Project Status Report for Project Management

Project Status Report for Project Management.

You know as well as we do, that effective communication is critical to delivering successful projects. But providing your stakeholders with the right information at the right time is not as easy as it seems. The trick is to create a single report that summarizes the entire status of your project, so that your stakeholders feel comfortable that you’re on-track and likely to meet their requirements. To help you do this, we’ve described here how to:

Create a bullet-proof “Project Status Report”

The Project Status Report summarizes the entire progress of the project to date. It also provides the stakeholders with a list of the critical changes, risks and issues which require immediate attention. If you want to create a bullet-proof status report, then make sure that your report includes each of the following sections:

Executive Summary

Summarize the overall progress to date and any key achievements. Then state whether the project is currently on schedule and within budget. List the key deliverables accepted by the customer so far and describe all high priority risks and issues. Finally, describe any changes affecting the project.

Schedule

• List the deliverables accepted by the customer
• List the scheduled completion date for each deliverable
• List the actual completion date for each deliverable
• Identify actual and scheduled completion date variances
• List the new forecast completion date for each deliverable
• Identify scheduled and forecast completion date variances

Expenses

• List each expense type; such as labor, equipment & materials
• Identify the budgeted expenditure, per expense type
• Identify the actual expenditure, per expense type
• List actual and budgeted expenditure variances
• Identify the forecast expenditure, per expense type
• List budgeted and forecast expenditure variances

Effort

• List all of the major activities that staff have spent effort on
• Identify the amount of effort originally budgeted per activity
• Identify the actual effort expended per activity
• List actual and budgeted effort variances
• Identify the forecast effort, per project activity
• List budgeted and forecast effort variances

Quality

• List the deliverables to be provided by the project
• List the original quality targets set for each deliverable
• Describe the extent to which each quality target was achieved
• Identify any variances between the quality target set and the actual level of quality achieved, for each deliverable

Risks and Issues

• List the high priority risks raised during the reporting period
• Rate the likelihood of each risk occurring and its project impact
• List the high priority issues raised during the reporting period
• Rate the current impact of the issue on the project

And that’s it. If you create a project report which describes each of the sections above, then you will keep your project stakeholders better informed of the overall progress of the project. See http://www.method123.com// for templates which help you better communicate with staff, customers and stakeholders.