PROJECT REPORT

A project report is a document created for a team or company that ensures a project stays on track. The project report describes the project's progress, milestones, and roadblocks.

A Project Report is a document which provides details on the overall picture of the proposed business. The project report gives an account of the project proposal to ascertain the prospects of the proposed plan/activity. Project Report is a written document relating to any investment. It contains data on the basis of which the project has been appraised and found feasible. It consists of information on economic, technical, financial, managerial and production aspects.

When to write a project status report?
This largely depends on the timeline (or predicted timeline for that matter) outlined in your project proposal. If your project is expected to run over a few years, it may be best to create quarterly project status reports. However, if your project is set to run around six months to a year, monthly is recommended.

For all of the help that project status reports provide, it's important to remember that they can be pretty time consuming to make. We've provided a project report template in this article to make your job easier; however, it's still a process. Click here to view our project report template gallery.

For all the time a project manager is putting into a status report, they're not putting the work into managing their team. Pick a regular period to deliver the report in and put it in the Gantt calendar. Be conscious of the time it consumes, and try to stick to the real-time delivery dates.

What to include in a project status report?
Depending on whom you're writing the report for, this will change. However, there are a few core elements to include for the project progress, despite who is reading the project report.

Resources
It's important to document all of the resources you had mapped out in your project plan. What do you have left still available? What have you used and found insufficient? Of what resources do you need more? This can include project management tools and physical resources like software or a PDF, but also human resources.

Timelines and targets
It's essential to give everyone an overview of your project timelines in these status reports, especially those that are outside of your project team and not using the project management software you're using.

At this point, be realistic with your timelines, not optimistic. Refer back to your Gantt calendar to help with this. Save your optimism for team meetings to spur your project team on in working more efficiently and hitting deadlines. In the reporting part, you need to be honest with your timelines and deliverables, both with the goals you have or have not hit and those you expect to be on time with or not.

Many players further down the line will be working on the information you provide in this section of the report, it therefore needs to be accurate so they can manage their workload and be available at the predicted date.

Notable changes
This can radically vary but needs to be anything notable that's happened and is no longer abiding by the initial project plan. If you're using an editable template rather than a PDF, you can go back and edit your project plan to accommodate changes.

Funding & budgets
The project manager should use the time dedicated to a project status report to reflect on his or her budgets. Accounting skills are vital for a project manager's success, and being able to handle a large budget will come in handy when it comes to managing the overall funding of a project.

In this part of the report, give a clear overview of expenses, predicted expenses, and visually highlight where you were over or under budget in real-time. The team can learn from this, not only for future projects but even for the next month's project management reports and spending.

‍ Team performance
Use goals and targets to quantitatively identify if the team is performing well. While doing this, it's essential to consider the hurdles they've had to jump along the way. Have they faced exceptional circumstances that were not planned? If so, how did they cope and react to these challenges?

Your qualitative eye needs to come in to play here. Just because a team member did not hit the pre-planned deliverables, doesn't mean they're not performing. How have their personable skills been as well as their hard skills?

Take it all into account, put pressure on those who can do better, highlight exemplary team members, give praise, and lead by example.

Risk management
This is the final part of the Project Status report and one of the most important skillsets for a successful project manager: Risk Management. A project manager needs to have a certain amount of hindsight at play in their everyday work and be able to give an executive summary of all risks.