Construction project management involves monitoring and control of multiple aspects – progress, costs, quality etc. Therefore any template for construction project management report also has to be multi dimensional.
Table Of Contents
1. Parameters to be reported
1.1 Planned Vs Actual Progress
1.2 Budgeted Vs Actual
1.3 Overall project health
2. Spreadsheet template for construction project management report
Parameters to be reported
The number one job of any project manager is to keep track of project progress, costs and to make sure they don’t go over the original planned / budgeted limits.
Therefore a holistic construction project report template must give us an up to date picture of progress and costs.
Planned Vs Actual Progress
One important responsibility for any project manager is to ensure that the project is completed on time. Therefore he must track the planned Vs actual progress all the time.
So our project management report template should compare the planned timelines with actual timelines of all construction activities.
Planned progress timelines would normally come from a Gantt chart created in MS Project or Primavera. Actual progress values are often tracked in many different spreadsheets – Master Deliverable List, Daily Progress Reports, Material Tracking Sheet, Labor Tracking Sheet, etc.
Our centralized project management report should be able to link up with all these sheets for reporting purposes.
Budgeted Vs Actual
The other important responsibility is to maintain the actual spending within budgeted values.
Each construction activity requires labor and material resources. Sometimes there is a fixed cost – for example, work outsourced to a subcontractor at a fixed cost. All of these costs are budgeted for at the beginning of the project and available in the budget spreadsheet.
Whereas the actual costs are often tracked in ERP software, purchase orders, cost control spreadsheets etc.
A construction project report template should compare the budgeted vs actual cost by pulling together data from these different sources.
Overall project health
Finally, there should be easy way to compare the “planned Vs actual progress” and “budgeted vs actual cost”. We should have a bird’s eye view to tell us about the current status and health of the project in terms of schedule and budget.
Labor Utilization
For bigger businesses, optimal labor utilization is also an important factor in project management. Well experienced project managers can very well predict the labor requirements on different project sites as per the project schedule, while anticipating the usual hiccups in the construction project lifeccycle.
But even if you don’t have decades of construction project management experience. You can still build your construction schedule with labor requirements attached to individual activities and then factor in contingencies in this schedule.
You will need a dashboard that captures the actual labor utilization and forecast manpower requirements as per the schedule.
This kinds of detailed manpower utilization report would be possible only if your site engineers are sending regular updated on labor usage for different activities. You can use the following format for regular manpower updates from site
Material Tracking
Timely availability of required material on site is very important to keep your projects moving along. If some of the material items are not made available on time, your labor may end up sitting idle on those days. Ultimately damaging the productivity and overall health of your project.
That’s why it is very important that your procurement team is also connected to your project management system and that they can update the latest material purchase and dispatch details in the system.
Finally you will need a dashboard to track the latest movement and status of important material items.
This particular report template helps you to track not only the budget and actual costs of your material items, but also the movements of those material items as they are indented, purchased, dispatched and received on site.
Excel spreadsheet template for construction project management report
Ideally, a construction project report should be able to link up with multiple tools to present following project parameters in real time –
- Project schedule in Gantt chart or spreadsheet format
- Budget spreadsheet
- Cost control sheet
- Daily progress report sheets
- Material and inventory tracking sheets
- ERP; if it is used for procurement and payments
Most of this data can be made available in spreadsheet format. Then it can be easily consolidated in a central spreadsheet for reporting.
Using a spreadsheet report template also provides the flexibility required in a construction project. Construction projects differ a lot from each other based on their scale, size, complexity, type of work etc.
Correspondingly, the report template should also be easily customizable depending on scope of work for the project. This kind of flexibility is easily possible in spreadsheets.
That’s why we have created a spreadsheet based template for construction project management reports. This template can be easily customized based on your needs, desired formats etc.
Moreover, you can use this template in a Google spreadsheet to easily connect with other tools and spreadsheets used for managing your project. Connecting your construction project management tools in Google drive brings a lot of easy connectivity to the project management processes.
Here is a construction project management solution that connects all your important project management tools – schedule, scope of work, budget, material & cost tracking etc. to finally report the overall project status and health on a centralized report.
The same solution can also be customized for different industry verticals. For example, here’s a customized solution for managing solar installation projects.
Click here to try for a free.