Weekly reporting with Confluence

[abolotnov]

We are migrating to confluence and want it to be the center of our collaborative universe for all the projects that we run internally. There are quite a few and every project has its own page based on project template page. it all works quite nice so far.

Now I need to implement some sort of weekly reporting for project managers and the goals here are simple:

Project Managers should be able to submit weekly reports on their projects (ideally, they fill out a form with basic things like - what's done, issues, status of progress and so on) - one PM will normally manage 2-5 projects and if they could report on all 5 on the same page, that'd be great.

A a few reports based on project manager's submissions: 1) a table showing current statuses for all projects (last reports and reports before last week to be able to compare) 2) a page that will show all historic reports for a prorject and 3) a short summary of all progress (like status).

What's my best way of getting this sorted, can someone please suggest?

[Kevin Buchs · Accepted solution]

I have this feeling that the full implementation of a solution to fit your requirements might be challenging. I'm not sure of the "best" way.

You might consider this simplified approach:

Each project has a status page. This page gets edited each week. The page history shows prior reports. Then on a "roll-up" page (#1), use the reporting plug-in to gather information from each of the given pages as to its last modification date and the modifcation date of the previous version (that has a weakness if PMs edit the page outside of the 1/week).

For #2, use the page history.

For #3, create a page that uses the {include} macro to gather info from each of the pages or excerpts or a given data field.

[Daniel Holmes]

Here's a simple example I found online https://www.tacticalprojectmanagement.com/confluence-tutorial-project-portfolio-dashboard/

[Adrien Ragot 2]

There are two solutions for that:

• Blueprints
• the Play SQL Spreadsheets add-on

Use Blueprints if you want a lot of text (i.e. formatted text, bullet points, etc):

• Create a Blueprint as a template for reporting, which each manager should submit for each of their projects, every week.
• They can detail their status (or not) with several paragraphs and images,
• The metadata can be displayed in the Page Properties Report macro,
• So you would have a summary page for the reports of the week and another one for all reports of a given project.
• You're limited in terms of reporting. You will have to fiddle the the labels to make it work. Statistics won't be available.

Use Play SQL Spreadsheets if you're rather managing the data about the projects:

• Each week, your managers add a line in the spreadsheet for their project,
• A filtered macro can display all the lines related to a project or all the lines related to a week,
• You can make stats (% of successful statuses, delays or workforce demand) using queries. Or even graphs ;)

However you're limited to data. You won't be able to put bullet points in cells.

Good luck!

[Jan Lambrecht]

Here's a third way. It uses the setup and labels from https://www.tacticalprojectmanagement.com/confluence-tutorial-project-portfolio-dashboard/ 

I implemented this solution on a new project and so far, it beats other alternatives (like storing PDF extracts of previous reports).

1. Create a new page called "Status Report Archive"
2. Go to the Portfolio Page (i.e. the page that summarises the individual reports) and click on the 3 dots in the top right-hand corner.
3. In the pop-down menu, select "Copy".
4. In the "Copy" dialogue
   1. Select "Status Report Archive" as the Parent Page.
   2. Select "Include child pages".
   3. Click "Next".
5. In the "Copy pages" dialogue
   1. Add the archival date into the "Start titles with" field, e.g. "yyyy-dd-mm_" will give you an archived copy of the Portfolio Page called "yyyy-mm-dd_Portfolio Page".
   2. The preview shows the results.
   3. Un-tick the "Labels" box. Otherwise all your archived pages will show up in the current report.
   4. Click "Copy" and let Confluence do the work.
6. Now, go to the archived summary page; let's assume you called it "2020-09-24_Portfolio Page". 
   1. Select the first of the sub-pages; scroll to the bottom (or press "l") and add the label "2020-09-24_status".
   2. Repeat for all remaining sub-pages.
   3. Return to the top page and edit it
      1. Edit the page property report.
      2. Add "2020-09-24_status" as label in the property report.
7. Now, the archived portfolio page displays the correct information.
8. Consider changing the access rights to the archived pages to read-only.

Enjoy!