Project status questions
I spent some time today catching up on some recent episodes of the .NET Rocks! podcast. One episode in particular really caught my attention that has a great discussion with Pat Hynds on why projects fail. Pat dropped some great ideas around project management and how to communicate clearly in order to progress a project smoothly.
One of the aspects I strongly believe in while running a project is to over communicate. The idea being that anyone that has a slight inkling about a project’s existence gets a status report on its progress. Pat mentioned during the show that he’s a fan of using a set of questions Bruce Bacak has developed to drive the content of his worker’s status reports. I really like these as they go one step past scrum’s daily stand up questions in order to get a much better picture of what’s happening with the project and those individuals that are driving the progress for that project.
Here’s the main questions each status report has to contain:
- What did you do today, what did you get done? - Don’t need a whole slew of details, just an overview -
- What did you do that you didn’t plan on doing? - Someone walks into your office with an emergency, etc -
- What did you plan to do and not get done, and why?
- What do you plan to do over the next time period (Hours, day, weeks)?
- What do you need from others?
- What are your problems?
