Seven Key Areas to Create a Bullet-Proof Project Status Report
Sunday, February 19, 2017, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
Status reporting is the minimum communication element for a project manager. The primary purpose is to manage stakeholder expectations.
The project Status Report summarizes the progress of the project to date, and provides a list of the critical changes, risks and issues which require their attention.
If you want to create a bullet-proof status report, then make sure that your report includes each of the following sections:
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Executive Summary
Summarize the overall progress and any key achievements since the last update. State whether the project is currently on schedule and within budget.
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Schedule
Describe the overall schedule status in terms of green (on track), yellow (at risk) or red (need to re-baseline), If the schedule is yellow, state what you are doing to get back to green.
If the schedule is red, describe how you will re-baseline scope, schedule and/or budget to get back in synch. Also list any actual and estimated deliverable completion date variances.
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Costs
Describe the overall cost status in terms of green (on track), yellow (at risk) or red (need to re-baseline). If the cost is yellow, state what you are doing to get back to green.
If the costs is red, describe how you will re-baseline scope, schedule and/or budget to get back in synch. Also list any actual and budgeted expenditure variances.
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Scope
Describe the overall scope status in terms of green (on track), yellow (at risk) or red (need to re-baseline). If the scope is yellow, state what you are doing to get back to green.
If the costs is red, describe how you will re-baseline scope, schedule and/or budget to get back in synch.
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Quality
Describe the overall quality status in terms of green (on track), yellow (at risk) or red (need to re-baseline). If the quality is yellow, state what you are doing to get back to green.
If the costs is red, describe how you will change the project to meet quality expectations. This is normally changing project processes to meet existing quality expectations, although sometimes the quality criteria need to change to become more realistic.
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Risks
Risks are potential problems that may arise in the future. Your project should have an updated risk register. You should pull out any interesting or critical risks to provide visibility to management stakeholders – along with how you are responding to the risk.
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Issues
Issues are large, current problems that are impacting your project. Issues are big enough that all of them should be listed for stakeholder review. For each issue, describe your plan to address and sold the problem.
That’s it. If you create a project report which describes each of the sections above, you will keep your project stakeholders better informed of the overall progress of the project, and manage their expectations about the state of the project.
Remember, if your stakeholders are surprised, you likely have not done a good job of managing expectations.
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This column is © copyright to www.Method123.com and originally appeared in their weekly project management tip newsletter.
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