It can be hard to find the best practices about status reporting as there are a lot of ways weekly status reporting can be done.
But all those different templates and forms for status reporting have a similar core principle, which is to show what is the current status of our work.
Status reports should be written about once a week, so the challenge is to make it as fast as possible as otherwise status reports would take a lot of time.
In Team Compass’ status reports the time spent on status reporting is about 5 minutes a week.
Parts of Status Reports
Usually, status reporting at work is implemented by management to understand what everyone is doing. But it can also be used to track your own progress.
‘Weekly status reporting consists of 3 different questions or categories:
- Plans. What are you planning? (Future)
- Progress. What have you done? (Past)
- Problems. What problems are you facing? (Present)
And this is actually it. The simplest status reporting system is called PPP – Plans, Progress, Problems.
Answering those questions every week gives a complete overview of everything that you or your team is doing.
Effective Status Reporting
For status reporting to be effective and not time consuming, you have to remember some things:
- Status reporting is not for seeing who has done a larger amount of tasks. It’s to give a clear overview of ongoing work and plans.
Items in a status report should be 1 – 2 sentences but they should give a good summary of plans or things done.
- Status reporting is not for writing lengthy and detailed reports about every moment of the day. It’s about showing what are the important big things employee does every week.
A good status report has 5 – 7 plans per week
- Status reporting is not for getting reports anytime you want. It’s for getting them regularly on a specific deadline
Don’t demand a random update anytime you feel like it. Say that everyone has to submit them by 3PM Friday.
Highlighting Problems in your status reports let’s both you and your manager focus on them.
Weekdone offers easy weekly status reporting. You can see an example of a weekly report template here.