The Lost Art of Project Status Reporting

by Thomas Ghantt

With the growing emphasis on project management skills across most industries, the need for effectively communicating a project’s status is just as important as the skills of executing the project itself. Sadly, however, most training courses and books fail to address this subject entirely or brush over it quickly. It is often implied that pulling out the important details of your project should be easy and packaging it for your team, senior sponsors or clients will naturally occur. The reality is many status reports fail to convey the status and needs of a project. Status meetings often lack the focus needed to effective communicate the project’s status and direct future actions. The result of this ineffective communication contributes to the number of project failures. During project post mortems, we often uncover warning signs that were never presented or were buried in a sea of information. To the project team’s credit, they often knew of the problems, but their inability to communicate it through the status reporting process doomed them with every report. This book provides a simple and effective method to create and communicate project status. This is the method that I personally follow and introduce to people I mentor. When I first started managing projects I struggled to communicate project status correctly and often became frustrated at how status meetings were conducted. So I started researching the experts to see what they recommended. Some provided high-level or obvious tips and many appeared as if they never actually reported status before. I did learn one thing however. Reporting status correctly is not difficult provided you have the right framework. That is what you will learn here.

126 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 25, 2012

Reviews

[Petrov · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not much value

Easy and short but for me this book lacks ideas to think of and get away with to put in my own practice.

[Sarah Vander Plaats · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a useful little book. Good reminders about how to conduct meetings.