What is a Weekly Report?

Weekly report – the weekly documentation of a project

Projects develop – sometimes as planned, sometimes not as planned. Organisations document developments in projects with a weekly report. The frequency with which project reports are produced depends on the project scope, the duration of the project and practical and organisational considerations: the shorter a project is, the shorter the reporting period should be, the longer a project lasts, the longer reporting periods can be.

As the name suggests, the weekly report is produced weekly, the monthly report monthly and the quarterly report quarterly. Companies individually define which information is documented in a weekly report. In addition to some master data such as

• the project name,
• a project abbreviation,
• the name of the project manager,
• the start of the project and
• the end of the project

are above all

• status information and
• the representation of the actual situation,
• possible solutions to existing problems and
• management decisions to be taken are very useful.

The delegation of decisions to governing bodies such as the works council, management board, supervisory board, steering committee, change control board or shareholders’ council can also be documented in a weekly report.

The benefits of weekly reports

In principle, a weekly report – as well as other reports – should create added value by, among other things,

• providing information that is not available to all employees involved
• and aggregating data in order to obtain a good overview of the stage of completion of the project.

A weekly report that is only prepared to meet internal formalities, that is only filed internally and not read, misses its purpose.

Sometimes criticism is expressed that the explicit creation of weekly reports is no longer necessary when using appropriate systems, because such reports can be generated at the push of a button. In addition, modern systems often offer the aggregation and visualisation of data directly in the program. As a counterargument, the personal, human evaluation of responsible employees, which is based not only on figures and data, but on experience, may be used.

Notes:

Here you can download a weekly report template.

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