Mastering Microsoft Project 2002

Project managers communicate information about project status and progress to members of the project team, managers, and stakeholders. Unless your project is simple enough to be easily understood by people who aren’t intimately involved with project tasks, you’ll want to create different reports for each audience.

Creating Reports for the Project Team

Team members want access to information that will help them participate successfully in the project. As the project manager, you can encourage communication between individuals and groups working on the project, but you need to provide projectwide reports that meet the team members’ needs for connection with the entire project. Gantt charts that show completed tasks or include progress lines (refer to Figure 3.3), bar charts that show the percentage of work completed, and project calendars and timelines are all effective ways to communicate information within the team. (Thank-you notes and congratulatory e-mails are good tools, too.)

Creating Reports for Other Managers

Company managers need project summaries and timelines, variance reports, and written communications about your management of the project. Managerial reports should include the following:

• Current progress of the project work, including variances and indices

• Major activities or milestones completed in the reporting period

• Major activities scheduled for the next reporting period

• Problems and opportunities handled in the reporting period

• Your risk assessment for critical tasks in the next reporting period

If your company doesn’t have a standard format for project reports, create one and use it consistently at regular reporting intervals. A report can be periodic (monthly or quarterly), time-dependent (end-of-year, for instance), and/or related to major project milestones.

Creating Reports for Stakeholders

Unfortunately, stakeholder reports often come in only two forms—press releases with a timeline or Gantt chart attached, or reams of paper that discourage close examination (the “bury-them-with-data” approach). Project managers often view stakeholders as a potential source of scope creep rather than as valued customers whose needs must be met for the success of the project. Both views are accurate. Make an effort to create reports for stakeholders that communicate the information they need, based on their level of participation in the project.