What does an ideal status report look like?

Question

I work with a large number of developers and contractors outside the company. I ask them to send me a quick 5-minute status of their work daily throughout the day. I sometimes have to consolidate the status of individuals in teams and sometimes consolidate the status of the week, for end-of-period reporting for my clients.

I want to learn:

• Completed items and how much time was spent on each
• Problems and time spent on each
• Elements that will be processed further, their assessments (during the person’s hours of operation) and their target dates.
• The questions they have at work.

I am looking for a format that will provide this information so far:

• Fast for developers (5-10 minutes without thinking too much)
• Easy to read and quickly browse.
• Consistent for every developer

What would you suggest?

Answer 1

Use Scrum . Create a backup of the sprint, create a table with tasks and a column for each day of the sprint. Ask people to fill out daily work hours for each task. Send a daily report, starting with a burning schedule for the sprint, and then a short two liners for each member - the last time worked and worked on. Send a weekly report with a burning schedule, red / yellow / green status for each main function (and block problems and notes if they are not green), and the remaining elements are lagging behind.

I do not have a link to the samples, but here are a few drafts:

 02/10/2008 - Product A daily status

 <Burndown chart>

 Team member A
 Last 24: feature A
 Next 24: feature A unit tests

 Team member B
 Last 24: bug jail
 Next 24: feature B

 Team member C
 Last 24: feature C
 Next 24: feature C
 Blocked on: Dependency D - still waiting on the redist from team D

 02/10/2008 - Product A weekly status <Burndown chart> ** Feature A ** - Green [note: red / yellow / green represents status;  use background color as well for better visualization] On track ** Feature B ** - Yellow [note: red / yellow / green represents status;  use background color as well for better visualization] Slipping a day due to bug jail Mitigation: will load balance unit tests on team member A ** Feature C ** - Red [note: red / yellow / green represents status;  use background color as well for better visualization] Feature is blocked on external dependency from team D. No ETA on unblock.  Mitigation: consider cutting the feature for this sprint ** Milestone schedule: ** Planning complete - 9/15 (two weeks of planning) Code complete - 10/15 (four weeks of coding) RC - 10/30 (two weeks stabilization and testing) 

Answer 2

you probably don't want to hear it, but it’s all the same -

I was in this situation on both sides of the table and came to the conclusion that these reports on minimized status are a complete waste of time for you and the developers. That's why:

• developers should work on features / results with specified deadlines.
• developers should ask questions when they arise.
• communication should flow in both directions as needed

If these things do not happen, no passive status information will fix the problems that will inevitably arise.

on the side of the developer of the fence - “fast five-minute status” [I hate this phrase, five minutes is not fast!] interrupts the flow of the developer, causing a loss of fifteen minutes (or more) of productivity (joel even blogged about this I think). But even if it’s actually only five minutes, if you have a dozen developers, you spend five man-hours a week on the administration (and this is probably more like 20)

on the side of the fence manager - folding reports on the status of individual participants in the project team, etc. - This is unproductive work that also spends your time. Most likely, no one reads the reports.

but here is the real problem: this kind of reporting and coagulation may indicate reactive management instead of active management. In other words, it doesn’t matter which methodology is used - scrum, xp, agile, rational, waterfall, home-grow or anything else - if the project is properly planned and executed, then you should already know what everyone is doing because it was planned in advance. And it doesn’t matter if it was planned in the morning or six months ago.

ignoring customer requirements for a moment, if you really need this information on a daily basis for project management, then there are probably some serious problems with the projects - ask the developer every time that they "I will continue to work on and how long it will take, for example, hints that no real planning was done in advance ...

as for client requirements, if they absolutely insist on this type (and I know that, for example, some government agencies), the best option is to provide a web interface or other application for automating boredom that will make you a convolution. You will still waste developer time, but at least you will not waste your time; -)

oh, and to answer your question literally: the status report says "goal with project plan" and nothing more; -)

Answer 3

Just give them a template laid out in a format in which you expect to see the returned data. You can also think about increasing the time they are going to devote to this and removing the sentence "not too much" if you are demanding an assessment of future work. I would not trust the assessment that someone came up with in 5 minutes. without thinking.

If you are currently using any project management software, it should be trivial for developers to record and view (or even just remember) what they did to compile it. Ideally, they will record questions or questions throughout the day and not try to find them just to fill out a report.

Your I want to know list seems to be a great starting point for creating a template. Only you will find out what is the ideal format for you.

Answer 4

It looks like you want to do extreme programming.

http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/standupmeeting.html

You can talk with the site team members using your phone with laudspeaker or some kind of VOIP.

Answer 5

As a rule, I simply relied on email as a means of reporting status, it provides simplicity and speed of completion, but does not provide any uniformity.

There are many options to achieve this, but they all risk making the process more complex and time consuming. Some of them may be:

An online form with sections for each or several sheets, each of which is a section.

All this requires some effort to create them, do you need uniformity for some purpose? for example, to automate summary reports.

An alternative would be to use some kind of project management tool that contractors have filled out while they are working, and that you could communicate at any time. I would recommend Thoughtworks Studio Mingle, but it relies on a flexible process.