End Stage Report

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

Download the Template

Background

So, you’re approaching the end of the stage and are preparing for the next one. This is when you also prepare an End Stage Report.

There are a few important things to do here. First, continuous business justification is one of principles in PRINCE2, and here is a great time to add some information about the updated justification. Then, you also need to report the status of the products that were the subject of this stage.

What about the project as a whole? You need to evaluate project objectives (the six variables), with their target, tolerance, current state, and most importantly, your forecast for their state at completion. You also need to evaluate the objectives (6 variables) of the current stage (just as historical information) and then give your forecast for the objectives of the next stage.

Have you done EVERYTHING that you were supposed to do in this stage? There may be a few unfinished works and open issues. It’s fine, as long as you list them here and assign owners to them.

You also need to report issues and risks and lessons learned, otherwise people may think that you don’t know what project management is!

Composition

The template contains 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.
Approval: this section is for capturing approvals. There are multiple lines, because you may have multiple versions of this document approved. If you have a well-formed Configuration Management system to track approvals, feel free to remove this section.
Justification: updated justification of the project based on the Business Case. Products: the status of the products that were the subject of the stage. Make sure you also add their quality status, and handovers (if any). If you have a proper Configuration Management System, you probably prefer to attach a report of that system (called Product Status Account) instead of adding such a table. It’s fine.
Objectives of the project, current stage, and next stage: the values of the six variables; these values play a crucial role in PRINCE2’s manage by exception method.
Team Performance: time to be nice and praise the team!
Follow-on action recommendations: a list of the unfinished work and open issues of the current stage that should be done later, along with their owners.
Issues and risks: you probably prefer to attach a copy of your Issue Register and Risk Register instead of filling in the table, which is fine.
Lessons Learned: remember that you should capture lessons continuously, not only at the end of the stages or project. Here you will add the lessons related to the current stage, or even better, attach a copy of the Lessons Log that is filtered for those lessons.

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.