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there are various documents that you will need to create when managing a project these project documents are created throughout the Project Life Cycle so there are documents to create in the initiation stage in the planning in the execution marginal controlling and the closing stage of the project management life cycle and in this video I'll be sharing three essential project documents that you'll need to create on every project in order to plan and successfully deliver the project hey there welcome back to my channel if you're new yet hey if you're a subscriber thank you so much for supporting me on this journey my name is Gaga Johnson and I help emerging and establish project professionals to start and Advance their careers in project management and on this channel I share everything about a career in project management including life lessons from my projects management business and career so if you're interested in project management whether in growing or launching your project management career then click on the Subscribe button and let's learn together so let's go right into this video there are three essential documents I'll be talking about today I'll be walking you through them so I will first of all talk about why they're important what a document is used for what they contain and then I'll walk you through a live example of what these documents look like so the first document we'll be looking at is the project schedule the project schedule is a very important project document when planning your project because in the project schedule you see your activity so all the activities you need to carry out on the project alongside the duration you know the start and the end date and the timeline how long each of those activities will take also in the product schedule you'll see the resources as whoever is assigned to carry out this project so that's why it's very important some people actually call this project schedule a project plan and I don't really blame them because technically when you are delivering the project that's when you're in execution stage this is the document the project schedule that you actually look at to ensure that your project is going ing to plan so that's why some people call it a project plan but really is a project schedule so it is very important because with your project schedule you're able to create a baseline okay so when your munching and controlling your project you're trying to measure the performance of your project the details on your project schedule act as a baseline for anything schedule related so then you use this Baseline as your planned vessels your actual that is the results you're getting currently from your execution phase that will be your actual well the plan will be the details that you have in your project schedule so it's very important for tracking the project to ensure the project is going as it should go and also measuring performance on your projects so a typical project schedule will contain the activities of the project as a task project task it will contain what the start date what the end date is typically just the duration for each of the activities as well as the resources so that's what you will see in a typical project schedule and most times you know you don't have to create the schedule this document from scratch you could simply go online and just search for free project schedule template and then you can pick one and tailor or customize it based on you know the various aspects or components that you need with respect to your organization and also some organizations already have templates standard templates you know organizational process assets that they use to create the project schedule so you may not need to create it from scratch now one interesting thing about the project schedule as well is that this document you can actually create it using various project management tools so for example you can create a project schedule using your MS project you can use your jira to create a project schedule um if you are you know doing your projects in an agile methodology you use it to create your backlog okay you can create your project schedule using smart sheets as well so these tools you can use to help you create your project schedule or you can use a good old Excel to create your project schedule so I'm going to walk you through a live example of a project schedule that I created okay I'll show you the templates and I use Excel initially I got this template online and then I customized it to what I wanted to use based on what I use within my own organization so come on all right so we are looking at the project schedule template as you can see the first thing that you see on here is the project title you see the project title you see the project manager the start date for the entire project okay so this is called like the administrative headline okay and it just basically helps so that anyone who sees this document is aware of okay this project schedule is for X Project and is managed by this project manager and this is the start date and this duration of the project and then next you know this is your WS WBS stands for work breakdown structure so this just shows that this is you know the index just call it like number like number one number two you know for your project then see your tax name which is like the activities of the project really so for example here's an example here that these are the various activities for the project which various tasks and then the next column you're seeing assigned to so basically you write the names example assigned to add a assigned to O Gaga you know you see this is where you write who um these activities or the stacks are assigned to then also your start and end date so you put it there and then your duration in this let's say um the project Charter activity to develop it maybe it will take eight days okay so you put it there eight I don't need to write days behind it because I've already put that it's in days so this is a typical project schedule um it's very easy to create like you can see um and this is Excel using Excel to create it you can use various other project management tools but you can also use Excel and this is an example of a project schedule so next time you need to work on your project I need to create a project schedule don't be afraid to create it it's very easy to create it and these are just the um essential um sections that you need for your project schedule number two project budget the project projects an essential document that you should have so you should create a project budget document for any project you're delivering because it helps you to plan how much your project will cost so that you can ensure that the funds needed for your project throughout the project you know duration is available also just like the project scheduling helps you to create a baseline when you're monitoring and controlling the project you're tracking the project and also during the measurements when you're checking how the project is performing this your project budget to serve as the Baseline so during the course of your project while you're executing you decide to do a performance measurement and then you tell yourself you know what this project is 50 you know into the project that's how far we have gone in our delivery 50 and at 50 we have already spent 50 million dollars now the entire project costs 70 million dollars so even halfway mark I've spent 50 million dollars already it means I only have 20 million dollars for the remaining 50 