How can I use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate project status reporting?

All answers to this question.

Start with Power BI. If the data is reachable via API, it’s a much more modern and robust solution than building a bot.

   Answered 2024-02-06 by Betty Nelson

• Agreed, Betty. We moved to a Jira-Power BI connector and it’s been a game changer. The "real-time" aspect means stakeholders don't have to wait for Monday's report.

     Commented 2024-02-07 by Kevin Garcia

Does automating the report make the PM "disconnected" from the actual progress of the team?

   Answered 2024-02-07 by Joseph Baker

• Joseph, that's a valid worry. You shouldn't just "set it and forget it." Use the 10 hours you saved to actually talk to your team and solve the blockers the report identified. The automation should remove the "busy work" of formatting, but it shouldn't replace the "human work" of interpreting what the numbers actually mean for the project's success.

     Commented 2024-02-09 by Charles Gonzalez

For a large-scale project in 2023, we tried both. Power BI is better if your data is already "clean" and in a structured format. But if you have to scrape data from legacy systems or PDFs that don't have an API, RPA is the winner. We built a bot that logged into three different portals every Monday morning, compiled the data, and emailed a formatted PDF to the sponsors. It saved our PMO team about 40 hours a month. The "reliability" depends on the UI—if the Jira interface changes, your bot might break, whereas a Power BI API connection is much more stable.

   Answered 2024-10-10 by Nancy King