Precise Project Status Reporting
How to Develop Project Status Reporting and Importance of Accuracy?
Doing weekly project status reports will help keep all stakeholders in the loop and aligned on how your project is progressing. It should highlight 2-3 key milestones, previous week accomplishments, next 2 weeks planned actions and risks / issues with a mitigation plan.
Irrelevant information not linked to key milestones, lack of standard template use, inaccurate data, inconsistent risks, and issues follow up are some of the pitfalls to poor project reporting. Don’t lose credibility with your customer by following key steps below:
Use a professional template with standardized formatting, font, colors design.
Leverage information from project plan, RAID log, change log and meeting minutes (follow up items) – ensure information is accurate and up to date, indicate if project is on or off track, confirm with task owners.
Use executive high-level messaging, concise language, and avoid wordiness, dense content.
Use charts, tables, or graphs from accurate data, validate with analyst and task owners, avoid use of too much data and show pertinent relationship between variables.
Review all content with key task owners, elicit additional information, make multiple iterations until client ready.
Send final draft to client project sponsor and other meeting attendees as a pre-read 24 to 48 hours prior to meeting, make modifications if requested.
Assign a note taker to document recommendations, new ideas, task status, next steps, and other applicable information during status meeting.
During status meeting engage audience on open action times, risks, and issues, drive next steps and secure owners.
Send meeting minutes within 24 hours of status meeting with associated documents and links.
Download our leading practice Project Status Report, Change Request Log, RAID Log, Meeting Minutes, Meeting Minutes Tracker templates here!