Letting the people be on familiar terms with how a venture is coming along is evidently a key job of any project manager of any company. With the abundance of methodologies that can be chosen from these days, it becomes very difficult to decide that which particular piece of information will be helpful to all those people who are involved in that particular project. All these methodologies are more often than not jumbled mass of puzzling vocabulary, often only identifiable by the practitioners of the particular system on which the project is being made (e.g. sprint backlog, burn down graph, concession, and story points, etc).

The next topic to worry about is; what piece of information can you present when you are working on a status report that will be helpful to a very broad audience (e.g. senior management, client, technical and non-technical users and people like advocates, etc). The project data maintained within a project for development and day-to-day organization is a different thing, but what is to be shown to the non-technical people is something completely different. Naturally, the details that will be going into the progress reports of the project are most likely to be obtained from the tracking documents of the project.