Shape Stakeholder Perceptions with Your Status Reports

Communication is a keystone of project management. Shaping perceptions of your project should is an important part of project communication and the best tool for this is your status report. Here are powerful ways your project status report can influence stakeholders’ perception.

• Describe opportunities. Risks aren’t always negative! Opportunities are positive events with a probability of enhancing your project. To leave a positive impression on stakeholders, share what you’re doing to bring an opportunity to fruition in your status report.
• Describe dodged risks. Highlighting risks that you side-stepped can also create a favorable impression. Whether the risk didn’t occur or you took action to address it isn’t important. You can build confidence in the project and your management by sharing risks that are no longer a concern. Of course, you should continue to report on risks that could still impact the project. This demonstrates project management diligence.
• Note relevant task completions. To help manage perception, go beyond “tick the box, got it done” status items. Identify breakthroughs in how tasks are completed. Explain any innovative activities. Share when significant tasks are completed. And include the significance of the task completion. Also, describe how those task completions enables project outcomes. 
• Highlight project team members’ backgrounds. Include a team member profile in every status report. It’s a simple, quick, and easy way to heighten stakeholder confidence. Describe the team member’s expertise and don’t forget to include contract personnel, who might not be known to your key stakeholders. 
• Boost exposure to preliminary deliverables. Highlight the completion of preliminary deliverables, and when feasible, show them off! Nothing boosts confidence more than demonstrating deliverables. Although many completed deliverables can’t be fully utilized, share them any way you can! If the deliverable is a physical one, arrange a viewing. In the case of a building section, arrange a tour. If it’s an information technology system, set up a demo. Stakeholders find project outcomes more believable when there is a tangible item to examine.

Do you have other sections that you include in your status reports to mould stakeholder perception? How does that information help? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about project reports, check out Doug Rose’s Project Management Foundations: Communication course.