Driving a Quick-Glance Status Report

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Communications Management   Risk Management   Schedule Management   Scheduling   Scope Management  

When you’re driving a car, the dashboard provides vital information--but it only takes a quick glance down to be able to see the critical information. If the dashboard were designed to take a long time to read or decipher, then it would not be very useful to the driver; instead, it would probably be the cause of accidents.

Many project status reports are packed full of dense information like earned value statistics, risk analysis, scope information and so on. While all of this information is helpful to the project manager and beneficial to the project, it can also be distracting at times. Sometimes, the project manager just needs a simple dashboard that he can glance at. This dashboard should contain relevant and timely information presented in an easy-to-view format.

This article contains some ideas for creating a quick-glance status report (which could be titled the “QGSR”, or perhaps “Project Dashboard” would have a better ring to it). Of course, different projects have different needs and even different phases of projects might call for different information to be presented on the report. The project manager should tailor the report to the project while keeping it quickly understandable.

Speedometer
The speedometer in the car tells the driver the instantaneous velocity of the car. This is a key indicator to the driver; it can …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.