Early in my career as an engineer and manager, I found that weekly reports were a pain to produce. It was usually something put together in a hurry on Friday afternoon or Monday morning.
As a project manager, these reports can be invaluable. They can provide a quick and simple insight on the health of your project. They can also help you target the areas to question in terms of progress or quality.
For example, when the same one week task shows up over the course of two or three weeks, it's time to talk to the individual responsible to see why progress is so slow. In other cases, observations by staff will point out dependencies that were missed in the original plan.
I like to use a simple format that will be less than 1 screen (20 lines) in email format.
- What was Completed
- What will be done this Week
- What Issues need Help to Resolve.