UBC Award of Achievement in Project Management with Microsoft Project >

6. Communicate Progress to Clients and Management
Friday, Oct 28, 2011, 9am to 4pm

Clear communication builds credibility with your sponsor and stakeholders. 

Project manager should create a communication plan early in the project life cycle to establish expectations with the client and management. Schedule project review meetings. Split time between focusing on the project and communicating with clients and management.

Project reporting occurs at two levels. First the project managers report progress on their individual projects. Second the project management office should provide management and clients with an unbiased view of the status of each project. Organizations need an early warning system to identify projects that need attention. Many projects slip behind schedule long before anyone being aware of what is happening.

Project managers communicate progress to clients and management to maintain support for the project so your resources will not be stolen for other projects. Communicate project schedule and budget progress against the project baseline. Progress is measured by finishing key deliverables on reported milestones. Progress reports should include issues and risks that threaten project success.

Project managers can spent lots of time preparing project status reports. Project reporting takes considerable amount of time. Microsoft Project offers the advantage of reporting from a single data source. Reporting from project plans improves integrity of project progress reports. Unlock valuable project information by standardize reports with Microsoft Project Server and Web Access. Project reporting requires project managers to keep their plans up to date.

Organizations can lighten a project manager's communication workload by standardizing reports across projects. Standardization improves communication because users don't have to learn the unique reporting style of each project manager.

The last session discusses methods and tools for reporting project progress to clients and management. Participants will learn to:

1. Create a communications plan for your project.
2. Create consistent reporting standards
3. Understand reporting requirements
4. Design efficient reporting systems.
5. Build custom reports with tables and views.
6. Automate standard project reports across projects.
7. Understand the power of macro's and Visual basic for applications
8. Report progress to management
9. Conduct a post-project audit

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Communicate Progress to Clients and Management
Agenda for Friday, Oct 28, 2011, 9am - 4pm

The following topics will be covered in this course.

	Topic	Report Progress to Clients and Management
9am	Communicate to succeed in project management	Report progress for all projects Drill down to find detail. Keeping project on track requires action Communicating a key Project managers' responsibility Difficulties with honesty Difficulties with managing the news.
	Build communications plan	Identify stakeholders. Identify reports by project phase.
930am	Defining reporting requirements.	Decide reporting process.  Critical project metrics to report Earned value reports Identify reports to produce. Reporting top ten risks Getting timely feedback
10am	Coffee
10:15am	Design reporting architecture	Regular project review meetings Distributing information via email Benefits of distributing information from repositories. Designing a project web site
11am	Produce project reports with views, tables and filters.	Customizing Microsoft Project reports Flagging tasks that need attention Defining columns with tables Selecting tasks with filters. Building custom views. Adding reports to menus
12noon	Lunch break
1pm	Simplify reporting with Microsoft Project Web Access	Save projects in a central repository Distribute project reports with Internet Compare Web Access and Project Server Specify views for Project Center Specify views for Resource center. Pasting project views to Word
230pm	Coffee
245pm	Conduct project reviews	Steering committee agendas Communicate action requests in writing Escalating issues Post project audits
4pm	Finish

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email Brian Mullen with your questions

Updated: July 6, 2011.