Details Weekely Reporting

Overview of Project Status Reports

What should be included in a weekly project status report? This is a question to which there is no right answer. It depends on a number of things. The size of the project; the criticality; the corporate culture; the organisational structure. Hopefully, this white paper will answer some of the questions and will give you guidance to solve the rest in your own environment.

Project Status Reports Criteria

A starting point is to look at what are the important things in a project. It will vary project to project but here are a few typical criteria for project reporting.

Reporting against Schedule

What is the reader interested in hearing about the schedule? The progress against the schedule is essentially the progress against milestones. There are basically three questions that need to be answered.

• Did the project achieve the milestones due since the last report?
• What milestones are due before the next report?
• Has anything happened that will impact the final delivery date?

So, the report needs to list the milestones due since the last report (including any that were outstanding at the last report) and identify if they were met or not. It then needs to list the milestones due before the next report. To address the third point, if there is a change to the final delivery date, it needs to be identified and explained. If everything is still on track, there is no need to make mention.

Reporting against Budget

I tend to take the view that budget should not be included in the weekly status report. For a start, it may not be appropriate for everyone who sees the weekly report to know the financial situation. There is also the issue of timeliness of reporting. Often the budget is only reconciled once a month due to reporting limitations from the general ledger system. My suggestion is that reporting is done monthly as a separate report to a subset of those who receive the Weekly Project Status Report.

We have a separate white paper on project budget and expenditure for those interested. The key point is that reporting percentage of budget used to date is meaningless. You need to establish a cash flow at the start of the project and report against that projection. Typically, the start of the project uses up only a small portion of the money and the main expenditure comes later.