Project Management Playbook

Struggling to keep your project on track? Leverage a Weekly Scorecard. As a Chief of Staff, you’re often asked to execute a special project on behalf of the CEO.

No one else on the leadership team has capacity, so maybe you’re asked to quantify the market opportunity of expanding into the Middle East or implement a new sales operations tool to accelerate growth.

But how do you keep your project on track, especially with multiple stakeholders? How do implement simple governance to inform everyone about project status? How do you deal with issues that crop up in a proactive way?

The answer: use a lightweight Weekly Scorecard. Take a look below for an example. This is the exact scorecard that we use with our own consulting clients.

As the Project Owner, you have the opportunity to update the Weekly Scorecard with the Overall Status to quickly communicate the health of the project using color-coding. Blue (complete), Green (On Track), Amber (At Risk, with Mitigation), Red (At Risk, without Mitigation) and White (Not Started).

You can identify Blockers and Risks and any associated Actions and Mitigation to call attention to any issues that might derail your project. You can keep track of Key Activities and Milestones while previewing Immediate Next Steps. Finally, you can use Harvey balls to track the progress of Key Deliverables. A full Harvey ball means the deliverable is complete.

Next, send out your Weekly Scorecard to all relevant stakeholders with a Loom video or email to call attention to specific areas of the status report. Store all Weekly Scorecards in a centralized Project Governance folder so everyone can access them.

What’s the result? Clear communication to all internal and external stakeholders on project status. The ability to quickly deal with issues before they become too big. Completing your project on time, within budget and within scope.

So next time you're struggling to keep your project on track, use a Weekly Scorecard. Download the template here.