How do you communicate your task status and progress to your managers and clients?

Effectively communicating task status and progress to managers and clients involves clear, concise, and regular updates. Here's a structured approach: For Managers: Establish Communication Channels: Determine preferred communication methods with your manager—whether it's through email, weekly meetings, project management tools, or a combination. Regular Updates: Provide scheduled updates according to the agreed-upon frequency (e.g., weekly, bi-weekly). Include progress made, milestones achieved, challenges faced, and upcoming steps. Use Project Management Tools: Utilize tools like Trello, Asana, or Jira to share real-time progress, task statuses, and timelines. These platforms often allow direct visibility into ongoing work.

For me, I rely heavily on Outlook calendar to set “reminders” for me to check something, a reoccurring event or to set meeting invites. As my tasks are never-ending, it’s a wonderful resource to utilize versus trying to remember everything.

A task management tool like Worklenz, an open-source solution, helps you organize, track, and manage your tasks efficiently. It offers visual overviews like Gantt charts, Kanban boards, or timelines, enabling you to update tasks with comments, attachments, subtasks, or checklists. Notifications and reminders can be sent to stakeholders when tasks are completed, changed, or delayed. Additionally, you can generate reports or dashboards to show task status and progress in terms of time, budget, quality, or scope. This tool saves time and effort in communication, while enhancing transparency and accountability. Learn more at Worklenz (worklenz.com). #Productivity #OpenSource

We have a distributed team collaborating on projects with many internal and external stakeholders. We have found task management software to be hugely beneficial to keep an eye on the relevant moving parts and dependencies. My word of warning would be to allow sufficient time at the start of a project to set it up properly. There can be duplication of effort if it's not fully thought through before operational. Additionally, make sure expectations and responsibilities are clear on who updates what and when. Personally, software with built-in analysis and/or data visualisation has been a low-effort, easy-win engagement tool for us.

Communicating your task status and progress to your managers and clients should be done in a clear and concise manner. At the start of any project make sure you lay out and schedule certain checkpoints and communicate what you will be discussing before each one. Keep your time together short by giving a quick update, let the person whether that is your manager or client know what you need from them and then convey what the next steps are. A follow up meeting should take no more than 30 min but leave room for follow up questions should there be any.

When you are communicating your status and progress to either your manager or client you should always be honest. If something got in the way of you progressing or completing a task, let them know and always have a solution to that problem. If it was technology that glitched or your lack of knowledge that held you back being truthful make sure to convey how you will move forward in learning the skill or seeking how to fix the tech. Never make promises that you cannot keep or be unrealistic with your ability to complete a task or project. When you are honest from start to finish, you build credibility and will more than likely keep that client and manager's respect.

If you let your managers and clients know that you will updating them on a specific day, follow through and do so. Stick to the frequency of your updates as well as the format in which you will be doing so. Make sure to answer any questions and include some good news should you have any to convey. This not only establishes trust, but opens the lines for further collaboration and even referrals.