The important part of project management is monitoring and controlling process. The most effective tools in this respect are regular reports, which reveal and analyze project history and predict future development.
To understand the discrepancy between status report and progress report, a comparison with synchronic and diachronic approaches in history will be drawn. Synchronic approach analyzes particular event/fact at a fixed point of time. For instance, synchronic approach was applied in the analysis of the structure of political parties in the USA in 2008. Similarly, in the project management status report appeals to the stasis. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, status report is a document describing the situation of something such as a project at the present time. Greene and Stellman argue that status reports should reveal only facts collected from status meetings. The aim of status report is not to predict future development or compare with the past progress, but to inform about the current state of the project by collecting facts. In other words, status report should answer WHAT changes occur in the project currently. The function of collecting facts and informing about the project status belongs not to the project manager but to the project expediter who has less competence than the project manager. Status reports stress achievements and, therefore, will be more suitable for executive audience.
Progress report is defined as an activity that takes place during a project or process, that conveys details, such as what sub-goals have been accomplished, what resources have been expended, what problems have been encountered. Progress report bears much resemblance to diachronic approach. Diachronic approach is utilized to outline how much something has evolved or developed over time, allowing one to ascertain changes, explain reasons for these changes and predict future development of events. For instance, diachronic approach can be effectively used in determining why the Republican Party lost elections in 2012 in the USA. To perform the task, the activity of the party over the whole year 2012 should be carefully studied. In project management, progress report is time-oriented. It provides historical record of project events and predicts future course of development. In other words, progress report answers WHY changes occurred and what will their ramifications be.
Milosevic identifies progress report with performance report, which makes the former an inevitable part of project schedule control. The most challenging in the progress report is the reliability of information. During progress/status meetings, activity owners may provide information, which does not correspond with the real state of affairs. The outputs of progress report include evaluation of history record, presence of risks at the current time, work completed over the reporting period and work to be completed during the next reporting period.
Despite the fact that status reports give precise information about the project at the current time, it has time limits. More practical and meritorious for project managers is progress report because it can analyze historical record on the basis of which changes to improve the future situation can be implemented. Summary progress report assists in revealing whether project constraints are successfully managed. There are six constraints distinguished (time, scope, cost, resources, quality, and risk). Summary progress report should be a prediction of the future development of the project through interpretation of the history record. The greatest concern in creating summary progress report is caused by the fact that interpretation may be inaccurate or false because it is based on the personal reports with high level of human factor subjectivity.
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