Project status template

The project status template works hand in hand with university PMO’s Jira projects, which all share the same scheme. In that scheme, there is a specific work type called the PMO Project that collects metadata, including the name of the project manager and sponsor, and the project health, constraints, status, and more. That information is used to update the Jira macros embedded in the Confluence template which will give your stakeholders an overview of progress on the project. There is only one PMO Project work item per project, and it’s all filled out by the project manager.

ASU has also automated filling out the Summary section of the template by creating two custom fields in the PMO Project work item: the Status note field and the Constraints field. Then, they employed the Jira macro in Confluence to pull only those fields into the Summary table.

To create this magic yourself, set the display to only show ‘Status note’ and ‘Constraints’ (or whatever you've set up as your status summary custom fields) in the corresponding columns. Once you’ve set this up once, your project managers will only need to replace the project key in the JQL of the macro with their own.

With all this data automatically in their view, it’s far easier for the project manager to assign project status – green, yellow, or red – after a quick glance.

Use the Jira report macro to display all the work items in the project and then have your project managers replace the project key with their own. You’ll see in the ASU example, the team there has set up its PMO project work type and is displaying the custom fields summary, status, start-date, end-date, and description.

Give your stakeholders an overview of your latest accomplishments, next steps, and risks or issues. Again, ASU uses work types that exist in each PMO Project.

In the Accomplishments column, ASU adds their resolved tasks from the last 7 days using the JQL Project = "ATL" AND Resolution changed to Done during (-7d, now()).

Next Steps column is pulling in tasks that are still unresolved using the JQL: Project = "ATL" AND work itemtype != "PMO Project" AND Resolution = unresolved.

Risks and Work items are also pulled in via custom work types.

Once you have set this up for your team, you can save the template as your own so that your project managers only need to update their project key to get started. Offer one place to send your stakeholders and teams to get an update across all projects in a standardized way.