The 10 Best Tips to Make Your Project Reports Stand Out

If you want to create a project report that will impress your audience, here are some important things to keep in mind.

These days, it’s impossible to think of a project without a report. In fact, some projects need you to produce multiple reports during their lifecycle. Your projects and clients might need you to generate various types of reports, but all the reports should be concise and easily understandable.

In this article, you'll learn how to make an effective report for a finished or ongoing project.

1. Clear and Concise Timesheets

Your project reports should have timesheets. It has to be concise, but it should also have all the necessary information so that recipients can easily understand it at a glance.

It’s better to create a weekly timesheet, and if necessary, you can make it bi-weekly or monthly. The timesheets should include resource name, task name, date, day of the week, login time, log-out time, and total working hours.

Instead of manually entering each data in a spreadsheet, you can use any timesheet app like Timely. Here, you can put in your working hours, task names, etc. Then the tool will automatically generate timesheet reports.

2. Detailed Expense Report

A complete expense report is not only essential for the client. It’s also beneficial for your team to keep track of the budget and actual cost during the project lifecycle.

An expense report should include the item or service, its quantity, item value, estimated budget, cost, and balance. If any team member wants to purchase any service or product for a project, ask them to send a similar expense report.

Make sure they buy that item only after your approval and submit the bill to you. Thus, you can add the data to your final expense report and prevent the cost from exceeding the budget.

3. Comprehensive Project Statuses

While you’re making a report on a project, it should explicitly convey the project status. Project status does not mean the current status of work progress. It should also include other data such as the difference between planned and actual schedule, variation between estimated and actual cost, remaining tasks, delayed deadline (if any), possible risks and issues, and so on.

You should create a comprehensive report containing status from all possible angles. Asana’s Universal Reporting feature can help craft project status reports in different scopes and angles.

4. Resource Distribution

As you prepare a report on task allocation, ensure that it helps others check resource availability and delegate tasks when necessary. Provide a breakdown of how many hours each resource will spend on each task in such reports.

It'll help managers and colleagues know which team member is busy and who has got some spare time. You can easily compile data and use it in the report for future planning with resource planning tools like Silverbucket.

Related: The Best Tools and Tips for Delegating Tasks Efficiently

5. Visualize Capacity Utilization

It's likely that you'll include a project resource utilization report. You must separate the billable utilization from the total resource utilization. Hence, it’s vital that you create separate columns for each data.

You may also include the name of the resources and individual utilization, along with a team-wise utilization. Similarly, you can take some time to reward and recognize the success of the best performers in terms of resource utilization.

6. Expected and Actual Risks

Risk assessment is an inseparable part of project management. Therefore, you should accurately visualize the risk assessment data. You might have thought of some risks while planning the project. However, as the project progresses, the risk assessment changes. Mention all perceived and actual risks when creating your project report.

Your risk reporting should consist of an overview of the expected risks, followed by any risks that the project has experienced up to the reporting date. It’s also imperative that you mention any risk profile changes that you or your team have identified during project progression.

7. Project Portfolio Analysis

If you're managing more than one project at any given time and need to come up with a report to analyze your portfolio, you have to be cautious. First of all, go for a dashboard where you’ll list all the project names in bold for easy visualization.

The dashboard should also include a summary of the projects, like milestones, deadline, current progress, budget vs. cost, and resource allocation. You can also use different graphs to visualize the data in one place. Later, you can create separate sections for each project and analyze them individually.

There are some robust project portfolio management tools available in the market. You can choose any of those best tools to create professional and comprehensive reports.

8. Data and Labelling Convention

Your project reports should contain a standard convention for data and labels. If you want to create a report for your organization, follow the organizational convention. If you are creating one for a client, you might want to discuss with them how they would like the information presented in the report.

Also, use short and precise labels in your report so that anyone can understand without any difficulty. Moreover, try to follow the local standards for time and date. If you are working for a US-based organization from the UK, using US date conventions would be ideal.

9. Interactive Charts and Graphs

No matter what type of report you’re about to make, the audience will find interactive charts more useful. Rows and columns full of numerical data can make people uninterested. Instead, create charts and graphs that show additional data when someone hovers the mouse cursor over the graph.

There are various graphs and charts you can use in your reports. Among these, pie charts, line graphs, and bar graphs are the most common. Depending on the data type, you need to choose a chart or diagram for easy visualization.

10. Feedback Section

Every project report would prompt positive or negative feedback. All project reports should include a section where clients or managers can offer their feedback. After going through the reports, the audience can offer their feedback and suggestions in that section.

So, you don’t have to ask for feedback separately. It’ll also show that you’re willing to know your limitations and make improvements. You can later implement the suggestions in your project workflow.

Start Creating a Project Report

A successful presentation depends on how you create the report for the audience. During report preparation, keep the above-mentioned points in mind to make efficient project reports.

You may also want to use a robust data visualization tool to present the reports professionally along with a touch of creativity.

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