Yes it is time for my annual rant on status reports. I actually rant on these daily but only write about it once a year!

First off I do believe status reports are important to a project and its stakeholders. My concern is that they are always misused. Project status reports should be about: where the project is, where it is going, what we need to worry about, & is it on schedule and budget.

• My # 1 problem with status reports is the status itself. Many companies use stop light status but invariably don't define what they mean.
• The other problem with stop light status is that we want to make up colors to avoid being red or yellow. Grellow, really.
• My next big problem with status reports is that we want to include too much information. Do we really need to list all of the milestones?
• We also want to list every accomplishment for the previous week. Is this useful? Probably not.
• Another concern is that stakeholders want different views of the same data so we end up with a weekly, monthly, and executive reports. Yuck!
• Many PMOs have templates for status reports that include risks and issues. Don't we have logs for those?
• Another issue is that all too often PMs copy the status report from week to week and ony change a few items to save time.
• Which leads me to - Status reports should never take more than 30 minutes to write. We have projects to run, right?

Next week I will tweet about how to write effective status reports in 30 minutes or less