Top Tips – Project Reporting

Top Tips for Project Reporting

The importance of reporting as a communication tool should not be underestimated.

Project reports are one of the most effective and simple forms of communicating information about your project. A well-presented report can help your audience understand next steps, issues, risks and importantly keep them up to date with progress.

A poorly put together report will ultimately fail as a communication tool and will leave your recipients unclear and dis-engaged.

Many projects are complex and could have different workstreams, tasks, and milestones, which all contribute to the overall success of a project.

There are four fundamentals to keep in mind when creating a project report: –

1. Who is your audience?

Think about the purpose of your report as a communication tool.

Your audience will usually be the people either directly involved in the activities within the project or stakeholders that are invested in the overall success. This is often your project team, steering group, working group and external or internal clients.

Assess what information is important for each recipient and determine the key messages you want to communicate – Look to include all this information on the same report.

Having one well-structured report will help provide a consistent message and will give you the time to clearly document the details you want to present.

2. What should be included?

An informative report should include the following items as a minimum: –

• Reporting Period – Make sure you stipulate the dates the report covers.
• RAG Status – Typically, a simple Green, Amber or Red status should be documented. It will give your readers and understanding of the position of the project against the plan. These are widely used in project reporting and will be recognisable to your readers.
  • Green – The project is on track
  • Amber – Some tasks are off track, but plans are in place to resolve
  • Red – The plan is off track, with no clear plans in place to mitigate issues and resolve

If the project has different workstreams, you could also set a RAG status against each one. It will allow you to highlight where an area of focus should be.

• Summary – This should support your RAG and help your recipients understand the reason for the status you have set.
• Milestones – Include important events and dates in the project timeline. These are usually key events on the critical path.
• Risks & Issues – You shouldn’t document all your risks and issues on the report. Highlight important ones that are threats to the success of the project.
• Dependencies – Communicate any resource constraints or any activities that need to be completed outside of your project.

3. How to clearly display the information?

Most of the recipients will not have time to read through an essay of text or multiple lines of data. Keep the report simple, split into sections and have clear titles.

You’ll want to keep the audience interested and engaged so keep any commentary to a minimum. Highlight important information on the first page and make use of colours and graphs to visually display information.

For example, a graph could display how many milestones have been completed, on track or at risk. This gives the reader an overall picture and helps explain lots of information in a simple and clear way.

It’s important to keep reports consistent. This will help your audience familiarise with the information you’re presenting and allows them to navigate to the sections most relevant to them.

Establishing a companywide reporting theme can also be very effective. Reports can then be combined across the portfolio, which can be used to communicate a full overview of live projects.

There are software tools on the market that are specifically designed for project reporting. These can be used to automate the output and embed a consistent reporting format across the company.

4. When and how often to issue the report

Ordinarily, a weekly report is usually an appropriate timescale, however, this can depend on the size and speed of the project. Agree the occurrence at the project initiation and keep to it.

As the project starts to move into the closing stages, you may want to review the timescales and re-assess the information you want to communicate.

To conclude…

Remember your reports should be used as an effective way to communicate.

Assume that your audience will have no time to read through lots of detail. Keep the reports clear, engaging, visual and ensure you are including the information you feel is important to document.

Often your reports will be accompanied by weekly meetings with your project team. You’ll receive less questions and challenges by keeping the information simple and easy to understand.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help guide you through setting up and running your projects with meaningful reporting, please get in touch with us using [email protected].

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