The Weekly Status Report is a very good tool to track the progress of a project.
The example I give is that of a Software Project Weekly Status Report but the principles can be applied to any project. What you need to know is: the distinct Stages (milestones) of the project. At start of project itself, or once you have complete the scoping work, allocate percentage completion to each Stage or milestone.
For example in one software project where we designed ISDN software into a existing PSTN code baseline, we had decided that SRS completion: 10% Design completed: 25% Coding completed: 40% Unit Testing over: 50% System Testing Phase I(simulated environment): 65% Feature Testing (actual target): 75% Final build over: 85% System testing by V&V team over: 90% All documents and clean-up over: 100%
As you can see we deliberately down-played the earlier stages and allowed the buffer to be available by including finer granularity in the later stages. This was a small trick which really played us huge dividends: we were able to crash the completion time from Dec to Aug of the year (of course with a great amount of focus from the Top Management).
You can do the same for your project too. Down play those stages that are easy to complete and introduce more granularity into the difficult to do and difffcult to track progress Stages.
The actual template then goes like this:
Sl. | Miletone ID | Percentage of this | Overall project
No. | & description | milestone completed | completion
===========================================================
Then u can have the minute details person-wise as to what percentage of their jobs they need to complete to increase the %age completion of the milestone
Milestone ID: AAAA
==================
Sl. | Person Name | %age to be | Due | New | Actual |Remarks
No. | or Initials | completed | date| Date| Date |
============================================================
The due date is original date of completion as per plan; new date is same as due date usually; in case of problems or issues (which are mentioned in Remarks) then new date may be different from the due date. Actual date is the date of actual completion of the milestone.
Once u have completed a milestone and reported the actual completion date, u can remove it from the subsequent weekly reports. If u r using an XL sheet, u could transfer the
completed milestones to a separate worksheet.
Action Plan to address Issues
=============================
Sl.| Milestone | Issue | Mitigation / | Due | Actual
No.| ID | | Contingency | date | Date
==========================================================
For every Issue identified in the "Remarks" column which affects the due date planned originally, there should be a mitigation or contingency plan prepared. This Action should be accomplished by the Due Date. Once u record the completion of this Action on Actual date, u can then remove that Issue from subsequent Weekly Status Reports.
It is a good idea to just report the next 3 milestones or the next month's milestones in the 'current' XL worksheet name it MMMyy eg Apr03 and is what was just described above.
Have 1 worksheet for 'total' original vs actual completed dates ... the completed dates get filled up as & when the milestones are achieved. This will have the format of
Sl.| Milestone ID | %age | cumulative | Due | Actual
No.| description |completed | completed | Date | Date
==========================================================
This is where u record the initial %ages(percentages) that you are assuming as completion of the milestone with respect to the whole project. If u link up the 2 worksheets, then u could even twaek these percentages if required during the course of your project.
Hope this helps and answers your query,
Peace be upon you,
Naseem Mariam, Project Management Coach,
Project Management Made easy as 123
P.S: There is some shift in the tables headings but I hope that the contents remain legibe; I have used the "|" character to differentiate the fields.
