Collective Wisdom from the Experts 185
• If you’re managing more than one developer, create a group incentive. “If
I get all status report by 3 p.m. every Friday from all of you for one month,
everyone gets the next Friday afternoon off,” or, “I’ll bring in food for a
group lunch.” Nobody wants to be the one who keeps his or her team from
the reward.
• Make it easy to write the report. Provide a template or an electronic tool
to submit the status. Be prepared to rewrite the verbiage in a way that
will be understandable to everyone. Your vice-president most likely won’t
understand “lcl check-in to main build lab.” You can change it to “feature
milestone 2 achieved; project on track.”The point is, make sure you look at the task of completing periodic status
reports from the other person’s perspective. Status reports are important.
Everyone needs to know what’s going on. Senior management cares about
milestones, while business management cares about budget. Your job as a
project manager is to make sure that every stakeholder understands what’s
going on with the project—but also to realize that not all stakeholders are able
to fully analyze all the technical nuances of what is transpiring without your
help.
Find an effective input tool and work to achieve as much understanding of
the underlying tasks as you can. You are the liaison to create a comprehensive
status report that meets the needs of all stakeholders.