Podcast

Episode: 163 |
Will Bachman:
Reporting Template:
Episode
163

HOW TO THRIVE AS AN
INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONAL

Will Bachman

Reporting Template

Show Notes

Complex projects need something more sophisticated.

But for simple projects, this simple set of three questions forms the basis for a robust weekly or monthly update:

1. Last month, what did we promise to do over the coming month?

2. What did we ACTUALLY get done over the past month?

3. What are we going to do over the next month?

This short episode elaborates.

One weekly email with bonus materials and summaries of each new episode:

Will Bachman 00:02
If you are responsible for providing regular progress reviews on a project, there’s one robust approach that uses just three questions. Hey, welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional. I’m your host Will Bachman. For complex projects, you may need a more complicated reporting mechanism to address budget and milestones hit and critical path, timing and status of stakeholder buy, buy in, etc. But for a lot of projects, the following simple template works great. This works for any periodicity of reporting, whether it’s daily or weekly, or monthly, or quarterly or something else. And for purposes of discussion, let’s say we’re reporting monthly, okay, so that you just need three columns. The first column is last month, what did we say we were going to do over the course of the coming month. The second column is what did we actually do over the past month. And the third column is, what are we going to do over the coming month? The magic in the design of this framework, of course, is that enforces accountability. When you bring in your template from this month, you include the report from last month and maybe prior months as well. The people we are reporting to aren’t that interested in what we got done. And that’s just kind of details and they they trust We’ll figure that part out. What they want to know is, are we failing to do what we promised to do? So if you know where this concept came up came from, I didn’t make it up. I someone told it to me, but I’ve lost in the mists of time. I want to give someone credit for it. So let me know and I’ll add it to the show notes. If you have a progress report template that you like, I’d love to see a sample, you can email it to me at unleashed@umbrex.com. Let me know if I can share it with with listeners. And if you want to record a question for me to answer on a future episode, or get bonus features, I send out a weekly Unleashed email that includes a summary of each episode, you can go and sign up at ask unleashed.com Unleashed is a production of Umbrex with the world’s first global community connecting top tier independent management consultants with one another can visit umbrex@umbrex.com that’s UMBRX Thanks for listening.

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