Project reporting is an essential part of effective legal service delivery. Your ability to demonstrate the current status of the different parts of your project gives stakeholders confidence that it can be delivered on time, on budget, and on scope. Good reporting also supports management by exception, by highlighting those areas of the project which need the most attention and effort.

Giving a stakeholder access to the Portfolio and Matters means that they can self-serve reporting information. This helps to significantly reduce the amount of ad hoc “how is it going?” communication (emails and calls) so that teams can focus on doing the work. Fibonacci has a number of visual tools which make the most of live data to help you report better. We’re going to explore these below.

The Portfolio Overview is the landing page for all participants who have access to your portfolio.

The Activities widget provides a helpful snapshot of the current work (tasks and events) that is happening across a range of time periods. It surfaces any overdue tasks so that you can get a feel for where additional support or enquiries are required.

The Matters widget focuses on key information about the way in which you’ve broken down the work in your portfolio. It surfaces status, matter type and jurisdiction information for each matter in a highly visual format so stakeholders can quickly calibrate overall progress.

We recommend using the Portfolio Overview if you’re short on time and need a quick update.

For those stakeholders who need more detailed information about current status across the portfolio, the Matters Index can be found in the second tab at portfolio level.

The Matters Index lists all the matters in the portfolio, along with relevant metadata for each including: matter status, blueprint % (task completion), and any custom fields you’ve set up. You can select what columns are shown by clicking on “Show Columns” top-right of the page. This does not affect other users' view of the index.

The Matters Index is an excellent replacement for a weekly status update report. Rather than collecting information offline and then circulating a report by email, stakeholders can hover over the matter status to get the latest progress update from the matter teams. It can be exported to excel so that you email it to stakeholders who aren’t Fibonacci users.

Most projects have important milestones which need to be reported on to ensure that stakeholders understand the sequence of events. As projects grow in size this becomes increasingly important to ensure that project resources are targeted to where they are most needed.

The best way to report on milestones is by using the portfolio timeline. Teams working independently at matter level can add key events and tasks to their matter timelines and these will automatically be visible at the portfolio level. A well constructed timeline allows stakeholders to self-serve information which helps them stay aligned with what will be delivered and when. It can be exported into Excel at any point so that you can email it to any stakeholders who aren’t Fibonacci users.

Sometimes stakeholders need to get into the details of the work being done across the whole project. Rather than jumping in and out of individual matters and reviewing the blueprint the portfolio blueprint allows you to work with all the information in one place. The blueprint has sophisticated filters (including tags) which you can use to interrogate the whole plan and highlight, for example, where you’ve got significant numbers of overdue or unassigned work. This helps you decide where you need to focus your attention. Like other Fibonacci features, the portfolio blueprint can be exported into Excel to support further analysis.