Project Management Tips and Techniques - Communicating Status
Tom Mochal

Each month, Tom Mochal presents a set of project management tips and techniques for handling various aspects of planning and managing a project. Tom has over 23 years of IT experience. He has developed a comprehensive, scalable project management process called TenStep, which can be viewed at www.TenStep.com. 

Properly communicating on a project is a critical success factor for managing the expectations of the customer and the stakeholders. If these people are not kept well informed of the project progress there is a much greater chance of problems and difficulties due to differing levels of expectations. In fact, in many cases where conflicts arise, it is not because of the actual problem, but because the customer or manager was surprised.

All projects should communicate status. This includes reporting from the project team to the project manager and reporting from the project manager to the customers and stakeholders. Two typical forums for communicating status are through a Status Meeting and Status Reports. Larger projects need to be more sophisticated in how they communicate to various constituents. This multi-faceted approach is defined in a Communications Plan. 

Here are some tips and techniques to keep in mind when communicating status on your projects.

Status Meetings

• If you find that you are spending too much time in status meetings, it is usually a sign of too much problem solving. While you have everyone together, use the time to discuss general status, issues, scope and risk. Keep the status meetings short with a tight agenda to be most effective, and take any lengthy discussions offline. 
   
• In general, all meetings should have an agenda. The creation of the agenda takes a little extra work, but it can be as simple as writing it in an email and sending it to the meeting participants. Regularly scheduled meetings do not need a published agenda every week, if they stick to the same agenda format. 

Status Reports

• Avoid creating individualized reports for each person who needs information. Most people need only a standard set of information that can be communicated in a common Project Status Report. 
   
• The frequency of status reporting is based on the length of the project, and the speed in which you need to react. For instance, if your project is two months long, and the Project Manager receives Status Reports from the team members on a monthly basis, there is not enough time to respond if problems are indicated. A good rule of thumb might be that for small projects, you may not need formal status reporting. For medium projects, every week might make sense. For large projects, every other week might be appropriate. On the other hand, if critical activities are occurring (for instance when the solution is being implemented) you may need status updates on a daily basis.
   
• Try to focus the Status Reports so that the information in them can be used in the decision making process. Ask team members (and yourself) whether the information on the Status Report is there to really communicate something valuable, or is it just taking up space. 
   
• You want to focus on meaningful information in the status report. However, you may find that some of your audience finds value in the exceptions, while others find value in the details. One of the ways to satisfy both audiences is to write the formal status report as an exception-based document, but include the details as appendices.
   
• Always keep the organizational level of your audience in mind. Your team members need information that is highly detailed and highly specific to the work they are assigned. The project manager needs information that covers the entire project, but at a less detailed level. Your manager needs to have information summarized and delivered at a higher level. Their manager needs information at a higher-level still. Although your project is the most important thing on your mind, to senior management it may just be one of a number of important events they are trying to keep track of. 
   
• Don’t take retribution against the person (or people) that deliver bad news. If you ask people for a status, accept the good and the bad for what it is – information for you to make better decisions. If you want people to tell them when there are problems, you need to accept the information and then work with the team on causes and solutions. 
   
• One good technique for providing an overall summary of a project is to include a green / yellow / red indicator. Just as you would expect, a green indicator means that the project is basically on track. It does not imply that there are no problems at all. But it does mean that all problems are being addressed and the project is basically on time and on budget. A summary indicator of yellow means that there is some risk that the project will not meet its budget or deadline, and the project is trying to manage expectations. An indicator of red means that the project is definitely in trouble, and will need to compromise on budget, deadline and / or quality. 

Use these techniques to be a more effective communicator of project status. There is a tendency on the part of some project managers to communicate the least amount of information required. Don’t look at communicating status as a chore, but as an opportunity to get a message out on the status of the project, and as a chance to manage expectation in terms of accomplishments, challenges, deadlines, progress, etc.