Status reviews: keep your initiative on target

Posted on by Piet Neirinck

Periodic status reviews are important to keep your project ‘on target’. A status report can have different audiences:

  1. senior management and project sponsors
  2. program management
  3. core project team
  4. others

The trick is to make comprehensive status reports that provide the right level of information to all audiences involved. The key question for all audiences should be: Is our initiative ‘on track’? If not, what is the exposure and what are the actions being taken?

  • time: will we able to achieve the various milestones and deadlines that have been specified?
  • budget: will we be able to complete the project within budget?
  • scope: will we be able to deliver the intended scope and achieve the project objectives/deliverables?

Every project status report should contain at least

  • overall progress (% & comment)
  • status (time, budget, scope)
  • objectives/deliverables
  • milestones and progress against milestones
  • budget follow-up (optionally by work package)
  • open issues
  • open change requests

 

Some additional recommendations when preparing a status review:

  • Keep it brief and structured: Be aware that senior management rarely has the time to read through detailed status reports covering all aspects of the project. Make sure your status reports always follow more or less the same structure. A status review report should be easy to understand and leave limited room for interpretation.
  • Use basic colors: Use red, yellow or green to quickly identify whether the element being measured is ‘on track’, ‘requires attention’, or is ‘critical’.
  • Distribution: A status report can be discussed during a team meeting, steering committee (steerco) or just distributed without a ‘face-to-face’ meeting on a regular basis. We recommend organizing a steerco to immediately review the status at least once after the deadline of every key milestone.
  • Pay attention for the ‘last 20 percent’: A typical pattern observed is the situation where – at a certain stage of a project -work is indicated ‘80% done’, only to find out afterwards that the milestone can never be achieved. This is because the last 20% of the work takes always longer than planned.

The comprehensive project dashboard in 9teams has been designed to get the most out of your status reviews with limited effort. This dashboard is used as the central status overview for team meetings and steercos.

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