Project Reports: 9 Types And How to Create One

9 min read

A pivotal tool within the crucial discipline of project management is the project management report, a window into a project’s health and progress. 

With many such reports available, it’s important to define which ones to utilize during different project management stages. 

In this article, we dive into project management reports to explore their significance and role in propelling projects forward. 

We will navigate through 9 necessary report groups, from foundational project status reports to advanced strategic alignment reports. 

Let’s start by exploring the fundamentals of project management reports.

What are project reports?

Project reports are tools that help project managers, business analysts, stakeholders, and team members understand how well a project is advancing and whether it’s on track to meet its goals.

At their core, they gather data from various sources within a project and provide analysis in a structured format. 

These reports offering a snapshot of the project’s health by highlighting key indicators such as milestones achieved, tasks completed, budget utilization, and potential risks. 

Understanding project reports is essential before delving into their fundamental elements.

What are the key elements of project management reports?

Project management reports are a synthesis of data, analysis, and communication. 

Here are the essential components typically found in project reports:

Elements of the project report	Description
Project overview	Briefly introduces goals, scope, and objectives.
Status updates	Details of current progress and milestones.
Timeline and schedule	Highlights project phases and Gantt charts.
Resource allocation	Explains personnel, budget, and equipment usage.
Budget and costs	Covers financial data and expenditures.
Risk assessment	Identifies potential risks and strategies.
Performance metrics	Measures progress with KPIs and milestones.
Issues and solutions	Addresses challenges and provides solutions.
Communication summary	Covers team interaction and scope changes.
Future plans	Outlines upcoming tasks and milestones.
Executive summary	Provides a concise overview for management.
Visual aids	Enhance understanding with graphs and charts.

Having explored the key elements of project management reports, let’s now focus on the various types.

What types of project reports exist?

Project reports come in diverse formats, each tailored to fulfill distinct information needs. 

Below are the various project management report types, where we will explore how they illuminate different facets of project progress and performance.

Let’s start with project status reports.

What are status reports?

Among the project management reports, status reports are the bedrock of project oversight. 

These offer a real-time snapshot of a project’s advancement, achieved milestones, ongoing tasks, and potential roadblocks. Also, these reports help in project forecasting.

Status reports are a vital communication tool for keeping stakeholders informed and aligned.

Several main formats emerge within status reports:

• Progress reports: Comprehensive view of completed and ongoing tasks, highlighting achievements, deviations, and upcoming tasks.
• Milestone reports: Detail pivotal milestones, completion, delays, and overall project impact.
• Task status reports: Specify tasks, including status, assignees, dates, and challenges.
• Task dependency reports: Highlight task interdependencies, aiding sequence, and bottleneck management. These can be depicted through a Gantt chart.
• Activity reports: Breakdown of day-to-day actions, tracking micro-level progress and alignment with project goals.
• Work completed reports: Retrospective view of time-framed accomplishments, revealing trends and improvement areas.

Next, let’s explore another crucial aspect of project management: budget reports.

What are budget reports?

Budget reports provide a comprehensive overview of a project’s financial health, offering insights into budget allocation, expenditures, and potential discrepancies. 

Budget reports ensure that projects stay on track financially and that resources are optimally utilized.

There are several formats within the domain of budget reports:

• Budget allocation reports: Detail initial budget distribution across project elements.
• Cost analysis reports: Show a breakdown of actual expenses compared to budget.
• Expense tracking reports: Real-time view of ongoing expenditures.
• Variance reports: Highlight budget deviations and identify causes.
• ROI reports: Analyze project’s financial returns, meeting objectives.

Pro tip: We’ve created a project budget template to streamline your work.

Moving from financial insights provided by budget reports, we now shift our focus to the proactive identification offered by risk management reports.

What are risk management reports?

Risk management reports emerge as a vital tool to identify, assess, and mitigate potential challenges that could impact project success. 

These reports provide a comprehensive view of project risks, enabling proactive measures to steer the project toward its objectives.

Within the domain of risk management reports, several main formats are noteworthy:

• Risk identification reports: Catalog potential risks, impact, and likelihood.
• Risk assessment reports: Evaluate risk severity and prioritize based on impact.
• Risk mitigation reports: Outline strategies, action plans, and prevention.
• Risk tracking reports: Monitor mitigation progress and risk changes.
• Issue resolution reports: Address project issues, nature, impact, and resolution.

Pro tip: We prepared a variety of risk management document templates for project managers: risk assessment, risk management plan, and risk register templates. Utilize these to enhance your project’s risk management processes.

From assessing potential pitfalls in risk management reports, we’ll now explore the efficient utilization of resources through resource allocation reports.

What are resource allocation reports?

