The area of portfolio management, executive dashboards and reports is one where customers indicate they have strong requirements, but are sometimes not at all clear on what they are.

Certainly there is a need to provide executives with a visual summary of the status of programmes. These can be RAG ( Red Amber Green ) reports reflecting constituent project statuses, but they might also address budgetary status, resource health, reports by status, costs, benefits, ROI and many other factors.

At the individual programme and project level reporting requirements are normally clearer, and functionality in this area is fundamental. Every project should have RAG and Task status reports as fundamental reporting - and these should be available as automated reports on a project manager defined time interval ( weekly for example ) as well as easily generated on demand.

These reports should be exportable to arrange of formats - CSV and XLS are clearly useful.