Project Management Checklists For Dummies

Chapter 13

Stage Reporting

In This Chapter

Team level reporting

Reporting to the Project Steering Group

Specialised reports

Reporting during a stage provides control to the management level ‘above’. In the case of reports prepared by the Project Manager, that level above will mostly be the Project Steering Group (PSG). In the case of reports produced by a Team Leader, well they’ll normally go to the Project Manager.

Reporting is simple on the one hand, but needs careful thought on the other. You want to include enough information for effective control but over-reporting merely drives up overheads … or worse. Every bit of redundant information is written by someone, wasting time and effort. But then the recipients of the reports then have to scan through the redundant information to find the bits they really do want, and that wastes more time still. The ‘worse’ is that reports become so unwieldy that those who should be reading them simply don’t bother to look at them at all.

There’s inevitably a bit of overlap between this chapter and others in that it covers some of the same information. During a stage you are going to check progress, obviously enough. And during the stage you ...