Resource allocation reports serve as compasses guiding personnel, time, and assets distribution to maximize productivity and minimize waste. 

They provide insights into how resources are utilized and help optimize allocation for optimal project outcomes.

Several main formats come to the forefront within resource allocation reports:

• Resource utilization reports: Provide a snapshot of resource usage, identifying efficiency adjustments and opportunities to level resources.
• Workload distribution reports: Balance tasks among hybrid and remote teams, preventing burnout.
• Resource forecasting reports: Predict future resource needs and prevent disruptions.
• Resource allocation analysis reports: Align resource distribution with project goals.
• Capacity planning reports: Forecast long-term resource availability and timeline realism.

Pro tip: You can use our resource allocation plan template to ease your resource management.

Having covered efficient resource allocation, we now pivot to the communication and engagement aspects in stakeholder reports.

What are stakeholder reports?

Stakeholder reports serve as bridges that connect project teams with those invested in the project’s success. 

These reports provide insights tailored to stakeholders’ needs to foster understanding, alignment, and collaboration.

Several main formats of stakeholder reports are:

• Executive summary reports: High-level overview for senior management.
• Progress snapshot reports: Real-time project status snapshot in the form of a dashboard.
• Performance highlights reports: Showcase KPIs and achievements.
• Major milestone reports: Chronicle significant milestones.
• Project health reports: Assess overall project condition.
• Investor reports: Focus on financial health and alignment.
• Stakeholder engagement reports: Demonstrate stakeholder involvement.

Pro Tip: We have prepared over 200 Power BI reports in PPM Express. Utilize them to enhance your workflow efficiency.

From stakeholder engagement, we now turn to maintaining standards and performance through quality assurance reports.

What are quality assurance reports?

Quality assurance reports guide projects toward excellence by evaluating processes, deliverables, and outcomes. 

These reports provide insights into the project’s adherence to established quality standards and facilitate continuous improvement.

Several formats within the domain of quality assurance reports are:

• Quality control reports: Assess deliverable quality against standards.
• Process evaluation reports: Examine workflow efficiency and consistency.
• Audit reports: Review for compliance and accountability.
• Performance evaluation reports: Track progress against KPIs and OKRs.
• Lessons learned reports: Capture insights and improvements.

Next, we will explore the adaptive change management process through reports.

What are change management reports?

Change management reports are navigational tools for addressing shifts, modifications, and adaptations within a project’s scope, requirements, or objectives. 

This is done by providing insights into managing, communicating, and integrating changes to ensure project success.

Within change management reports, several main formats emerge:

• Change impact reports: Outline consequences on scope, timeline, and resources.
• Change request reports: Document change requests and rationale.
• Change communication reports: Ensure transparent communication.
• Change implementation reports: Track execution and adjustments.
• Change evaluation reports: Assess outcomes and continuous improvement.

Pro tip: If you’re searching for an ideation and innovation management system, PPM Express offers native functionality for collecting customer feedback and overseeing its future implementation.

Moving from monitoring change initiatives, we look at how to effectively managing project schedules with time-tracking reports.

What are time-tracking reports?

Time tracking reports serve as navigational tools for monitoring the allocation and utilization of time within a project. 

These reports provide insights into time spent on tasks and how to exercise better resource management and project efficiency with proper time management.

At the forefront are several formats within time-tracking reports:

• Time log reports: Provide a detailed task-time breakdown.
• Weekly time sheets: Summarize weekly time allocation.
• Time allocation reports: Balance team workload.
• Time analysis reports: Identifie patterns and inefficiencies.
• Overtime and time-off reports: Manage work-life balance and availability.

From monitoring project schedules, we move on to assessing portfolio-level advancement through reports.

What are project portfolio management reports?

Project portfolio management reports serve as navigational tools for overseeing and optimizing the collective performance of a portfolio of projects. 

These reports provide insights into resource allocation, risk exposure, and alignment with organizational goals.

Several main formats emerge within PPM reports:

• Portfolio overview reports: Summarize portfolio status and progress.
• Resource allocation reports: Provide insights into resource distribution.
• Risk exposure reports: Assess portfolio risk vulnerability.
• Financial performance reports: Analyze financial health and impact.
• Strategic alignment reports: Evaluate project alignment with goals.

Pro tip: We have compiled a comprehensive guide to PPM reports to simplify preparing analytics.

Having explored the various types of project management reports, let’s now dive into creating these informative documents.

How to create a project management report?

To understand the process of crafting a comprehensive project report, let’s select a project status report as our foundation.

