Project Status Reporting – 6 Key Considerations

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, Project Managers (PMs) live and die by the Plan. The entire purpose of the Start-up Phase of a Project is to produce a comprehensive Plan for the Project; consisting of an integrated Performance Measurement Baseline (Time, Cost, Scope) and an associated Project Management Plan to monitor and control it. Once the planning is complete, the Project shifts into the main Execution phase which will form the vast bulk of the timeline. The Project should then be reporting its status regularly to senior management via a Status Report, as part of its overarching Governance arrangement. So far so good; but when an organisation is orchestrating its status reporting process, what does it need to consider?

We’ve recently been involved in a review and update to the Project status reporting and governance structure for a major organisation with circa 150 Projects live projects at any one time. When you have that many Projects, the Project status reporting process needs to be effective and efficient to ensure the Organisation can “see the wood for the trees” – where does it need to focus its limited time and resources? Below we’ll outline up some basic high level considerations which we consider to be important; look on for more details on some of these points in future articles.

1. Management by Exception: This PRINCE2 Principle is extremely valuable as the starting point; the Project shouldn’t need to tell management about every single thing that it has done. The Project Plan was agreed and the Project now tracks to it; why waste time and effort restating what’s in the plan? The truth is senior management aren’t really bothered, or at least they shouldn’t be.
2. RAG: Red – Amber – Green. Very common terminology in the UK (“Amber” is the middle light on our traffic lights) you can call it Red – Yellow – Green if you prefer. This simple rating approach is pretty universal, and helps to implement step 1. A Green status means the Project is on-plan: management don’t waste your time asking any more questions. Amber status means the Project is a little bit off track, so keep an eye on us to make sure we’re ok. A Red status means we’re up a creek without a paddle – help! When you are dealing with a very large number of projects, RAG states help management see pain areas at a glance and then focus their attention accordingly.
3. Milestones: I’m not a fan of status reports with “Achievements this week” and “Planned for next week” – do they really want to know every task we’ve done and are planning to do? I have a very big schedule… But Project Milestones are different; high visibility key dates, they are typically tied to contractual requirements and financial payments. Reporting progress against these, or any risk to them, helps to give an appropriate view on progress without worrying about minor variations against individual tasks. Ideally, organisations should define as part of their standards a common set of milestones to be adopted by all Project to ensure consistent nomenclature and reporting.
4. Sub-Factors influencing Status: Reporting an overall RAG status is good, but in reality a Project’s Status is influenced by many factors. Effective reporting should ensure a Project report status against a standard set of sub-factors, which then collectively inform the overall Project status. These sub-factors may be different between organisations and industries, but should be common within the organisation, supported by an associated set of clear definitions. A good place to start when considering potential sub-factors is the Performance Measurement Baseline – the triple constraint of Scope/Cost/Time; how are we performing against these? What about the client relationship? If they don’t think the Projects going well then it doesn’t matter what you think. Risk is another factor; it’s nice if the Project is going to plan, but if there a lot of very severe risks stacked up that may impact at any time then the Project has the potential to go off course at any minute. There are many others of course: legal, commercial, safety, security, solution – the list goes on. Pick some, define them, stick to them.
5. Go-To-Green Plan: We’ve agreed the importance of the plan above, and if the Project Status is Amber or Red then clearly we are off-plan. What we need then is a plan to get back on plan – sometimes known as a Go-To-Green plan, or Corrective Action. If the Project is Amber or Red, management want to know that you have it in hand, and the GTG plan shows this. They will want to review it of course to ensure it is credible, and understand if they need to support it in any way – approving a Change Request to scope, making a priority call on key resources etc. In the worst case you may not be able to produce a GTG plan, in which case management will want to know when you will have one; a Plan for a Plan perhaps, or a Go To Amber plan.  
6. Reporting System Independence: The truth is that no one likes their Project to be Red, and understandably so – all you get is heat from senior management. The problem here is that sometimes PMs will keep on reporting Green when they should be reporting Amber or Red. This means that rather than getting the focus and support to fix their Project, the Project performance continues to slip until they are totally unrecoverable and yet another Project fails entirely. To counter this, Organisations need to foster an environment where being Red is not a negative; instead PMs get genuine support. Additionally, Organisations need to establish a reporting system what removes the ability to PMs to make potentially subjective and biased assessments of their Project’s status. Instead they should look to shift assessment of the key indices’ of Project performance out from their hands, and automate it based upon Project Performance Data. For example, cost performance data is collected by the PMO and the Cost Performance Index (CPI) is calculated and compared against defined Organisational standards to determine the Finance Status of the Projects – the PMs Judgement has nothing to do with it.

So there you go, some basic high level considerations for Status Reporting and Governance that we’ve used. What other considerations can you think of for designing Project Status Reporting processes? There are many other factors of course, and we may get on to them in the future!
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