The Project Manager Communication Challenge

4 quick tips for meaningful presentations

Effective project managers know how to effectively communicate up to leadership, to team members, across departments, and even external contributors or vendors. In today’s data-driven world, project managers need to share meaningful information with one or many of their contacts – most importantly to executives responsible for delivering on strategy. According to the 2017 PMI Pulse of the Profession report1, 37% of CEOs and other members of the c-suite are directly responsible for the implementation of strategy through high-priority initiatives.

With the increasing pace in which companies must work, executives and other leadership have the bigger picture to worry about. They don’t want, nor do they have the time to shuffle through detail-heavy reports (and they certainly don’t want to go into the execution tool-of-choice and have to search for the data or information themselves). They want data-rich visuals that provide information to quickly understand status and use those insights to make fast decisions.

Project managers are tasked to present this information in an appealing and succinct manner. Here’s a few things to consider when putting together a presentation for your stakeholders:

1. Provide a consolidated high-level snapshot that is easy to understand.
2. Use a summary timeline that displays only major milestones, not the details. Too much detail will just make the data more difficult to follow.
3. Show any planning or delivery issues and some of the critical tasks or phases to give them a sense of the overall health of the project.
4. Use visuals that they are familiar with. Microsoft PowerPoint is usually the de facto presentation tool in most organizations, so presenting your project’s data as a clean, elegant presentation slide will ensure anyone will find it easy to follow, or even update and share.

Portfolio, program, product, and project managers can export Planview Portfolios data and seamlessly create Microsoft Office PowerPoint graphics of roadmaps and individual strategy, outcome, or work schedules. Planview has partnered with Office Timeline to give managers a visual way to share their roadmaps, plans and progress to improve communication conversations.

With a simple click, transform a detailed schedule into a meaningful high-level PowerPoint slide via the Export as PowerPoint Timeline functionality. Gantts and milestones are exported as native PowerPoint objects into a slide to edit, share, add, and changed as with any other .pptx slide.

See how quick and easy it is to export

Turn Planview Portfolios data into the perfect PowerPoint timeline or Gantt chart in 3 simple steps:

1. Select a portfolio or an individual project, program, program, or application schedule and select Export as PowerPoint Timeline. Select the data to present. Remember executive slides need to be easy to read and easy to understand. The output will create a single slide, so pare it down to the critical items you want to communicate.
2. Click the Export button to instantly generate your PowerPoint timeline.
3. Instantly apply a pre-defined template or create a custom one with corporate colors to quickly modify the timeline’s look. Or simply modify part of it, restyling colors, fonts, task shapes, or milestone shapes using Office Timeline’s intuitive PowerPoint timeline maker.

Creating professional timelines and gantt charts has never been easier. Seamless integration into PowerPoint and a powerful yet simple timeline creator means you can start creating great-looking gantt charts and timelines that bring your project, program, and portfolio plans to life.

Elegant, Custom-Built Timelines That Fit Your Organization’s Themes and Brand Standards

Customize Planview Portfolios work, strategy, and outcome roadmap and Gantt exports with Office Timeline Plus Edition. Install the Plus add-in to your PowerPoint and expand customization, enabling you to:

• Tailor anything from styles, colors, or task & milestone shapes, to texts fonts and positions, date formats, or percentage (%) complete. Every detail on your timeline can be easily changed at the click of a button using the add-in’s intuitive controls.
• Create your own timeline templates that are saved and embedded into the add-in – your template can be reapplied for any future work, saving time and effort.
• Leverage PowerPoint to drive further conversations such as illustrating how various risks, issues, or potential changes could impact the project schedule without having to modify the detailed schedule. This short video tutorial illustrates how it works.

Planview Portfolios users have immediate access to the standard exporting capabilities. By taking advantage of full access to Office Timeline Plus edition with a 14-day complimentary trial, presentation design possibilities are endless.