Let’s break down the process into practical steps using a hypothetical software development project as an example:

1. Define purpose and audience: Start by understanding why you’re creating the report. Determine how the overview of the project’s progress will benefit the project manager, team members, and upper management. Tailor the report’s content accordingly to meet their needs and expectations.
2. Gather relevant data: Collect information from various sources like project management tools, team meetings, and individual updates. Use a project portfolio management tool like PPM Express to ease the data collection and visualization. Capture data on completed tasks, ongoing activities, and any challenges faced, and ensure you have accurate and up-to-date information.
3. Choose a clear structure: Structure the report to make it easily digestible. Break it down into the following sections:
   • Introduction: Briefly explain the project’s goals and why they matter.
   • Project overview: Highlight the project’s scope, timeline, and key milestones.
   • Progress updates: Detail tasks that are finished, ongoing, and overdue.
   • Resource utilization: Provide insights into team members’ workloads and availability.
   • Risks and challenges: Identify potential risks, their impacts, and mitigation strategies.
   • Recommendations: Suggest solutions for overcoming challenges and maintaining progress.
4. Visualize data: Incorporate visual aids for better comprehension. Use a Gantt chart to represent the project timeline and task dependencies. Use a bar chart to show completed, ongoing, and overdue tasks. Visuals can help stakeholders grasp complex information more easily.
5. Provide insights: Don’t just present raw data—interpret it. For instance, you might explain that the project is on track with 70% of tasks completed. Emphasize achievements like the backend development phase completion and address potential delays in UI design due to resource limitations. This contextualization adds depth to your report.

Congratulations! Your report is ready.

Pro tip: You can leverage 200+ ready-to-use reports created with Power BI by PPM Express for your convenience and easy start. Additionally, access ChatGPT prompts that can assist you with project reporting from our extensive ChatGPT prompts library designed for project managers.

Once you understand the process of creating project management reports, let’s uncover the key best practices for crafting effective and impactful reports.

What are the best practices for creating project reports?

Effective project reports require careful understanding and adherence to best practices to ensure clarity, accuracy, and value for stakeholders. 

Here are a few best practices when creating project reports:

• Clear objectives: Define the report’s purpose and outcomes clearly.
• Audience understanding: Tailor the content to meet the intended audience’s needs.
• Relevant data: Use accurate and relevant data from reliable sources.
• Concise communication: Present the findings succinctly with plain language.
• Visual aids: Utilize charts and graphs for more transparent data representation.

Pro tip: Seasoned project managers are eager to share best practices as you pursue certification. Uncertain about your choice? Explore our comprehensive list of project management certifications to find the right one for you.

From mastering best practices, we now turn our attention to selecting the right software for efficient streamlining of project reporting.

What software to choose to streamline project reporting?

In the digital age, leveraging software solutions is essential to streamlining project reporting, enhancing collaboration, and ensuring accurate data management. 

Here are five groups of software that can help in efficient project reporting:

• Project management software: Smartsheet, Microsoft Planner, and Monday.com offer built-in reporting features, allowing you to track task progress, assign responsibilities, set deadlines, and generate reports on project status, team workload, and milestones. Don’t know how to choose from all these options? We have an article on how to make the right choice.
• Business Intelligence (BI) tools: Power BI, Tableau, and QlikView provide advanced reporting capabilities to help you create interactive dashboards and visualizations, enabling stakeholders to easily explore project data and derive insights.
• Time tracking tools: Toggl and Harvest focus on tracking time spent on tasks and resource allocation. They can generate both individual and team productivity reports, helping you assess resource utilization and project efficiency.
• Integrated project portfolio management software: PPM Express offers end-to-end solutions for project and portfolio planning, execution, and reporting. It also consolidates data from various projects and platforms like Azure DevOps and Jira, enabling high-level portfolio reporting.
• Collaboration and communication platforms: Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google Workspace enhance communication and document sharing by facilitating real-time collaboration, making it easier to gather information for reporting and ensuring everyone stays informed.

Now that we’ve explored software options for streamlined reporting, let’s discover how to leverage project management reports in making better decisions for your project.

From data to decisions: Harnessing the potential of project management reports

In project management, data is key to informed decisions and successful outcomes. Project management reports bridge the gap between raw data and actionable insights, offering a roadmap for navigating projects toward achievement. 

Project management reports transform data into valuable intelligence:

• Clarity amid complexity: Reports simplify intricate project details.
• Timely course corrections: Identifies deviations and aids interventions.
• Data-driven decision-making: Empowers informed choices.
• Transparency and accountability: Fosters collaboration and responsibility.
• Continuous improvement: Analyzes data for future enhancement.

To fully harness the potential of project management reports, consider trying out PPM Express, a comprehensive solution designed to streamline project reporting and portfolio management. 

Take the first step towards making your data work for you by signing up for a trial of PPM Express today.