<p>Currently I use the <a href="http://www.onepageprojectmanager.com/oppm/resource.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">"One Page Project Manager" Excel Template</a> for project status reports. It contains a summary of last week's work and a forecast for the next week. For all important tasks we track, if they are comleted or not. Everything on one page. I send this report every week to all participants/stakeholders. (hint: I do not work in an agile environment)</p>

<p>How do you report your project status?</p>

Status reporting should be brief (nobody likes to sit there for ages while every member of the team goes on and on about their status) so I'm a big fan of SOFT reports:
Successes
- what have you achieved since the last status meeting: tasks directly off the project schedule. If possible I tried to avoid reporting x% done -- it's either done, or it's not. Reporting by % means that tasks will sit at 95% for
weeks
. This also encourages the project manager/tech lead to break down the work breakdown structure into tasks that are no longer than a few days.
Opportunities
- have you identified any opportunities: things that will help the project that aren't being considered yet (e.g.: found a better way to script something, a library that will save the project from implementing something themselves, etc)
Future Work
- what are you working on between now and the next status meeting: again, directly off the project schedule.
Threats
- have you identified anything that will impact your ability to get your scheduled work done? e.g.: a previously-unidentified hole in the requirements, support calls are taking a big chunk of your time, implementing something turns out to be harder than expected, etc.
Ideally I would try and avoid doing this stuff in a big project meeting since 90% of the material is irrelevant to half the people in the room. I like to collect SOFT reports before the meeting, spend some time looking at them before the meeting and then discuss specific issues that are probably relevant to everybody during the actual meeting.