This is the "meat" of your metaphorical "status report sandwich." You've laid the groundwork. At this point, everyone knows who you are and what project your going to be presenting.

Now What?

No need to panic, we'll be taking a look at the body of your presentation in depth.

Report on What We've Done Have you ever heard the phrase you get an A for effort? Strike it from your memory! The world of work is a very different place than an elementary school's soccer team. In the real world, no one cares about effort, they care about results. One common method to track results is to write down a set of realistic goals and dates for achieving them. We call these collections of goals and dates milestones. Setting milestones publicly at the start of a project can be an excellent way to track the success of a project and is far more objective than having to resort to falling back to speaking about "effort". While the exact milestones that should be tracked for your project will vary, here are some of the most obvious: Testing completion dates

Planning completion dates

Checkpoints at which major decisions are made

Levels of quality and a date at which they are achieved You'll almost certainly want to mention milestones that have been hit and those that have been missed (along with an explanation as to why they were missed). Whether your goals involve dollar savings, widgets produced, or a change in quality levels, you should report on how you are tracking against these goals. It's good to be able to say that we've finished about half of the work required for the project. It's much better to say that we've completed all necessary planning, have created the first prototypes and are now ready to enter full production within a week of the originally estimated date. Many project managers like to use burn down charts to demonstrate progress. They're simply line graphs that show how many units of work you have outstanding on the current project. The utility of this device will depend greatly upon the management strategy that you use for your project. An interesting point to note is that your attention should not be spread evenly over your past accomplishments. Your description of accomplishments should be more heavily weighted toward the most recent events. Your change in progress since the last time you've provided a status report is likely the part your audience cares most about. By the end of the project, happenings early in the project will be (and should be) a distant memory.

Wait, There's More? A common rookie mistake is to think that status is all about the past. You also have to look to the future. Just as you looked at the past to describe progress, you can also use data to predict the status of the project in the future. If you don't, nasty surprises could be in store. Have you seen those old videos that were made before the airplane was invented? People would attach large wooden wings to their arms and jump out of a window, hoping that they would somehow be able to fly like birds. Let's pretend, for a moment, that you're one of those folks. You've just jumped out of a 20th-floor window and are providing a status report on your flying efforts so far. It would probably sound something like this: Project "learn to fly" is proceeding well. Supplies were purchased at estimated cost, construction required 10 hours of work (as expected). Flight is in progress and results will be reported at the next meeting." Everything seems great! But things are probably going to get much worse in the near future (when you hit the ground). One of your duties in a status report is to alert the audience about things that will happen. Sometimes, the audience will be able to help - perhaps they'll be able to drag a giant mattress under you to break your fall. Other times, you'll be able to make predictions to demonstrate that you understand where the project is heading and prove that your team is ready to deal with what might happen in the future. Problems that represent future trouble in the future are categorized into two basic categories. Issues An issue is an existing problem, or something that is guaranteed to be a future problem. If your project is to make a sandwich, and you don't have any bread, you have an issue. You know for a fact that you'll have to some money to buy bread in the future. Bread won't simply appear in your cabinet if you look again later. There is no bread, and you'll have to do something about about that if you're going to make a sandwich. An issue can be classified in only one way: severity. All issues will have an effect upon your project, it's just a matter of understanding how much of an effect each issue will cause. It goes without saying that more time should be spent discussing issues with high severity than those with a lesser severity. Risks Risks are potential problems. If your project is to make a sandwich, and you don't know if you have any bread, you have a risk - not an issue. You might have ten loaves of bread in the cupboard, but you might have none. When you go around your kitchen and look for bread, one of two things might happen. Either you'll find some bread (and the risk will go away), or you'll find out you have no bread (and the risk, now certain, will become an issue). Tracking risks before they become issues is critical. The earlier you can find a potential issue, the more time you and your managers will have to deal with the situation. A risk can be classified in two categories: severity and likelihood. Without a doubt, you will want to focus on discussing risks with relatively high potential for severity and high risk of occurrence. You'll want to spend a lot less (or perhaps no) time discussing very unlikely risks that probably won't occur. Yes, it's possible that progress writing a cookbook will be delayed if you are kidnapped by Martians, but I'm almost certain that a more worrisome risk would be that some of the recipes you've created will not be enjoyed by your test subjects. A risk can be dealt with in a few ways. Being able to describe your approach to dealing with a risk is crucial to explaining its effect on your project: Accept the Risk Sometimes bad things happen, and there's nothing you can do about it. This is usually done if the severity of a problem is low and the likelihood is low and the cost to prevent it would be high. For instance, it's possible that a local coffee shop may have a risk that the price of electricity may go up next month. As electricity is a relatively small cost of the shop's overall budget, and it's difficult to stockpile energy, the shop owner would just accept the risk of energy price fluctuations.

