Step 9. Reporting engineering company tasks

Reports are submissions of the business data from different projects. In VIP Task Manager reports are displayed in text, graphic or HTML formats. These reports can be built for a single task or the whole project to analyze and process the business data of engineering company. Task report building can be an iterative process throughout the project and aimed to periodically display the in-progress reports to review task most recent changes. By creating report in VIP Task Manager, it is necessary to understand, what parts should be included in it, how to make joined report on group of tasks or project, how to adjust email reminders and what additional data should be included in reports.

Building up task reports

Reporting feature enables employees of engineering company to define content in the report and to set up different printing options like page layout, page size, and orientation. They can customize report structure by choosing which task attribute is due to be included in the report. For example, when building a report an employee selects those tasks attributes like "General", "Assignment", "Notes", "Comments" and "Custom fields". Such a report will show managers comprehensive information on a single task or a group of tasks. They will find out who performs a task, what planned and actual dates, notes and comments and task custom column like "Duration".

Using Excel sheet to report task list

VIP Task Manager allows to export task lists to Microsoft Excel. This feature can be used for building joined task report on a project. The report will contain all tasks with the fields included in task list. For example, the project manager can build joined report on status of the project of Client 1, export to Excel and demonstrate its hard copy printed to the client.

Reminders

The way to improve reports submitting is to set up reminders. For example, to prevent procrastinated submission of reports on the Horizontal Drilling Project, the manager of Geotechnical Services Department can set up reminder to all assigned resources to the task "18.Reporting&Documentation" . Task reminder can be sent to all members of the project at the end of the reporting period. Even if an employee have forgotten or neglected to build up reports in the project he is working on, the system will send out a separate alert by email by the end of manually preset reporting period. In order task reminders are to be sent to the mailing list selected by the project manager only, the project manager needs to deny "Edit" permissions to the task "18.Reporting&Documentation" to all resource except himself.