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Chapter 7. Reports
- Table of Contents
- Graphical Reports
- Printed Reports
Real-time reports allow you to accurately track the progress of activities, compare actual effort vs. estimated effort, spot problem areas, analyze the workload of tracker participants, and much more. Accurate and timely reporting can make the difference between managing a project successfully and losing control over what is going on. openCRX enables you to easily monitor activity trackers of any size, i.e. from small projects with very few people working on a few dozen activities to global-scale projects with thousands of people and tens of thousands of activities.
Graphical Reports
openCRX is distributed with various graphical reports (charts), which you can place on your User Home or on the overview page of an Activity Tracker. You can obtain a current list of all the charts available from your system by executing the operation View > Recalculate and Refresh on an activity tracker and then clicking on the tab [Charts]:
Every chart contains a time stamp indicating date and time when the underlying data was collected. Due to the fact that the data collection process and the calculations involved to produce charts can be quite time consuming, charts are updatable "on-demand" - use the operation "Recalculate and Refresh." to update charts.
Most of the charts speak for themselves. Nevertheless, let us look at some of them in more detail.
The chart Activities Overview [Open | All] presents a high level overview showing the number of open activities and the total number of activities for each activity type:
The chart Efforts allows you to compare the total estimated effort (as provided at the Activity Tracker level) with the sum of efforts estimated at the Activity level and the actual effort (as provided by the Work Records).
The chart Effort Estimate Deviation in % offers an alternative view of the same data which allows you to analyze deviations of the actual effort from the estimated effort at the Activity level:
If the bulk of activities show positive deviations of actual efforts from estimated efforts you might conclude that estimated effort is systematically underestimated. Similarly, if the deviation bars are mostly to the left of the zero mark, the conclusion is that estimated effort tends to be overestimated.
The chart Activities By Assignee [Open | All] gives you a quick overview of the total number of activities assigned to each person and how many of those activities are open:
The chart Incidents by Transition contains information regarding that last transition of all the incidents of an Activity Tracker:
The chart Incidents by Severity [Open | All] contains information regarding the severity of all the incidents of an Activity Tracker (in addition to the total number of incidents you also see the number of open/unresolved incidents per severity level):
Depending on your information needs you might also want to look at some of the reports for individual Activity Types, e.g. E-Mail-By-State, Incident-By-State, etc.
