The delivery report nobody skips
A weekly written report sounds like overhead until you notice it is the only artefact that reliably catches a project drifting before the client does.
Every engagement we run produces a written report every Friday. Scope, risk, burn, blockers, and what changed since last week. It goes to the client whether or not the news is good, and it is written by the delivery lead, not generated from a tool.
The reason it is written rather than a dashboard is that a dashboard cannot say 'this is going to slip and here is why'. Numbers describe the past. A sentence commits someone to a judgement about the future, and that judgement is the actual product of a delivery lead.
It also changes the incentive at the point where projects go wrong. The typical failure is not a sudden disaster; it is three weeks of quiet optimism followed by a difficult conversation. If you have to write down the risk on Friday, the difficult conversation happens in week one, when it is still cheap.
We keep the format fixed and short. One page. Scope changes get listed explicitly with a cost, so nobody arrives at the end of a fixed-price project arguing about what was included. Risks carry an owner and a date.
Clients tell us the reports are the thing they forward internally. That was not the intent, but it is the strongest signal that they are useful: a report that gets forwarded is one that answers the question the CFO was going to ask anyway.