you know so having your project budget helps you to do those performance measurements it gives you a baseline where you can actually calculate how much your entire project will cost one way of calculating It Is by calculating what cost will each activity incur and then do a estimation of each of the activities and when you're finished doing that then you aggregate you know all the costs that you have calculated to give you the total cost that's the most accurate and detailed way to calculate your project budget so check that you still have enough money to complete the project at the various stages of your projects while delivering it so let's go right into look at a live example of the project budget so I'm using a similar um template with with the project schedule and that's because I want to show the similarities between our project budget template and a project schedule so if you notice this is the same template you know with the administrative header so that anyone who picks up this project but a document will know that okay this is for Project X with project manager this you know with a start date and the duration now this is the exact this part is the exact same thing we saw in the project schedule document that we just went through the only thing is I've added this sections that I've highlighted now which show the human and physical resources so here our resources are divided not normally into two human and physical resources so as explained earlier for each of these activities what you need to do is to determine how much each activity will will cost and what the so you have the cost estimate for each activity and you have the duration okay so like we said we said for the project Charter it will be idea science ADI so that's the human resource so we need to see how many hours do our day works let's see how this is eight hours that's perfect and at this rate is a hundred dollars so you see we're doing a hundred dollars for our day for eight hours now what physical resources will either need let's say I just says you know I need to rent an office space so that I can work for eight hours so you need only an office space for one day so you've put the duration there one day and then how long um how much so you said you need an office space right so we say office space that's the item all right okay Office Space so that's there and you need it for one day so the quantity is one and what's the cost estimate for one day we said it is one thousand dollars okay perfect so we have um office space for one thousand dollars for one day and um we have um eight hours and it's charging a hundred remember we said a hundred dollars for a day now next thing is okay what's the subtotal so eight eight times a hundred dollars so the subtotal is eight hundred dollars is how much um we'll pay a day and then for the office space one times one thousand so that's one thousand dollars all right so what's the total now in terms of cost of resources to um needed in order to execute this activity to deliver this activity as a hundred plus 800 so that will be 1 800. in total voila so we have our project budget estimated as a thousand eight hundred for that activity for a day you will do this same thing that I just did across every other activity and once you're finished getting the um the cost estimates um you do an aggregation of everything to know your total project budget and that's the amount that your project will cost in total note that this doesn't include the contingency budget not the management budgets this is just the total project budget needed to complete or deliver your project based on just the use of the research sources number three the project status report this is another document that you will need to create when managing a project is essential the reason why it's essential is because you use a project status report to update your stakeholders on the status of the project you use it to tell them where the project is at what's going on well what risk or what issues are you know you're encountering on the project the projects you just report comes in different forms you could hear something called you know a one-page or a snapshot report you could hear oh I want weekly project status reports monthly project status reports there are different examples of project status reports in this video we'll actually walk through two life examples now one way to be able to get the information you use on your project status report is by tracking your project scan schedule exactly while you're executing your project you could use your Project's schedule to create a project tracker in other two you know monitor control and check how your project is doing because once you do that then you're able to report on you know how your project is doing the status of your project because you're effectively tracking it along the way so let's move right into the live example where I'll be showing you a project tracker a live example of that and two examples of a project status report all right so we're looking at a project tracker now as you can see this is exactly the project schedule template however I've added two main columns that are new I've added the status and the comments column and I've also added a status key I like using the status Keys like an advanced key of the traffic light key that you know we always have which is you know the green Amber or yellow and red so I like using not started on track delayed on hold and complete as my status key when managing projects okay and this is like my favorite part because I'm an expert in you know creating project delivery Frameworks and one of the things I create very well is the tracker and you know the different Frameworks that you can use to effectively Monitor and track your projects that your project successfully delivered on time this is one of my expertise so I'm excited about this section one of my taxes also doing reports so I'm really excited about this section all right so let's let's continue to remember ideas are starting to project Charter guy guys are signed to research so as a product is going on you know um it's already the start date you have gone in and you realize that okay yeah I just finished you know um duration was eight hours one day so you can then what I do I just copy you know control C you know copy these and my status for Ade is complete because he has finished this so I just put it here complete and let's say the research you know is going on I'm doing it um it's on track okay nothing we have no issues with it is going on as planned so I put on track then we look at the projections oh it's going on but right now he's a bit delayed because it's meant to you know finish in two days but we have not even completed you know 50 of what's what needs to be done you know and it needs to be complete by two um in two days so it's a bit delayed so it's in progress It's going on but it's delayed you know it's not on track it's delayed based on where it is now um it doesn't mean at the end of the day you may not finish it in two days may still finish it in two days but right now the status is that it's delayed then stakeholders oh you know I put a comment here so you know in this document you can put comments very good to put comments here so you're saying I'm saying like you know due to holidays the meeting to discuss projections has been put on hold so because of that the status for this particular um activity is on hold it means that it was meant to be probably it was meant to hold last week or how did it happen no one was available you know so that meeting has been put on