manage well

Many project reports are exactly that much – “Aal izz well” (and for those uninitiated to the latest bollywood blockbuster ’3 Idiots’, it simply is “All is Well”). They speak of yesterday’s weather, don’t help much in forecasting the future and the only thing they help create is the impression that all is well! An important fact about project status report that people don’t realize is that until the time a project has met its objectives and delivered its promised goods, the only ‘output’ from a project is really the communication to its stakeholders and the outside world.

However, in real world, project reporting is often treated with contempt it hardly deserves! I have seen more project managers at the extremities – either too fanatically pushing the project report whether or not it helps anyone, or literally delegating it to an admin assistant to just compile it together and send it out. In the former case, a lot of team effort is being wasted to create worthless pieces of information that no one cares, except perhaps the project manager who thinks his only job is to create beautiful masterpieces that history will remember him for. In the latter case, the project manager perhaps considers the activity a waste of time that serves no one, and hence decides to take matter in his own hands. Whether the intent in both these cases is bondfide or not, the project and its stakeholders are definitely not being served. Those project reports are, thus, not an administrative irritant, but must be treated with due importance.

Here are some of the ways you can improve your project reporting:

Identify Purpose and Target Audience

Not all projects are made equal, and certainly not all project reports are made equal. The internet is full of readymade templates to jumpstart your project reporting – but beware of those canned solutions. Typically, the more generic the solution, the more chances that it won’t meet any one individual’s needs well. So, if you must take reuse an existing ‘mother of all project reports’ due to whatever compulsion, first sit down with your stakeholders and understand what they want to know from your project report. Some stakeholders want detailed reporting while some might only want information that helps them manage by exception. Some might want to understand the way a project is burning cash, while others might want to understand what are the critical bottlenecks in design process.

A good idea is to do a proper stakeholder needs analysis and understand different priorities and preferences among various stakeholders, and what do they prefer. Influential stakeholders often have their jobs, money or credibility on the line, and naturally have more concerns about project execution. As much as they would like to hear ‘Aal izz well’, they would like to know more about bottlenecks and impediments that the team needs help with. No point promising moon to those stakeholders because at the end of the day, you are not really serving project needs by hiding the true picture of the project.

On-time

If the news of a tornado comes much after the tornado has already hit the village, there is nothing much that can be done. Similarly, your weekly project report that reaches a week late might straightaway head to where it rightfully deserves to be – the trash can. When you delay your project reports, you send multiple wrong messages to your stakeholders – the most damagine among it being that you are not on top of things. A good practice is to establish lead time to create project reports and allocate time and effort for it. As the project goes by, you can try to optimize the effort required to create the report, but never leave it to chance, and definitely never leave it for the weekend. I have seen the most common tendency is to leave project status report preparation for the weekend – during the silent zone, but guess what – several things can get you off the track. Family outing, surprise guests, unavailability of status update from some of your key team members, server shutdown, etc. and a many more reasons can simply take your weekend away from you. Look at it this way – if you want your key stakeholders to treat your reports with respect and due importance, perhaps you want to first start doing the same.

Consistent

Imagine getting updates from your team every week in different definitions, terminologies, measurement units, templates and even different softwares. Now before you get me wrong, I am all for innovation and continous improvement. If you are not happy with what you have, by all means, you should work on improving and making things simpler. But, if that becomes a little too much too often, you might not only spend (rather ‘waste’) too much time and effort in redoing it all every time, but even confuse your stakeholders. In the best case, they might sympathesize with you and wait until you get it right, and in the worst case, they might think you just can’t get anyting right! Again, best approach is to do as much upfront tweaking as required and possible, and then resist that urge to change things unless there is a definite benefit to project and its stakeholders. In case of major change, talk to them first lest they be confused by the uninformed change. However, try to be as much consistent as possible.

Concise

People’s times are premium these days, even more so for the influential stakeholders. Lengthy documentation and arguments should be preserved for your doctorate research and viva presentation, but if your project report doesn’t come to the point in perhaps 15 seconds of anyone reading it, you might have already lost the plot. I recommend not more than one side A4 of real estate for a project report at any level – anything bigger, and chances are you yourself are not clear on what the most important issues of a project are. If you are not convinced by this friendly advise, do a simple experiment: go to your favorite library and handpick the top 4 books that you have always wanted to read. Chances are that even after a month, you would not have read any of them. As opposed to this, just go and pick up one book next time, and chances are you would have not only read it over the weekend but are also able to retain key learnings from the book.

I highly recommend using Twitter to hone you presentation skills – if you can present yourself in 140 letters, you can kill the world with your charm :)

Phrophecise

Ok, so much about the how to do a project report, but what should it have ? IMNSHO, the most important thing in a project report should be the forecast of future, prediction of how the project will go from here to the finish line, an educated guess based on facts on what all air pockets the project is likely to hit and what is the proactive preparation of the project to deal with such eventualities. Mind you – it is not important that all your prophecies come true – they are an educated guess after all, and if all you guess are becoming facts, that might be leaving a lot unspoken about your ability to plan such ‘unforeseen’ events . What is important that you don’t leave anything to chance, and nothing ever comes from the left field and takes your project by surprise. If requires careful ‘what-if’ analyses for various types of scenarios, and while doing this might not look like a lot of project progress is being made, it is like ’the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war’ strategy in action. Most project reports never get to this point, and hence while they look good and shining and all that, they are actually worthless waste of human effort.  

So, everything else being equal,

• if I ignore your project report, it’s probably because I already know the facts therein
• if I file your project report, it’s probably because I want to record some facts for posterity
• but if I keep your project report with me throughout the next week and use it in all my discussions, it’s probably because there are things in it that have the potential to shape the course of my project in the coming week or beyond.

So, what type of response to your project report you will want from me?

Did you say…Aal izz well?