Improve Team Performance: The Weekly Status Update

Introduction

In a data driven world gathering information is a priority. As a team leader one of the best ways of gathering data is weekly updates from your team, once you understand the current status of where your team is currently the possibilities are endless. With the insights you gather from a weekly report you can align your priorities, prepare next steps and make informed decisions, understand the issues your team is facing and prepare for roadblocks and bottlenecks.

What is a Weekly Status Update?

A weekly status update is a summary of what your company is working on, and a summary of what work has been completed. It's important for leaders to have weekly status reports because they allow management to stay informed, especially if multiple projects are involved.

This may seem like something that's done "automatically", since most projects have a project manager, however, it's still important to keep weekly status reports up to date. This helps keep projects on track, and it allows your project manager or team leaders to see how each project is progressing — whether it's meeting deadlines, or falling behind.

How are they useful?

A weekly update is useful to asses risks and to check on your project timeline, it is also a progress report to gauge your project progress and an opportunity to foster team collaboration.

Weekly analysis reports are also useful for employees. They allow them to see what projects they're closing on, and to assess their progress by the end of the week. They can use this information to set goals and plan upcoming tasks, so that they can hit their targets and plan around deadlines while maintaining a work-life balance.

In summary, weekly status reports have a number of purposes:

They allow management to keep up to date on what projects have been started and completed.
They allow for the tracking of progress, and have valuable metrics that can be tracked over time, which can help management make decisions about resource allocation.
Weekly status updates give employees the opportunity to set new goals and plan upcoming weeks.
They allow employees to see where they fit in the organization, and to consider what projects they may want to work on in the future.‍

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How was our performance this week regarding goal completion?
Was this past week productive? Was everything completed or did we fall behind? This question could help us analyze if our planning was successful or not, and help us adjust for future plans.
Did you face any blockers this week?
Were team members facing blockers this week? Can these blockers be predicted for next week? Do they stop us from achieving project milestones? Knowing blockers is paramount. The best way to avoid them is knowing them in the first place, and preparing action items to avoid them or circumvent them next time they happen.
What are the critical tasks for next week?‍
With this question we are planning ahead into next week, we can analyze if this week's blockers are going to be relevant next week and we can time block and keep accountability on next week's tasks.