Users at a NASA operation are receiving their project reports from a third-party Microsoft Project reporting utility. Vantage Partners, a global management consulting firm, is using OnePager from a company by the same name to communicate status to project teams working at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, OH. This center researches, designs, develops and tests technology for aeronautics and spaceflight.

OnePager is a project plan communications program that takes data from Microsoft Project and turns it into summary graphics.

Vantage Partners project analyst Danelle Fogle manages schedules and deadlines for several projects at Glenn, including fire safety and hypersonic flight.

According to Fogle, while Project itself is useful for staying on top of details and timelines, it’s not optimal for sharing information. That’s where OnePager comes in.

The use of the add-in varies depending on project team needs. “Some groups need to see a true project summary,” she said in a case study on the work. “For those groups, OnePager is a summary tool. Others need more detail. For example, for one group, I use five separate ‘OnePagers’ to give an extremely granular view of the project, in addition to an overall project summary. OnePager makes it so easy to customize the data you are showing. It’s all real dates and real data — just presented in a way that gives the audience what they need.”

Fogle noted that one feature of OnePager is particularly useful: being able to accommodate quick turnaround of change requests. “With OnePager, you can see the impact of changes in real time. When someone requests to see something, they get it quickly, in a format that’s not too complex for them to understand.”