It is essential that status be communicated at an interval suited for the purposed. Status on a six year project might be reported to executive management once a quarter. Status on a human space flight might be reported every five seconds. Most projects are somewhere between. The typical cycle adopted by most companies is to communicate to the project team once a week and to executive management once or twice a month.

Most of those reporting cycles are based on push technology. A project manager collects the information and then sends out status updates. It is also possible to use pull technology. Collaborative tools and web sites make it possible for each member of the team to post updates asychronously to a shared site. Then anyone that needs status can get the most current status by going to that site and pulling the latests reports.

Many of the projects that I work on are hybrids. I use a collaborative portal whereever possible to collect the status from the team. Then I push a summary to executive management.

The level of information desired by the project manager, by the team and by executive management depends upon the culture in the organization. Those preferences should be documented in the communications management plan, and that plan should be integrated into the project plan. I am addressing this issue in advance of those topics, however, because status reports need to begin as soon as the project starts. Defining the communications managmeent plan and bundling the entire project plan take time. Status reports need to start before all of those other planning activities have produced results.

The key topics to cover in a status report should include:

• Key accomplishments since the last report.
• Issues that need management should know about.
• Activities that are expected to finish during this upcoming reporting cycle.
• Simple red (bad), amber (warning) and green (good) (RAG) status on scope, time, cost and quality.