Throughout my career, I’ve led numerous projects, and one question has consistently been asked by leadership, stakeholders, and team members: “How are you doing?”

Status reporting is essential. Your stakeholders and leadership need to understand the progress of the project and when it will be delivered. Your team members need to see their progress to maintain momentum and morale. In my experience, everyone asking this question has their own preferred format for receiving the answer – be it a spreadsheet, PowerPoint deck, dashboard, email, or some other form of communication. Often, a standard reporting format is used to help stakeholders normalize the data across multiple projects they are overseeing. Anticipating these requests before they come is crucial.

Start by carefully considering the metrics you want to collect and report. These should be objective, data-driven measures, not subjective opinions. For software projects, I’ve found the following metrics to be invaluable:

• Velocity: The number of story points each team delivers each Sprint.
• Commitment: The number of story points each team commits to each Sprint.
• Defect Rate: The rate at which new defects are found in production code (i.e., live to customers).
• Crash Rate: The frequency at which the app crashes in production.
• Page Load Times: The average and maximum load times for each app page.
• Grooming/Estimation Rate: The pace at which stories are being estimated relative to how quickly they are committed to during Sprint Planning.
• Churn: The percentage of stories that are returned to developers for rework due to defects found during testing.

All of these metrics can be extracted from your issue tracking tool (e.g., Jira), provided your team is using well-defined fields and processes to keep the data accurate and up-to-date. If they are not, change this first. Clean, well-maintained status data is essential.

Next, write queries that can automatically calculate each of the above metrics. Create a dashboard that presents these metrics in a clear and easy-to-understand format. Automating this will save you significant time and ensure that the data is always current.

If you’re fortunate, this dashboard might be all you need to communicate the project’s status to anyone interested. Publicize the dashboard’s existence and availability, and encourage feedback for improvements. However, in most cases, stakeholders and leadership will still want this data in a format that suits their preferences. By keeping your metrics granular and automated, you’ll make it easier to transform the data into whatever format they require.

Status reporting is critical. Clear and concise summaries of where the project stands, what remains to be done, and the expected delivery dates are essential for building and maintaining trust in your teams and in your ability to lead the project. Take the time to get your metrics right, automate the reporting, and make it easily accessible.

What other metrics have you found useful for tracking your projects? Are there tools you would recommend for making status reporting easier? I’d love to hear your thoughts.