Bas de Baar always has an interesting view of the world. A recent post was about deviant behavior
and status reporting. Status reports always seem to be a thorn in the
side of many project managers and managers in general. Status reports
tend to be "wrong headed" in general. Here's how to fix this and get
back to adding value.
The status report must:
- Describe in some graphical or simple textual form how the planned work was measured against the completed work. Earned Value is one simple tool. A graph of BCWS versus BCWP is the simplest way. Agilest would have "burn down" charts. But these do not show the "value" of the delivered items, just that they are delivered.
- Some graphical means of showing a color status for the work streams. RED, YELLOW, GREEN is a good one. By work streams I mean the obvious deliverables from the project. If something is YELLOW or RED, there must be a plan to "get to GREEN."
- The report must show the risks, mitigations, and retirement of risk for all the items that threaten the success of the project.
- The report must do this on a single 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper.
Now doing this can take several forms, but each form MUST not contain some rambling on narrative about all the gory details of the project. The only way out of "status report tar pit," is really simple:
State
before hand what is expected to be delivered in the form of measurable,
tangible, assessable outcomes. Deliverables. Then state in the status
report that you either produced these deliverables of you didn't. If you
didn't when will you? If you're having troubles delivering, what will
you do to remove this trouble. How much will all this new work cost?
This is the basis of Deliverables Based Planning.
Tell what you're going to deliver. Tell that you delivered it. If not, tell me when you will deliver it.
That's it. It's that simple. It's done every two weeks on multi-billion $ programs.
