Do teams in your organization need to report on the status of their projects or action items? Are managers and executives  looking for a way to aggregate and synthetize this information, to help them focus on key issues?

On January 23rd, at the SharePoint Saturday EMEA event, I’ll present a session about “KPI roll-up in SharePoint 2007”.

Last year, I already published a series about KPI roll-up, but it only applied to MOSS, and relied on the Content Query Web Part. This time, I’ll show you how a similar result can be achieved with the Data View Web Part and applied to any SharePoint 2007 configuration (wss v3 and MOSS).

As usual, no action is required on the server side. All the customizations will be done via the SharePoint UI. We’ll also use SharePoint Designer to configure the Data View Web Part, although this is not mandatory and could be one with a text editor.

Our tool for building the visual indicators is my “HTML Calculated Column” method. If you’ve already used it before, you know that it is usually associated with a client side script (“Text to HTML”). Well, here is some good news: in this specific case, we don’t even need the script, SharePoint will do all the work for us! btw this is also how it worked with the CQWP in last year’s series.

In this article (part I), I am going to describe the business scenario, with the support of a live demo.
In part II, I’ll provide the templates I used for the live demo. This will allow you to test them in your own environment (wss or MOSS).
In parts III and IV, I’ll explain how I did it, using calculated columns and the Data View Web Part.
In parts V to X… you tell me how you’ve taken advantage of the method in your own environment, and share your findings and customizations with me and the other readers!

The scenario

An organization is divided in business units, each one gathering multiple program teams. Each program team manages several projects.

Each level of the hierarchy needs visibility on the projects under its supervision. So for example:
– the program team 1.2 monitors all projects 1.2.x
– Business Unit 1 monitors all projects 1.x.y
– the top management monitors all projects

Information architecture

The SharePoint architecture follows the organizational structure: the collaborative space is a site collection, where each business unit is a sub-site of the top level, and each program is a sub-site of the business unit site.

Program team level

Note: click on a screenshot to access the live demo.

In my example, I use a custom list with 5 indicators to monitor the projects.

The budget, quality and schedule indicators track the project health: good (green), average (amber), or poor (red).

The overall status is a global indicator based on the 3 others. For example:
– Green+Amber+Amber –> Amber
– Red+Amber+Amber –> Red

To make the table easier to read, the text is converted into visual indicators: progress bar for the % complete, and traffic light for the health indicators.

Business unit level

 The business unit dashboard gathers all the projects under its responsibility:

For the demo, I have shown all the indicators. At this level, we could actually have restricted the view to the progress bar and the overall status, for a lighter display.

Top level

At the top level, we are collecting information from all the projects in the organization. To avoid an overwhelming amount of data, the list is filtered to only display the projects we want to focus on (in my example the ones with a red overall status).

In the next episode, I’ll share the list template and Web Part I used for the demo. A key point with this method is that it is the SAME Web Part that is used at all levels of the hierarchy to render the visual indicators. At each level, the Web Part is smart enough to only select the relevant information, i.e. the projects in the sub-tree.