What are A3 status reports?

4 min readMar 25, 2019

I’ve been using and recommending A3 reports as a way of progress reporting for the past 7–8 years. I was introduced to them while working at Redgate Software in Cambridge where they had a big impact on how reporting was done.

I’ve been sharing this description of A3s for a while now so thought I’d publish it here.

Let me know if you find it useful and start to use A3 reporting yourself.

Introduction

An A3 status report is a structured report capturing the state of a piece of work or process on one side of an A3-sized piece of paper (or similar amount of real-estate).

The report is intentionally limited in size to encourage it to be concise and so visual. The process of constructing the A3 benefits the report author by having them think through the key elements and issues of their work in order to capture them in this concise form and so promotes learning.

Structure of an A3

Each A3 report consists of the same broad sections:

a background — setting the context for the report
a current state — describing work done so far
results — showing progress against KPIs for example &
remaining issues / actions — work left to be done

Flow of an A3

The format of the A3 is intended to guide the reader (and author) through the ‘story’ of the work. Background sets the scene, current state tells you what actions you’ve taken and how you got there, results describes the impact of your actions towards your goals and remaining issues / actions tells you what you’ve got left to do.

Having a consistent structure and flow makes it easier for both authors and readers of A3s.

Background

This section summarises key information for the reader. Its content varies depending upon how familiar the reader is with the work being reported upon.

The background should also remind the reader of how the work contributes to goals.

Current State

The current state summarises where the work has got to so far. It’s useful to visualize how the current state has been arrived at from the original state e.g. through a Gantt Chart, annotated Impact Map or other representation of progress against e.g. a roadmap.

Extra information such as RAG statuses or evaluations of elements of the work can also be added in a visual way to help draw the reader’s attention to important aspects of the work.

Results

The goal of this section is to convey, quantitatively the impact of the work done so far. For example, progress against KPI targets that describe the success of the project, indications of team morale and of burndown. This section should be an objective and unbiased account of the results so far.

A balanced set of results should be shown e.g. to show that gains in one area could be being offset by losses in another. Work to show what has improved and what hasn’t.

Remaining Issues / Action Items

This section can include a variety of items depending on project state so far. It should include work to be done to finish the project, blockers in and out of the team, escalated actions etc.

A RAG status and extra notes can also be associated with these issues to highlight the most important points for consideration.

Outline completed A3 status report

FAQ

Is this just for software projects? — No. It can be used across different functions in entire organisations. The Finance, Facilities and People teams at Redgate used A3 reporting for example.

How does this relate to team walls? — The wall should already have all the information that would be on an A3.

Should a standard template be used? — It’s essential to give people support when starting off with A3s and a beginning template is a good idea. However, this shouldn’t be to prescriptive as different projects will have different needs. Peer-review is good for improving A3s and feedback from report readers is essential for this too.

Other types of A3

A3 Status Reports are just one type of A3 report. The literature also refers to A3 Project Proposal Reports — building a case for a project proposal — and A3 Problem-Solving reports — laying out a case for improvement action in response to diagnosed root causes of a problem. These other reports have the same flow and essentially the same structure although the nature of each section is slightly different. The book Understanding A3 Thinking describes these other formats in detail and relates them to the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle.