Blogging Project Status Reports
Phil Wolff has a good idea:
Blog your Project Status Flash Reports for communicating up..
Reporting a project's status upward shouldn't take more than 5 minutes. The technique is to boil everything down to a well structured, bullet-heavy, one-pager you can forward weekly or monthly.
He provides a couple of templates for project status reports.
Flash reports, if timely and shared electronically, can eliminate a program management round-table meeting every week. Attendees x payrate x meeting length x 52; you do the math. Even with meetings, you get faster, more focused meetings.
I don't know if eliminating meetings should really be the goal. As he says, faster, more focused meetings and allowing better communication and deeper understanding seem like bigger benefits to me.
Flash Reporting Tips:
- Create a channel or category for each project's upward communication. This should be an access controlled web site: you'll be reporting personnel issues and bad news on occasion. Not necessarily for the whole team's eyes.
- Email a copy of your flash report to your project sponsors, including a permalink.
- Use a post title when you blog your report, making it easier to find. "Project Name - Flash Report - Week Starting 7/7/2004" lets you organize different reports
- You rarely fit everything on one page, but force yourself. Prioritizing your messages assures sponsor attention to things that matter most to you.
[a klog apart]
A couple of things I'd add or change on that list:
- You shouldn't need to email a copy to the PM. He should be using an aggregator to gather the reports.
- Set up a process running on the network that harvests from all of the individual channels to produce a master report.
- That same process could store and index reports into a searchable database. This makes it easier to find (esp. older) information on a particular topic.
12:55:58 PM 
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