Speaker 1: Are you wondering what needs to be included in project management status reports? Well, in this video, I'm gonna share with you what exactly you should have in your project status report. And if you're in need of help to build your project management skills, I have an amazing free training for you, and I'm gonna put the link for you under this video. Hi, if you're new here, welcome. My name is Adrienne Gerdler, and on this channel, you're gonna get the best career and project management advice. Please consider subscribing as it really helps us grow this awesome community. Now, if you're ready to learn more about project status updates, then let's get to it. What is a project status report? Well, it basically summarizes what your project progress is in comparison to project plan. Now, there's many ways you can do this. You can put your project status report in a Word document. You can put it in a PowerPoint. You can create a page on a web-based platform if you actually use something like that for your project. So there are different ways that you can put your status report. Now, who would you send this to? Well, you would send it to all the stakeholders of the project. And again, don't forget who stakeholders are. They're anyone who touches the project. So it could be people like your team members who are very in-depth and understand what's going on. It could be steering committee members, sponsors. It could also be senior executives who are on the peripheral edge of communication when it comes to your project. It could also be the end user or department who is receiving the deliverable. Again, anyone who touches the project really should have an understanding of your status update report. You want to use it as a communication tool. It really is to keep everyone in the loop. Now, what's the frequency that you do with this status update report? I personally like once a month. I think that's really helpful. You have enough things that have gone by and occurred so that when you have your status update report, it actually has some good information and it will be different than your last status update report. So that frequency is really important. Now, how would you distribute this? It really is dependent upon the type of document platform that you use. So if you're doing more of a Word document or PowerPoint, you may want to email that out to people and make that just a monthly recurrence. You may have a Project Share Drive that maybe you want to put it on there and people go to it. Or like I said, you may want to use a web-based platform. I use Microsoft Office SharePoint and I actually create all my project documents on there and I bring people to it. So there's definitely different ways depending on really how do you use and communicate with your projects. Now, what I'm gonna show you next is what actually goes into that status update report. Project summary. This is the first thing that you need to do. So let me show you an example. Follow me. So with here, we have the title of our update and it's a monthly update and here's the date of it being updated, which was the second. And your first section always in any update is a project summary. Now, there's a really good reason for this. It's because you want to include information to remind people, all those stakeholders, what it is that we're doing. And what is it that you would include in this project summary? Well, the scope statement, which is what is it that I'm responsible for from a delivery standpoint. And for this particular project, we're implementing a new future state security center. And it's very specific with focus on streamlining people activities and implementing some technology to support new ways of working. Now, we also include the project priority matrix because this is gonna let people know what your constraints are, what you're willing to optimize and accept from a scope time and budget perspective. This becomes really handy when you have people off to the side asking you to, oh, just add this element without having an understanding of everything else. So you can bring them back to this and saying, hey, I can't do it. My biggest constraint is time and what you're asking me to do is to increase time. Unless you have money, which is budget, in order to help me out, I'm not able to do it. So it becomes a real powerful tool for you. And in fact, in my SLAY project management course with the link under this video, I actually go into this in great detail. I love this project priority matrix. And now the next thing that you would have in your project summary is your high-level milestones, not your detail, just very high level. You wanna give an overarching view to anybody who's looking at this. What is it that we're doing and when are we delivering it by? It's really very high level. It supports a scope statement and a priority matrix so that anyone coming into it, especially a brand new person, can get very quickly what is your project all about. So when they read the rest of the information in your status update, it makes sense. Overall project status. So this is very simply put, what is the overall status of your project? Are you on track or at risk? Let's go back to that example so I can show you more. Okay, now we want to go to the overall, oops, project status, which is basically saying, overall, my project as a whole, how is it? Is it on track? Do I have some issues? I like to use a stoplight system of green, yellow, and red. And green just means you're on track. Yellow, I may have some potential risks, but we're working on it. And red is I definitely have some issues. I'm probably gonna need some intervention in order to ensure that I get out of that. Not a bad thing to have any reds or yellows. In fact, I always tell everyone, you need to have reds and yellows. If I come across a project that's always in green status, I question it in saying, I don't know if they actually know what's going on because I've never come across a project that is constantly 100% in green status, on track, unless it's just myself. And I've complete 100% control. So if someone were to just look at the project summary and they just wanted to say, hey, how's this project? Right away, immediately they know this project overall is on track. Project deliverables or major milestone status. This is the heartbeat of your status report. So this is where all the detail is gonna be. Now that we have the project summary, which is really important, we have our overall status, which I'm saying is green. Now we're gonna get to