BUS605: Strategic Project Management

As you are laying bricks to build the foundation of a good project management process, a low hanging fruit is the status reporting process. It is often the first practice rolled out, but simply having a template available is not where the true value is earned.

Project status reporting is the hospital organization's view into how well that Capital Spend is progressing and your department's chance to facilitate communication with senior management and your business customers.

6 Effective Status Reporting Practices

1. Consistency - Consistency should address three components: frequency, appearance, and content.. Frequency has 3 stages, completed status due date, management review, and distribution. It is important to have a small as possible time gap from receiving the completed reports to distributing to executive leadership. I've found spotlight dashboards very useful to display all projects in a web page glance.
2. Raises Leadership Awareness of Key Issues - Escalation address properly alerting leadership of unhandled Risk, Decisions needed, or Critical Issues. The key thing here is there should be no surprises, and accountability is clear. If a decision is needed by the director of laboratory services, the director should already know the decision is awaiting, and have all the information necessary for that decision.
3. Written with the Audience in mind - The status report should make sense to its audience. This relates to using terminology familiar to the audience and not going into acronym speech. It is also worth taking the time to get the senior leader's opinion if the format and content contains everything they want to see.
4. Focus on Progress - Progress should be portrayed in the report. After all if it is the 12th week, and you are still debating terms and conditions on the MSA, ia bit more detail or anticipated completion date should be included.
5. Transparency - There should not be any hidden, well-known problems. Red, Yellow, and Green Status help to provide transparency on the project status.
6. Inclusive - In an organization, there should not be an IS project status on Opening 2 new ORS, a Plant Management project status, and then a OR departmental status. These should all be inclusive in the same tool. Possibly even the same project or program.

Source: Elyse
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