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In addition to assigning tasks and hosting meetings, project managers are often tasked with producing various project reports. These high-level overviews and summaries of critical data are delivered to project stakeholders and leadership to communicate different aspects of project progress. There are many types of project reports that track details and data for everything from project status and health, to risk and time tracking. Read more: Why Is Executive Involvement in Projects so Important?
Project reports offer a high-level overview of the goings-on in a project in a simple and easy-to-digest format. There are many project management tools that offer reporting options, though many project reports are delivered in a written or presentation format.
Project reports simply keep project stakeholders up-to-date on project status. They also help project team members track and address issues, including what is causing them and how to resolve them. Most importantly, project reporting helps trigger the planning of next steps by providing a full-circle view of where things are at a given time. Read more: What is Project Management? Definition, Types & Examples
Project status report: The project status report is a very common and important report that gives a general update on how a project is moving along towards its goals. This report hits on general updates, emerging issues, and milestones. Time tracking report: A project time tracking report pulls data from tracked time or time manually entered via desktop or an app interface for team members’ time spent working on a project. This type of report gives you immediate and actionable insight into where time is being spent at every stage of a project, so you can make adjustments on capacity and make improvements. Many reports provide visuals with instant information and metrics to help your organization stay on top of budgets and cost. Project dashboard report: The project dashboard report is a great visual summary for anyone requesting an overall project update. This report often lists visual charts showing task group percent complete, a project health indicator, risk analysis, and links to important project file locations and even other project reports. Some project dashboard software tools allow you to share the dashboard in email and on screen during status meetings. The project dashboard report can be customizable and flexible to include exactly what you want to share in an easy way. Project deliverables report: The project deliverables report is a nice summary of all project deliverables in order of priority. This report includes the health of the deliverable, the percent complete, and the start and end date of each deliverable. The list of deliverables can be displayed in a scrolling grid list view, Gantt view, or calendar view.
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