the heart of this project status update, and that is project deliverable status. So again, using the same stoplight system of green, yellow, and red, I'm now gonna be very specific to what deliverables I'm going to be giving a status on. Now, what I usually do is in my charter, I know what my major deliverables are, and I'm just gonna use those same deliverables in my monthly status update. So this is not an exhaustive list. This is just an example I'm giving you in regards. This was an actual real project, and due to confidentiality, I can't necessarily put everything in there, but just to give you an idea of some things. So from a deliverable standpoint of this project, we had upgrade of computer hardware, we had upgrade of furniture, we had to look at hiring new resources, and we had to do some training. Believe you me, there's a lot more, but for this example, I just wanna make it short and sweet for you. Now, it's really important, because this is the heartbeat of everything. This is where you're getting the nitty gritty, is define what your deliverable is, because I promise you people come in with assumptions, and you wanna negate those assumptions by just defining it. And then you wanna give your status for each one, green, yellow, red, green. Again, do not be afraid of having reds and yellows. It just means that you understand your project, you're on top of everything, and don't forget here, yellow, potential risk, but the team is monitoring them. And if I have a red, it means my team is working on fixing the issue. That could be literally them going in and doing themselves, me reaching out to maybe some steering committee members, whatever it may be. And your comment is for each deliverable. So for example, the upgrading of the computer hardware, as of this update, everything's on track, items have been ordered, great. Updating, upgrading our furniture, well, we're having some issues, because the original design configuration, we can't seem to get what we originally thought we designed, and we're ordering, so we're trying to find alternatives with our supplier. That to me is a yellow. We're monitoring it, we're coming up with an alternative solution. It's not a red, because it's not an issue, it just means we have to find a different solution for it. Resources, I marked down as a red, because we're having a difficult time finding qualified resources. We're gonna revisit our requirements, and definitely go to our steering committee to get approval for those changes. And then I got some training execution, which if I were to scroll here, it's really towards the end of my project, and I'm not there yet. I just said, as of August 2nd, deliverable hasn't started yet. So I'm giving myself a little bit of a bonus by saying, it's green, it's on track, because it is on track. I'm doing everything else in order to make it work. So this is your heartbeat. Again, you wanna have your project summary, so that people understand it. And even though my project deliverable has some reds and yellows, I still feel as a project manager, my project is green. Even though I have a few yellows and reds, because I have plans in place in order to address them. Issues and risk. This is where you're gonna outline some high level external elements that are impacting your project that you wanna share with your stakeholders. Anything that's gonna impact scope, time, or budget. Let's go back to that example. Now we're gonna go to the last section of your status update, issues and risks. So this is where you're gonna highlight any issues that are not connected to a deliverable, because there are things like that. And you just wanna give some information. And any risks that you are identifying, you wanna place it here. Again, you wanna show your due diligence, that you know what's going on with the project, and anything that's gonna impact your scope, time, and budget. So with this section, I actually have a risk, and that's project timeline is being negatively impacted. And now this is where you give that information. What is it? How are you going to address it? And is there anything else of note? So why is my timeline being negatively impacted? It's because as a project, we're struggling with our IT core team members to complete their tasks in the timeline associated. We all have had that issue. But this is not about finger pointing. I'm now even going into greater detail. Why is this happening? It's not because they don't care. They do care. It's a new project was launched. And what happens when something new happens? It's new, it's shiny, it's exciting, and everyone is told to start working on it. But now they're actually, the department that launched this new project, they're pulling my team members away from me. Why? Because I don't have a dedicated team 100% to this project. In fact, they have a whole bunch of other projects, my subject matter experts. So it's a balancing act. But I'm now calling out, saying that their managers are pulling on them to say, hey, start working on this project. So it's now my job. What I'm going to do as a PM is to speak to their direct managers. I'm going to bring up this issue for resolution to the steering committee, because that's their job to remove my roadblocks. So I just have to make sure that there's a balance of time for my team. Am I worried about this risk at the present moment? Not really. That's why I said green. But if I start talking to a direct managers and steering committee and nothing happens, then my project is going to go into the red very quickly. But I'm going to at least show my due diligence, and I'm going to show the paper trail that shows that I told everybody this. Again, this update is powerful, and I highly recommend that all your projects have one. Now that you know how to create a project status report, it's now time for you to go to the link under this video and grab your seat for my free training on the Fab Five Fundamentals of Project Management. If you're here for status reports, I'm letting you know, go there, because it's going to give you some really key elements that are just going to help you be amazing at project management. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel, like this video, and please share it with all the people you know. It really helps us grow our community, giving you more great content. I really hope you like this video, and please let me know if you have anything else that you would add to this, any comments you have. Please put them in the comments below. Until the next video, see you later.