[Trello Holiday Calendar] Day 16: How to create useful reports for your projects

[#1]

It's nearly the holidays!

But there's still time to learn something before we're done.

Let's talk reporting, and specifically my top tip on creating useful reports for your projects. When creating any report, it is tempting to throw every chart you can think of at it, however you will do better if you stop and ask...

Who is your report for? And what should they do when they see it?

These are the two questions you need to ask yourself when you create a new report for your project. You will usualy find that you are creating one of two report types

• An operational report: used by the team to manage their work
• An analytical report: used by management to assess performance, resourcing levels etc.

Operational reports should lead to action. Every chart you put on there should have the potential to make someone go and DO something. 

Analytical reports should lead to further questions and discussion. Every chart you put on there should help people see trends and changes over time.

What happens if you mix these two report type ups?

Get analytical charts in your operational dashboard? Now instead of your team getting organised in the morning and cracking on with thir work they waste time discussing why work is taking longer over the last 2 weeks 🤔

Get operational charts in your analytical dashboard? People get too concerned about the overdue cards and forget to focus on the bigger picture.

Think of them like main and dessert. No one wants to eat chilli meringue pie!

Interested in learning more about the reporting options in Trello, check out our guide to trello reporting or go ahead and start a free trial of Blue Cat Reports today :)

[Brittany Joiner]

@Robin Warren great points here! Different data for different folks!

[Robin Warren]

apologies to anyone triggered by the image of chlli meringue pie! I was going to go with liver meringue so consider yourselves lucky :)