hold so that's on hold so once you have your status key here you can then take it and use it to update your status here and put relevant comments so for example if I look at your project tracker right let's say I'm a stakeholder and the product sponsor and I swear on hold and we wanted okay why is this or not so your comments here will actually be able to tell me why and also by time you have your status here you have your comments here you can easily do your reporting so we're going to first look at something called the spotlight status reports it's also called the snapshots like in terms of in one look you can know the entire status of your project that's the essence so as always it has this administrative section where you have you know your project name you know your projects who the project manager is and the dates of when the status was um written all the dates for that status and the date is very important because obviously um you need to know how relevant this status report is so if I'm looking at it I want to know okay if it was date of status entries today then that's great because then I'm knowing the most up-to-date status of this report and also another thing that is important is the period because that could be a status for a week the period covering a week the last week it could be a status for the period of period covering the entire month so it's very essential you have the name of the project manager the project name the date of this status the date when this report was written and the period this report is going to cover because it helps give context to whatever status is written in this report so for example you can see here it is project status for this week and then you have overall project status remember this is a snapshot so you want to see at a glance how is this project operating oh it's on track overall okay he's on track overall all right well in terms of the different project components where are they all right in terms of the budgets there's potential risk the resources there's risk or roadblock maybe someone is sick or a resource um you know left and went to another job something like that timeline potential rate scope is on track however by the time you you know based on this report you're saying by time you look at the overall status of all the components it's ultimately still on track and this is where you write your information on that notes right why did you say it on track you know so put any highlights here enter information about your overall status and highlights and then here also when you put your budget and put your status you call out highlights as well you know oh it's um risk because um we have potential delays in shipping so because of that we need to do you know one day shipping which will be extra money with no budget so that's why it's a potential risk but it may not be so you know just things like that you put out why the status is in potential risks why the status is in risk or roadblocks and always remember to have your status scheme your status key is very important in your report so that you can know okay what does the status mean all right that's the sense of the status key so this is a snapshot status report see it's very small not much information and this is if very good for um if you have a stakeholder that just wants a very high level information doesn't want too much detail just wants to know where am are we on the project what's the overall status and where are we in terms of the other project components how are we doing not much information just want to see a snapshot and that's the kind of um reports that you sent to that person so it's very important to know what how your stakeholder would like to be communicated with you know the communication style and preference of your stakeholder that will help you to know what type of report you should send to them then there's another report I will show you this is more detailed um you see this more for stakeholders that want a more detailed you know example of a more detailed report they want to really know what's going on okay you can see your status key already here and your budget key so I have two keys here one for status one for Budget all right so here you go status key budget key is here and like I said this this has more details so here this is a weekly project status report template and like always always your project name your project manager It's always important to have this year the period covered this is for a week is this for a month what date to what date and date when the status was taken okay so it's very important and then projected date of completion for the entire project is included in this one okay so first of all you have your project status this week more like you know the same thing overall project status where are we and then you can also list the Milestones on your project what are the Milestones okay so the key Milestones that you probably accomplished for the week you can have that here and next you have the project components section uh the key project components at this particular report is tracking you know your budget your resources the timeline the scope where are you and then you have your notes Here Also work accomplished for that week all right that is very crucial what was a work that was accomplished you know what are the risk roadblocks or issues that you're encountering on the projects you write the risk number the description who owns it and what are the you know risk responses or how do you intend to fix or solve the problem another thing that you can put is highlights and key takeaways for the week like oh we were able to reach this Milestone this week um oh and we got um customer feedback that is great and we're going to use it to um for that iterate on the project delivery you know key highlights and key uh takeaway these are like your achievements for that week so that's where you put that your key achievements and then finally you can end with upcoming work that is basically telling you know whether it's reading the report this is what to expect next week because this is what we're focusing on to do now next week and you can even make him more okay next week you know week which is let's say that's week one the following week which is week two the next upper week which is week three you can detail it out you know some people can you know preempt or know what is to be expected going on and mind you you can add more sections to your report depending on what your stakeholders want to see so you can add more sections but this is more like a standard um project status report that is more detailed than the spotlight report which is which we saw that is very high level so that's it for the project status report um these are the three essential project documents that you need on any project you know that successfully plan and deliver the project so if you like a more detailed explanation or maybe you want me to show you how to go about creating these documents without using the product management meant tool or using Excel you want me to walk you step by step how I created it from even you know for example if it's Excel from like going and opening my Excel on my computer opening the no problem let me know in the comment section and I will work on that video for you so thank you very much for watching if you have any questions please let me know in the comment section and I'll be sure to respond if you enjoyed this video don't forget to give me a thumbs up like comment share and don't forget to subscribe thank you so much for watching guys see you next time bye