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 or assess the health of your organization to identify development areas.

But how do you keep your project on track and avoid project roadblocks, 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. Let’s get into it.

Create Your Weekly Scorecard

Take a look at the photo above. This is the exact scorecard that I use with my 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 as follows: Blue (Complete), Green (On Track), Amber (At Risk, with Mitigation), Red (At Risk, without Mitigation) and White (Not Started).

You can identify Blockers & Risks and any associated Actions & Mitigation to call attention to any issues that might derail your project. You can keep track of Key Activities & 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.

Socialize Your Weekly Scorecard

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 & 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.

If you’re consulting with a client, you also establish a structured and consistent relationship with them.

So next time you're struggling to keep your project on track, use a Weekly Scorecard. Feel free to leverage my Weekly Scorecard Template here.

Want to speed up execution for your C-suite?

At Cedar, we are developing an assessment focused on C-suite speed, which we know results in increased growth, financial performance, innovation, employee engagement, operational resilience and organizational health. Just take a look at the McKinsey report here.

We are measuring things like average time to make an executive decision, average number of executive weekly meetings and clarity of company strategy.

The result is a readout across 20 metrics that identifies specific development areas that can increase C-suite speed to execution. As a Chief of Staff or C-suite leader, you now have a simple roadmap to achieve high speed at the top which results in benefits across your company.

Interested in completing our speed assessment with your C-suite team? Reply SPEED to this email and I’ll share more details.

Looking for your next Chief of Staff job?

Thank you to the 50+ folks that signed up for my Chief of Staff Talent Network waitlist on Pallet. It’s now live!

I’ve started to review candidate applications and accept them into my talent collective.

And I’m in the middle of outreaching CEOs who want to gain access to my hand-selected candidate database.

What’s the result? I’ll be able to make warm introductions between CEOs and candidates, making personalized matches on behalf of each party.

Ready to get started? Click this link to complete your application to my Talent Network.

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