Writing successful reports
Many people are interested in how your project is progressing, and during your project’s lifetime you will need to report on project outcomes to a wide range of stakeholders.
One of the main reports you need to write is to the ULF team. As well as keeping them aware of the success of projects, such reporting also enables the ULF team to offer support to achieve project outcomes.
Learning and the bargaining agenda
- An increasing number of unions and employers include learning and skills as part of the bargaining agenda. In time, this will be a factor in shifting learning and skills into mainstream bargaining and eventually into legislation.
- The ULF supports unions to make learning agreements and Skills Pledges, and asks project managers to report routinely on their activity in this area. Encouraging an employer to sign a Skills Pledge is a great opportunity for unions to gain greater commitment to learning, and it can be an important first step in them signing a learning agreement.
When writing project progress reports for other stakeholders, put yourself in their shoes: what information will be useful to them? The format of the report will need to be consistent so that people can easily understand what has changed over time.
Successful reports
- Consistently presented with clear headings – this allows people to see how things have changed over time
- Accurate
- On time
- Objective
- Concise
- Avoid filler words like basically, actually, etc
Think about producing a project dashboard. This is a one-page document that includes key statistics and project headlines. Diagrams and traffic light systems can have more impact than text and are easier to understand. If you’re using MS Project or MS Excel, you can buy software to collate the information using your records, or you can build the dashboard yourself using MS Word or PowerPoint.
