Reporting, on Risks, Issues and Deliverables

[Bob McGlynn]

Hi, I have worked out how to add Risks, Issues and Deliverables for projects using custom fields but I have yet to find a way to report on them easily and regularly.

is someone able to save me some time and effort. many thanks

[Larry Christofaro]

Bob, when you say “using custom fields”, are you using custom fields in the associated SharePoint lists or in PWA? Assuming you are adding custom fields to the out of box lists provided through Project Server, I can give you to general approaches to reporting:
1. Those lists do show up in the reporting database and can be reported using any BI reporting tools. One note is that any additional custom fields that you add to the lists are not available in the reporting database.
2. Reporting out of SharePoint. This is a much bigger topic and is SharePoint related, so a bit out of scope from Project Server.
Hope this helps some to point you in the right direction.

[Bob McGlynn]

Larry, many thanks for your reply. by custom fields I refer to the ability in 2016 to configure Text field with lookups and formula. I discovered this via a google and it was a thread on MPUG. guess I should have looked here first. so I now can see how to tailor Project (in this case Pro) to allow capture and store of say- risk data or Deliverables, but I can not find a way to subsequently report on the data stored. I have found what I would call a Data Dictionary (Available Fields) within the Project DataBase, but don’t see readily a way to access the data I need. I have investigated export to Excel and use of Power Pivot and now looking at Power BI both look good but if I cant find the fields I cant get at the data!!! bless Microsoft great products but where’s the documentation??

[Larry Christofaro]

Bob, when you referenced Issues, Risks, and Deliverables I immediately assumed you were talking about Project Server. Now I’m not so sure, but the best documentation I’ve seen is here: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/project_programmability/archive/2013/01/28/project-server-2013-reporting-database-rdb-schema-reference.aspx
I also just ran across a nice article from Treb Gatte that might be of interest to you: https://aboutmsproject.com/database-diagramsproject-server-reporting-database/

If you are talking about Microsoft Project standalone then the reports menu should be able to provide what you need.

Hope that helps…

[Bob McGlynn]

Larry,
Many thanks for getting back. I have found https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Available-fields-reference-615a4563-1cc3-40f4-b66f-1b17e793a460, which is a word version but has a greater (better) description than “Risk Trigger Type = Trigger type. just lov MS. the word doc is better but still not great and I am still finding it difficult to find the fields that actually provide meaningful data. I am sure they are there just not easily found. interesting that the DD shows a field measure = Risk. as I have just created it in my view I wounder where this is presumably in the standard product out of the box but I do not see it as a field available in the add a col drop down??

best regards

B

[John Murphy]

Larry,

When you say “One note is that any additional custom fields that you add to the lists are not available in the reporting database.”, does that mean that if you have created custom meta data related to tasks, resources, and projects on PWA that they will not be available in ODdata?

Thanks
John

[Larry Christofaro]

No, those fields will be included. It is just the SharePoint list custom fields that don’t get added. Thanks…

[Author]

Posts