Avoid the Risk Sometimes you'll be able to reduce the chance that a risk will occur. This is usually done if it would be relatively cheap to prevent the risk, compared to the cost of the risk occurring. A coffee shop owner may have found some possibly-spoiled mayonnaise. It could be served to customers, but there is a risk that it may cause customers to become sick. The manager can avoid the risk by throwing out the questionable mayonnaise.

Mitigate the Risk Sometimes you can reduce the severity of a risk. Suppose that a coffee shop is famous for the quality of its coffee. Unfortunately, excellent coffee beans are very expensive. There is a risk that if the owners choose to use less expensive coffee beans, customers may become upset and make fewer purchases. The owners could reduce the risk of upsetting customers by blending some of their high quality beans with a smaller amount of lower quality beans. Doing so would reduce the severity of risk, because the new version of the coffee wouldn't be quite as bad coffee made entirely of inferior beans.

Transfer the Risk Transferring a risk can be difficult to accomplish, but can be a very powerful tool for a project leader. It requires that someone else take responsibility for the risk, should it occur. Let's take another look at our coffee shop. There is a risk that some criminals will break in when the shop is closed and steal all of the equipment. Rather than worrying about this risk, the owners can buy some insurance. That way, if anything happens, the insurance company (and not the shop) will be on the hook for replacing whatever is stolen. In an office setting, it's often difficult to buy an insurance policy, but you may be able to get people on record to "guarantee" that they'll take care of certain problems, if they occur. For instance, a department manager may guarantee that his staff will be made available to you if his components prove faulty. Fun fact: many managers hire outside consultants, not because they need the consultants' expertise, but because it allows them to transfer risk to someone else. Ever hear the expressions No one was ever fired for choosing IBM? This is why IBM was chosen so much.

Watch Your Language! A status report is not a poetry performance. It is a presentation of information that is both useful and actionable. As a rule, you should avoid colorful adverbs and adjectives like the plague. Focus on quantifiable measures instead. We spent $30,000 studying the issue, but are unable to find the cause leaves a lot less to the imagination than We worked as quickly as we could but despite our valiantly planned efforts, we were unable to solve the troubling issue. A few words to avoid: Quickly

Cheaply

Safely

Rapidly

Efficiently Notice a common pattern? If a word ends in "ly" you should not be using it. Remember, "ly" words are imprecise, and precision is a goal for the status report. Try to come up with a sentence using an "ly" word and a number associated with that "ly" word. It's almost impossible! Here are some examples of words to that should be sprinkled all over your presentation: Financial units: dollars, euros, pounds

Changes: percent complete, percent remaining

Time units: days, hours, weeks

Quantity measures: ounces, acres, feet

Ratios: quarters, thirds, tenths

Dates: January 17th, October 10th, February 2nd Your status should be described as objectively as possible, so if you're using units of measures, you're probably on the right track.

Avoid Technospeak and Acronyms As the person delivering the status report, you may feel the need to demonstrate that you know more about the work being performed than anyone else in the room. While this type of thinking is understandable, it should be avoided at all costs. You should focus on making your report understandable. Anyone can take a simple idea and make it sound complex, but a truly great speaker can take a complex idea and boil it down to its simplest parts. That means not utilizing technobabble, uncommon acronyms or overly technical language. If someone in the audience can't follow what you're saying, the fault is yours - not theirs.

