
- Goal tracking: compare current progress vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Risk analysis for project and task mapping
- Task, milestone, resource, team analysis
Operational Progress Tracking Reports
Operational reports for team leads and project coordinators have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Task management: task completion, deadlines, priority levels
- Resource allocation: resource availability, workload distribution
- Time tracking: hours logged, time spent on tasks
- Milestone tracking: milestone completion, delays, dependencies
Operational progress tracking reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a progress tracking report?
To build a progress tracking report, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the report, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are project management tools for task and milestone tracking, time tracking software for resource utilization, and CRM systems for client and project data.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of progress tracking report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like task management, resource allocation, milestone tracking, and project performance.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or organization. Map your specific metrics, especially custom task metrics, CRM project data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "progress" and "performance".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your progress tracking use cases, such as task management, resource allocation, milestone tracking, and project performance.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Task completion rate, hours logged, milestones achieved, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, project name, team member, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your progress tracking reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your progress tracking reports:
Share
Share your progress tracking reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a progress tracking report?
Progress tracking reports should include a mix of task, resource, milestone, efficiency, effectiveness, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of projects towards business goals. They include:
Task KPIs measure the progress of tasks and activities, regardless of the project:
- Task metrics: tasks completed, tasks overdue, task priority levels
- Resource metrics: hours logged, resource availability, workload distribution
- Milestone metrics: milestones achieved, milestone delays, dependencies
Efficiency KPIs compare your project outputs to the cost, including:
- Task: cost per task completed
- Resource: cost per hour logged
- Milestone: cost per milestone achieved
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one project phase to another
- Task: task completion rate
- Resource: resource utilization rate
- Milestone: milestone achievement rate
Cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your project performance:
- Cost: project budget, expenses, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, cost variance
- Effectiveness: schedule variance, earned value
To analyze these progress tracking KPIs, segment them by:
- Project: phase, objective
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Resource: availability, allocation
- Task: priority, status, type
