How to Share Quick Project Status Report with Orangescrum

Having crisp project status reports is a must to drive crucial decisions & management attention at the right time. Savvy project managers understand the value of project overviews as this where they can garner all the support & momentum required for the project success.

On the other hand, it is always a challenge for project managers to gather relevant data points at times from multiple repositories & tools before they can prepare the master report.

Manual effort intensive, time consuming, boring and obviously tedious!

Most of all, not a judicious spend of precious efforts!

One needs to be cautious not to go overboard in terms of data points, formatting & making the project status reports verbose.

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Understand the Audience

First things first. Never try to be fancy with these reports unless you have an audience who is too stuck with look and feel. It adds to the distraction and takes focus away from key business matters.

Smart project managers usually gauge their stakeholder expectations and requirements from their initial discussions during the initiation and planning phases.

And they make a rough outline of what data points, frequency and format their stakeholders would like to receive.

Secondly, stick to the established formats if they are the norm of the day and work well. People may not like or become biased because you changed the way they are used to specific things.

Keep in mind that the objective of the report is to present facts in the easiest way to derive required focus and support for the project.

The prime objective of project status report is to ensure

• True project progress is represented
• Open issues, high priority items are duly pointed
• Validated numbers w.r.t time, resource & expense are presented
• Risks if any are always highlighted
• A brief project overview note highlighting key achievements or delays are shared

Now that we’ve established the key data points for a project status report, let us focus how an integrated project management tool like Orangescrum can help.

Project Status Overview Report in Orangescrum

Orangescrum’s project overview is a ready to use, automated & comprehensive report to present to your customers, PMO (project management office) or executives.

Let us take a detailed look at it.

The Basics:

Each project status report must have key identifiers highlighted at the top of the report. Such as

• Project Name
• Start and Due Date
• Project Progress
• Project Priority

Project Progress in Orangescrum is calculated as the average progress of all tasks in the project to provide a holistic project status.

Project statistics that matter:

Task, time and resources make for crucial project elements that must be reported duly on your project status report.

Orangescrum neatly sets these numbers right at the beginning of the project overview.

Task Status & Count – A crisp pie chart presents “task count by status” to show how tasks are progressing through their life cycle.

Time Log Chart – Next up is the time log chart that explains the billable vs non-billable and total hours spent on the project. You get to know which way is your project headed.

Project Team Scorecard – A neat table of all project users with the breakup of their total vs overdue task count along with billable and non-billable hours spent across those tasks.

Overdue Tasks – List of all overdue tasks with critical info such as Due date, Late by days count and assignee to reprioritize tasks or course correct as needed.

Associated Documents – You can view and access the files linked to various tasks of the ongoing project from the project overview.

Task count by Task Type – This pie chart gives you a task breakup across various task types. So you know which types of activities keep your teams occupied. This simple chart is highly insightful as –

You get to analyse and identify if there are process gaps, skill gaps or erroneous execution leading to bottlenecks and delays.

Task Group Progress – This is an important section as you get to know the progress of various modules and phases of your projects. How many tasks have been completed, in progress and yet to start.

Project Notes: – This is where project managers own their customers and leadership teams. They must use it to highlight

• Risks, bottlenecks and delays
• Change requests if any
• Resource and funding requirements
• Customer dependent items
• Team achievements, project failures

The best thing of all is you can run a live project status review meeting with this dashboard ON!

And if not, you can just export it as a PDF and share with your project stakeholders.

 Wrapping it up!

Basically, as you progress with project execution the dashboard starts to build intuitively. All you need to ensure as a project manager is that

• Proper task breakdown is done
• Teams do their time tracking diligently
• Task status updates is done as progress is made
• Mark time logs as billable

Hence, Orangescrum project management software allows project team to focus on collaboration, task management, time and resource management instead of wasting time of building manual reports.

And the fact that Orangescrum is an online and centralized task management tool, teams can stay up to date and communicate seamlessly.

So, what’s it going to be? Manual or smart project reporting?

Create your next project status report now with Orangescrum.