Dashboard
End of week status reports
Guide to automating your end of week status reports
In this blog we are going to look at how you can automate and streamline your end of week status reports for you and your team. It's easy to do this when your team is really small, but as your team grows bigger, you end up spending hours just to collect the information from different tools needed for creating this report every week.
Arjun Rajkumar
October 07, 2024
If you are using a project management tool like Salesforce, Asana, PowerBI etc - you will have to manually check and get it from there or write a script that pulls the data from there for you every week. This can be time consuming - so we are going to look at how you can simplify and automate the whole process of creating an end of week status report if you set things up the right way from the start.
- Current tasks First, check which project management tools you are using currently to keep a track of tasks
- Collect information Then start collecting the work that was done by the team
- Create a weekly report What got done, what are the upcoming tasks, and if any blockers.
Good weekly reports are an effective way to keep everyone informed on the progress. You may think that no-one is going to read this except you, but your CEO, CTO, high-level managers will find it extremely useful for quickly understanding what's working, and what needs improvement. Also sending these weekly reports regularly shows that you are proactive rather than reactive.
Writing an end of week status report effectively
First, check which project management tool you are using currently to keep a track of tasks. Most of these tools like Salesforce etc have some reporting built into it, but it is not ideal for getting a quick update of each of your co-workers' end of week status reports. Also, you may miss out on a lot of details if you just go by the tasks listed in these tools - for e.g. while executing a task, did they run into a blocker? How did they solve it? Are they still stuck and do you need someone else to look into it? These specific details cannot be taken from a tool unless you go thru them individually, and this ends up taking a lot of time every week. It may get a little easier if you already have a pre-build dashboard that pulls in all the required information and updates it every week. All this is hard to manage, and it becomes exponentially more difficult as your team grows.
Instead a better approach to creating your weekly status reports is to simply ask your team directly for this information. Basically, ask each member of your team to create a weekly report for you, answering a few simple standup questions: What got done, what are the upcoming tasks, and if any blockers. This way every week you are getting a high level update from each of your co-workers. This makes it much easier than manually going through your project management tool and viewing the tasks. Information will be lost if you end up trying to do this manually.
So, now that you have decided to get progress updates from your team, the next question is how you should collect this information. There are different ways to do this. You could use your default project management tool like Asana, Salesforce, Trello etc - but the risk is that your team is already using these tools everyday for doing many things, and they may forget to create a weekly report, as there is feature bloat and notification overload with these tools. Another approach is to ask them to email you directly every week - but your inbox becomes full, and it's hard to reply and share this information with the whole team. Ideally, it's better to use a tool that is built specifically for this - and to get all your end of week status reports from your team in writing.
The idea is to have a system that is simple. Nothing too fancy. Nothing complicated. Something easy to use so that the whole team starts doing this repeatedly every week. Good weekly reporting keeps managers from breathing down your neck so that your teams can work without pressure and micromanagement.
So, now that you have decided to get progress updates from your team, the next question is how you should collect this information. There are different ways to do this. You could use your default project management tool like Asana, Salesforce, Trello etc - but the risk is that your team is already using these tools everyday for doing many things, and they may forget to create a weekly report, as there is feature bloat and notification overload with these tools. Another approach is to ask them to email you directly every week - but your inbox becomes full, and it's hard to reply and share this information with the whole team. Ideally, it's better to use a tool that is built specifically for this - and to get all your end of week status reports from your team in writing.
The idea is to have a system that is simple. Nothing too fancy. Nothing complicated. Something easy to use so that the whole team starts doing this repeatedly every week. Good weekly reporting keeps managers from breathing down your neck so that your teams can work without pressure and micromanagement.