5 Essentials For Your Project Reports

Monitor your project with clear status reports.

#1: Major risks

List the top 3 risks to the project on your report. These should be the big risks that you want your sponsor to be aware of and perhaps even take action on. If you are expecting a decision about the best route forward or next steps then point this out on the report.

As risk status can change almost daily, talk to the risk owner before you prepare the report and make sure that you have all the details about the latest situation. You don't want to be reporting something that is out of date!

#2: Major issues

Include a list of the top 3 issues on the project and what you are doing about them. Again, if you need input from your project sponsor to help resolve them, be sure to mention it! Include the name of the person who is managing the issue (the issue owner) and the date by when you think the issue will be resolved.

#3: Progress summary

Sponsors are really interested in how much progress is being made so this is an important section. List the major project milestones and whether or not they have been achieved on the target dates. Don't try to include all your milestones: just pick the significant ones. If you haven't hit a milestone, make a note of the day you said you would achieve it along with the new forecasted date so you can see how significantly your plan has changed.

The scheduling features in ProjectManager.com will automatically show you any slippage or changes to the due dates for project tasks through an advanced suite of project reports. You can use this information in your status reports to save you time.

#4: Budget forecast

Another thing that sponsors want to know about is how much the project is costing and whether or not it is on track to spend more or less than you originally predicted. The status report is an opportunity to provide an early warning if the project looks like it is going to be over budget (or under budget, as the unspent money could be allocated to other work).

There's no need to provide lots of detail, just the high level figures of what you originally budgeted, how much has been spent to date and what you think the expenditure will be when the project is over.

#5: Status indicator

Make it easy for people to see if the project is going well with a Red/Yellow/Green status indicator. The traffic light colors highlight whether the project needs management attention (Red), is at risk of not hitting its targets (Yellow) or is progressing according to plan (Green).

The simplest way to display this information is by using a colored box at the top of the report. Type the word Red, Yellow or Green as well as using color in case your sponsor is looking at the report printed out in black and white!

A dashboard can pull all this information together in one place and use real-time updates from your project team. The more you can automate when it comes to project status reports, the less time it will take you to prepare the information every month. That's time you could be spending on other project tasks!

Use the dashboard and reporting features of ProjectManager.com to highlight progress and status. It automates the collection of data and makes your project's position really clear.