It’s really up to you how often you wish your team to report in however, typically they can be held bi-weekly or weekly. When the pressure is on checkpoint reporting can be daily or even more frequently.

A project gets late one day at a time

The goal of the checkpoint report is to deliver a summary of team member activity on current work packages and the analysis of the impact on stage and project tolerances. This is a key input into you project Highlight report for the Project Board.

The relationship between reporting requirements and team morale

Project Managers also need to be aware of what reporting and the perception of too much reporting can do to team morale. Assuming you’ve recruited a team of self-motivated professionals, too much reporting can be perceived as a lack of trust in team members, a distraction from the job at hand or worse still, lack of management skill by the project manager.

A note on report structure

Always put the first things first

This template is obviously based on the OGC PRINCE2 template however you may wish to consider putting your report on tolerances at the top, as I have. I’ve always found my executives and/or programme managers will always want to know their risk position first then deal with the status of delivery.