12.3. Documenting Progress

What Makes a Good Progress Report?

As mentioned in the previous chapter, what’s most effective in a progress report is providing clear information that is timely, relevant and solution-focused. You are not expected to provide detailed information about every single detail. This is a higher-level report that provides the most relevant facts. A project summary, on the other hand, would be a more detailed article that goes into a little more depth about the process of the project. A progress report is like a snapshot, while a summary is like a video.

If you are supporting a team that is working on a very large project, with many folks providing progress reports, it would be helpful to everyone involved if you were to create and share a template that they could use to provide their progress report. Consider this document another to add to your Document Toolkit. You can create the template to have all the relevant sections that your company expects; then, the team members can simply fill it in as appropriate.

Progress Report Components

As outlined in the previous section, a progress report could take the form of a memo, a letter, or a formal report (all documents that you have lots of practice creating). The main portions that you would need to include are the date the report is being made, the project being reported on, the name of the person creating the report, which components are being reported on, and how close they are to completion. It is important that progress reports use clear communication regarding the status of the project tasks.