Exploring the Dos and Don’ts of Status Reports

Dos and don’ts for status reports

There are many types of communication that exist, but the most common and influential is the project status report. This may be in a written form, in a meeting, or via a slide deck, but the purpose and content should largely be the same across these formats. We’ll be using the written format because it is common and the easiest to work within a course, but the concepts are translatable to whichever format you or your company use.

First up, here’s a quick inventory of what items should be included in a status report:

• Executive summary: This is a high-level summary of the project's progress that is easy to digest and clearly states the trajectory of the project. The traffic-light status is included here, as well as the items contributing to the current traffic-light color the project is on.

• Project milestones: There are two schools of thought on milestones. They are either a list of predefined phases or steps that every project goes through, such as implementation, testing, deployment, launch, and post-launch, or are used as shorthand for the deliverables of the project. Using milestones as the former provides good metrics that can be used across all projects (such as how often a project’s deployment takes longer than expected) and distinguishes milestones from the feature deliverables.

• Feature deliverables: This is a list of deliverables, usually synonymous with the top-level tasks (also called epic tasks) in a task list. This lets the stakeholders know when to expect a specific feature or group of features and varies with every project.

• Open and recently resolved issues: This is a list of issues that are currently being tracked. These are separate from the known tasks and the known risks but will include realized risks as they are being dealt with. Having a separate table where resolved items are moved once a status report has shown them as resolved can help reduce the size of individual tables.

• Risk log: This is a log of the risks, as discussed earlier. If the number of risks is large, we could include just the high-risk items in the status report with a link to the full risk log.

• Contact information: In case of issues or concerns, a reader of the status needs to know who to ...