Sugarcoating Is for Cereal Only Above all, you report must be an honest assessment of your project. You must be honest about problems and weaknesses. One of the great things about providing an honest assessment of problems is that (especially if there is a written record), you'll have a get-out-of-jail card. Early warnings are a way of transferring risks from you to your managers. As an added bonus, if you and your team are able to solve problems presented in earlier status reports, you can earn congratulations and goodwill for your problem-solving abilities. Fixing a problem that no managers had ever heard about will result in considerably less praise from above.

Don't Go into the Weeds The higher your audience is in the management chain, the less interested they'll be in the minute details of your project. Attention is finite, and the higher up in the management hierarchy, the more widely a manager's attention is spread. Imagine the following situation at the White house: A gardener might report to the gardening supervisor that there are areas containing weeds in front of the side door, the vegetable garden and the driveway.

The gardening supervisor might report to the operations manager that his team has identified a few locations with weeds.

The operations manager might report to his manager that the grounds staff is caring for the grounds, as usual.

What do you think the President is going to want to know about the weed condition at the White House? Nothing. The president has better things to do than to worry about the weeds.

Highlight Project Constraints Project managers typically focus on the triple constraint: Cost - how much the end product will cost

Scope - the definition of what is being created (as well as its level of quality!)

Time - how long the project will take Typically when one or two of the constraints are not allowed to change, the third will fluctuate throughout the project. One way to add real value to your status report is to point out possible trade-offs between the constraints. As an example, let's say that you're a chef at a restaurant. The restaurant owner demands that you cook 10 filet mignon dinners in one hour for a total cost of $50. You've just been given an impossible task! Not only that, but all three parts of the triple constraint are fixed (almost always a sign of a doomed project). You have two options. You can try your best to accomplish the task, knowing that you will almost certainly fail. Many novice project leads will do this, in an attempt to "tow the company line" and demonstrate the fact that they are willing to do whatever work is assigned to the best of their ability. Unfortunately, while such actions may appease upper managers at the start of a project, managers tend to become unhappy when their projects inevitably fail later on. You can point out the impossibility of the task and help managers figure out trade-offs that are the least unpalatable. In the case of our cook, he can think of alternative meals which are less costly to produce. Maybe ten filet mignon dishes can't be cooked for $50, but ten pasta dishes certainly could. Even if you can't convince management of a specific trade-off, just reminding them that trade-offs exist can help them to start thinking about other trade-offs that could be made.

Using RAG Charts Many managers are familiar with "RAG" charts (RAG stands for the three colors that are used: red, amber and green). It's a simple system that explains the status of a project by color. The exact rating system is highly dependent upon the organization, but is generally straight forward. Here are the most commonly rated aspects of projects: Cost

Schedule

Scope

Quality

Resource availability Each item above is typically evaluated by standardized criteria and a colored dot is displayed next to each one. If the characteristic is at or above desired levels, a green dot is displayed.

If there are some problems or potential problems, but the result isn't terrible, an amber dot is displayed.

If there are significant problems or potential problems, a red dot is displayed. If you use this system, please make sure that your status slides are understandable, even when printed in black and white. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people take beautiful handouts and print them on black and white printers. I've also run into a number of color blind managers in recent years. Utilizing a standardized evaluation such as "On Target", "Low Risk" and "High Risk", each printed in the appropriate color is preferable to simply using colored dots.

Improving the RAG Chart Although RAG Charts can be used to display the current project outlook, they have one terrible downfall. They act only as a snapshot in time. It is much more useful to display trends in your reports. Doing so will help demonstrate your successes and highlight the importance of your concerns. One effective means to do this is to create a line graph with "date" on the horizontal axis and "level of concern" on the vertical. Though not standard, these charts will be simple for your audience to understand.