Picture this: You’re sitting in that hour-long, weekly status meeting with about 12 project leads. Leadership have got the dreaded spreadsheet open with rows and rows of project status. It takes a couple of minutes of awkward silence to load up and lags every time the view is scrolled. There is a wall of text messily populated across the cells - some have confusing jargon, others are just blank. As you try to facilitate that meeting, you have to scan across the spreadsheet, trying to find the row that the project lead is talking about.

It’s a painful, but not an uncommon scenario for a lot of us. And that’s because frequent communication and reporting on progress is necessary for leadership to understand where work is at, whether it needs to be course-corrected and how it may affect decisions to keep the org steering towards their company goals.

Reporting is a process that must be done; but that doesn’t mean it has to suck.

With the combination of custom fields, customisable directories and saved views, you’ll be able to tailor Atlas to your organisation’s needs and report on that information in accessible, personalised ways.

Atlas admins can add custom fields to all projects or goals in a workspace, to suit your company’s vocabulary and report effectively on work. Whether it’s a department field, or a budget allocation, project sponsor or anything else; Atlas supports multiple field types to cater to your specific company’s needs.

Custom fields is available in the Atlas Standard and Premium editions. Learn more.

Customise which columns display in your directory views, including custom fields, to fit your reporting needs and help you get to signals, without all the noise.

Get everyone on the same page by saving and embedding tailored views of the project & goal directory so that information can be easily revisited and shareable. Learn more.

Want to understand how these pieces fit together? Here are a few examples of how you can use Atlas to customise and achieve better reporting.

If you prefer to video to text, check out this Loom demo instead:

Nithilla is a department head, who needs to better understand the cost centres that the projects across her department are charging.

To gather this information, she creates a new custom field called “Cost centre”, and asks each of her project leads to fill the field out on their next update.

She then displays the Cost centre column, removes unnecessary columns for her reporting like Following and Owner, and creates a saved view in the project directory called “Projects by cost centre”.

From this view, she can easily see how many projects are being charged to each cost centre, to make portfolio allocation decisions on what needs to be stopped or continued.

She embeds this view into a Confluence page so she can easily share this dynamic report with her business stakeholders.

Joe is a principal product manager and he needs to dig into the projects that need his attention most to impact his KRs. These will be discussed with his triad in an upcoming meeting.

He goes to the project directory, where he filters by his team, the KRs he owns and projects with status At Risk or Off Track. He displays the Goal column, so he knows which of his KRs the projects contribute to and he can spot where the gaps are.

He saves this view as “Projects that require attention” and shares it with his triad so they can plan their strategy next.

In their meeting, Joe can quickly pull up the view and quickly switch between the list versus the timeline to understand what might get affected by their decisions, and the updates feed so they understand what blockers they can help course-correct.

Jane is a project manager who needs to ensure teams are adhering to the status reporting process in her department. She asks her project leads to write a weekly update in Atlas, ensuring that there are frequent checkpoints to keep context about the work reliable.

To check that teams are doing the right thing, Jane filters the directory to her department, displays the Tags column and sorts by the Last updated column.

She hovers over each project row to give herself an overview refresher on what the project is about.

Jane can then reach out to project leads who have not updated in the last week or remind them to add the relevant tags on their projects for reporting.

Jane can trust that the information in Atlas is kept fresh and reliable so that her reports have the hygiene to extract insightful decision-making.

Jump into Atlas to explore this modern world of project reporting that helps you meaningfully understand progress and how that impacts your goals. We’re excited to hear your feedback, so if you have any additional thoughts, send them to the Atlas team via our Give Feedback button or via the chat icon on the bottom-right in Atlas.