Highlight Report

Here you can find a simple Highlight Report template in Microsoft Word/Excel format, along with explanation on how to use it.

Download the Template

Background

You’re expected to report performance to the Project Board, and that’s what the Highlight Report is about.

The Team Managers send you frequent Checkpoint Reports, and you also gather extra information, combine and analyze them, and understand the overall status of the stage and project. That’s the main subject of this report.

Based on our Product-Based approach in PRINCE2, there’s a section in the report where you list all products of the current stage, with their current and future status, add information about issues and risks, lessons learned, etc.

And of course, it’s not PRINCE2 without thinking about, talking about, and documenting the objectives! That’s where you fill in the table for the six variables, both for the stage and for the project. We don’t expect any variable to be out of tolerance, unless there’s an Exception waiting to be resolved.

Composition

The template has these main sections:

Document information: this is the generic information about the document and connections with your Configuration Management system. Feel free to add more information here, but it’s best to keep it simple.
Products: this section is about the products that are the subject of the current stage, and you report their status for the current time, and also give your forecast for the next reporting period; both of them should contain information about their quality status as well as progress. Well, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about progress without considering quality anyway.
Issues and risks: it’s probably a good idea to only list the key issues and risks, but if you want, you can attach a copy of the Issue Register and Risk Register too. But remember, the Project Board won’t go through a long register, and if you really need their attention for a few issues or risks, you’d better list them separately here.
Objectives: the six variables, with their target values, tolerances, current state, and forecast at completion, both for the stage and for the whole project.
Lessons Learned: this is about the lessons you’ve learned during the reporting period, not the whole project or your whole life! If you have many of them, you can attach a filtered copy of the Lessons Log instead.

eLearning Courses

If you’d like to learn everything about PRINCE2, I can suggest our eLearning courses:

The first few lessons in each course are free. You can start taking the courses right now and make sure it’s what you’ve been looking for before you buy.

Note: The first 30% of the courses used to be free, but because of the recent constraints from PeopleCert, we’re not allowed to offer more than 15% of the scope or more than 90 minutes of the duration for free.