What is a progress report?

"progress," which means 'forward or onward movement towards a destination'. Since most
projects usually have a final target destination, the journey getting there has to be described in
some way to apprise other people of the status.

A progress report is a type of business writing designed to update someone on

various tasks of someone else. It's written for managers, project stakeholders, leadership,
or company-wide updates. It doesn't merely show progress or successes but also drawbacks,
obstacles, and recommendations for improvement.

Reporting project progress is a formal, documented, and structured way of keeping people in
the know. There are many types of progress reports out there, email wrap ups, memos, PDFs,
business letters, project summaries, Google docs, and the list goes on.

Why are progress reports important for business?

If your team members aren't big on report writing, this section of the guide will help you build
a formal case to introduce progress reporting to your workflow— time to get away from lost
email chains or messy PDFs.

Whether you're a manager looking for ways to get a better overview of your team, or you're a
team player looking to increase business efficiency— the below is why creating a working
progress report is so essential for any business.
1. Align your team

Staying in sync as a busy team with lots of subtasks can be painfully difficult sometimes.
Especially with a distributed workforce, important information gets lost in a mass of slack
messages, email chains, and 1-1 catch-ups. It can get really overwhelming when juggling
holidays, sick leaves, and meetings with external stakeholders.

Project progress reports effectively summarize your teams' achievements, milestones covered,
and challenges encountered in one place. Use a progress report as a one-stop-shop for any
team member that needs an update on a particular project or initiative. Progress reports
eliminate the need for managers and team members to repeat themselves, allowing everyone to
catch up quickly on their schedule.

2. Showcase wins

Progress reports are a fantastic tool for managers and leadership to credit and acknowledge an
individual's efforts and progress towards company goals. When annual or bi-annual reviews
come around, these progress reports can serve as the backbone for someone's performance
record and enable a fair assessment of work ethic based on factual progress rather than
feelings, bias, or solely major projects.

At the same time, reporting progress on a project gives employees an opportunity to celebrate
their wins and have a notch on their belts when promotions are in consideration.

3. Give stakeholders updates on projects

An easy win, and an obvious point but certainly not one to be overlooked. The primary aim
of writing progress reports is to give stakeholders the updates they need and
bring them up to speed on the status of everything. The stakeholders can be anyone in
the business or externally. They just need to be known by the reporter when writing the report,
so the reporter can include the necessary information they know a particular person will
require.
4. Document work for future reference

If a business is ever looking to repeat a project or strategy, your progress reports are essential
for learning and improving processes. These reports allow a company to optimize a strategy or
process based on learnings. Writing a progress report on projects regularly is an excellent way
of documenting workflow and in the future, the workforce will have a solid and practical
reference point to draw ideas, motivation, and innovation from.

5. Identify common roadblocks

While a progress report primarily highlights the positive advancements in the project, it's also
important to highlight the bad - roadblocks. These can come in many forms; maybe it's
technology, maybe it's a vendor, maybe it's team capabilities or a particular team member.
Managers should collate progress reports and identify common roadblocks that need
addressing. In doing so, they'll work towards making the business an operationally smoother
workplace.

Progress reports step-by-step

The following is a step-by-step guide to creating useful progress reports. Learning how to write
a progress report is a process, and the more you write, the better you become at organizing
your details into clean, easy-to-understand sections.

Follow this 8 step format for progress report writing to ensure you include all the important
details:

1. Place identifying details at the top

The first step to creating a killer progress report document is to title your report by placing the
identifying details at the top of the page. Each report must be clearly distinguished from all the
others for easy documentation. Untitled reports seem rushed with little attention to some of
the most important details.

These details should be written in clear, bold fonts of varying sizes. They include:

- Title of the report

- Date of submission
- Department/division
- Reference number
- Handling/supervising officer

2. Project details

Following the identifying details of the report are the details of the project itself. It doesn't
matter how many progress reports are submitted in a period of time; the details of the project
must be included in each one. The higher-ups probably have a long list of reports being
submitted by various departments, so they'd always require a refresher of what each team is
working on.

After the title, you should write one or two sentences generally describing the project. After
this, you can list out the details of the project. The best practice in a working progress report
would be to put the information in a tabular form. These include:

- The project name/title

- Project ID
- Starting date
- Expected date of completion
- Current status
- Team members involved
- Project manager
- Supervising officers
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3. Summary of the report

This should be a short paragraph between 100 and 150 words, briefly describing the project
details and current status of the project. It gives an overview of everything that's currently
going with the project, and it's written for the sole purpose of providing a quick glance-over
within the report. Do not include any negative details or complaints here - keep it short and
simple.

4. Core activities

Following the summary is an in-depth description of all core activities going on within the
scope of the project, you have to describe the sub-tasks and how the teams are getting on with
their roles. Tabulation is also a great way to represent this information.The table labels include
and are not limited to title of the subtask/activity, small description, relevant dates (start and
expected completion), current status, team member assigned, and relevant file links. Progress
report comments from the supervising officer can also be included here. The overall section is
already a detailed input, so keep all secondary details brief and straight-to-the-point.

5. Current quantifiable results

This is an optional table, especially for projects that are still beginning and are yet to yield
reports. When writing progress reports for ongoing projects, this section can be written as a list
of or a three-column table containing the name of the task holder, subtask name, and brief
details of the result achieved. Make sure the results are mentally quantifiable and reasonable. If
there's nothing to write, leave this section undone and don't bother with fluffy or unnecessary
information. Doing this will essentially reduce the transparency of your report.
6. Challenges encountered

Most times, teams would encounter problems and obstacles with implementing the overall
project plan. When creating progress reports, it's important to make a section where you
outline the challenges encountered in a list, and highlight the subtask(s) where the problem
actually occurred. Describe how this has affected the completion of the project or the overall
results as a whole.Hot tip: Avoid using strong negative language here. You can describe in
detail but keep the tone professional.

7. Recommendations and suggestions

If you need to consult members of your team for their input in this section, great idea! Here,
you're required to recommend improvements that could possibly fix the problems outlined
above or improve the situation. This is best written as a list. You can expand briefly on any
point that needs further details. Ensure to mention how your suggestions directly affect the
results.

8. Concluding paragraph and signatures

In progress report writing, the conclusion is simply a re-hash of everything discussed in the
report. The trick is to compress all the information into one to two sentences, or a maximum of
three. Let it quickly capture the main point of that report, how it intertwines with the previous
report and your expectation for the next report.

Also, leave a couple of lines for your signature as the project manager and another for the
supervising stakeholder.