Project Reporting - 1

Project Reporting is one of the key areas of project Management as well as Project Office Management. In the communication plan, PM specifies how the project communication should be done., Different stakeholders of the project have different information requirements about the same project., So as PM, you group your stakeholders, and then you define the level of information requirements and the frequency of information requirements for each group. We can formally update our stakeholders through project meetings and project reports.

In this post, I will share little bit of my experience in Project Reporting.

As a PM, no point of you writing pages and pages of lengthy reports to prove the project board that you are in total control of the project. When updating my project stakeholders, I have always been successful by using simple but comprehensive predefined templates for Project Reporting.

Some of the benefits of using pre-defined Project status reporting templates:

1. You will not miss important points because the template itself defines the sections for all the key areas.
2. Your stakeholders will not have to read lengthy boring reports and understand something totally different to what you are trying to say.
3. You will make less mistakes in report writing as it keeps you focused on subject matters, You will not go out of focus.
4. You can easily provide required transparency of the project to readers.
5. Every week they read the same format of report so it becomes very user friendly and familiar to them.
6. You can maintain a company wide common templates for all the projects

Not only the template, the information you fill there should be accurate and clear.

I have few PM friends who creates different status reports for different stakeholders. internal They produce different status reports for internal people and different reports for the customer 2 reports contain total different views of the same project status ( they are not my colleagues) I do not agree with this., We have to provide maximum level project transparency to the customers and to all the other stakeholders., No point of creating different pictures for different parties., Remember .. “Bullshit can take you there but will not keep you there..” so one day everybody will get to know the truth about your project., Your credibility lies on the accuracy of your project reports. So the Rule No : 01 -Do not report false information to your stakeholders under any circumstances.

So how do you define a good report template to update your customers and key stakeholders? Its too much to write in this post …:( , So in my next post I will discuss “How to define a proper Project Report Template”