A weekly status report should be readable in ninety seconds by someone who has never joined a single call. That means one line of health at the top, then what changed, then what you need from the client, then the risks. Everything else is an attachment.
I have written one of these every Friday for about ten years, and the format above is what survived. The early versions were long. They listed everything the team did, and nobody read them. The current version fits on one phone screen, and I know it gets read because people reply to it.
What goes in the first line?
The first line carries the status and the reason together, in one sentence a reader can repeat from memory. "Amber. Payment sandbox access came three days late; the launch date still holds." That single line tells a busy person whether they need to keep reading or can close the email.
I put it in the subject line too. A finance head on the client side once told me she had read nothing but my subject lines for a month, and she still felt she knew where the project stood. I took that as the highest compliment the format can get. If your subject line says "Weekly Update - Week 14", it is telling the reader nothing.
Green, amber and red also need definitions the client has agreed to, because without them amber becomes the colour you reach for to avoid saying red.
| Label | What it means | What I need from the client |
|---|---|---|
| Green | The plan holds and the dates have not moved | Nothing this week |
| Amber | Something slipped and a recovery is running | Awareness, sometimes a faster answer |
| Red | The date or the scope needs a decision | A decision, named and dated |
What changed, or what happened?
A status report records change in the product rather than activity on the team. "Completed 14 tickets" is activity. "Checkout now works end to end on staging, and the address step is still mocked" is change. The second version lets a client picture the thing they are paying for.
If a workstream did not move, write "no change" and stop. Two words. It feels wrong the first few times because it looks like admitting idleness. In practice clients respect it far more than a padded paragraph, and it makes the weeks where something moves stand out.
What do you need from them?
Every report has a section titled "Needed from you", and every item in it carries a date and a consequence. "Sign-off on the invoice PDF layout by Thursday, otherwise the print step moves into the next sprint." The consequence is the part people skip, and it is the part that gets action.
This section is also my early-warning system. When the same item shows up three Fridays in a row, the item itself has stopped being the problem. Someone who owns it is stuck or has left, and I need a phone call rather than a fourth reminder.
How many risks belong in it?
Two or three, each with a next review date. Six risks means you have not decided which ones matter. A risk that has sat unchanged for eight weeks stops being a risk and becomes the plan, so either it gets a mitigation or it leaves the list.
I also keep the risk wording plain. "The client's data export may not include the fields we assumed" is a risk. "Data dependency uncertainty" is a fog. When I looked at what the AI projects that don't get cancelled tend to have in common, honest and regular communication sat near the top, and plain risk language is where that starts.
The mistake I made for years
I wrote the report for the person I spoke to every day. She already knew everything in it, so the report felt like a formality. What I missed was that she forwarded it. Her manager read it. Sometimes a board member read it. The report was the only version of the project those people ever saw.
Now I write it for the forward, and I ask every delivery lead at Shanti Infosoft to run four checks before hitting send:
- Does the subject line carry the status and the reason in one breath?
- Could a stranger repeat the state of the project back to you after ninety seconds?
- Does every item under "Needed from you" have a name, a date and a consequence?
- Have you cut every sentence that only makes sense to someone on the daily call?
The fourth check is where most of the red pen goes. It carries into our IT consulting work too, where the weekly note is often the only artefact a sponsor ever reads.
The whole thing takes me about twenty minutes on a Friday afternoon. It is the highest-value twenty minutes of my week, and I would rather skip a standup than skip it.
What is the one thing your clients actually look for in an update, and does your report put it first?
Sonal Jain runs delivery at Shanti Infosoft, a CMMI Level 5 software company, where the Friday report format above is the house standard.
