First of all, if you're a PM and you're not having regular reporting meetings (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever it is) with your boss, take the driver's seat and schedule them. S/he will be grateful for it.
If you have the attitude of seeing what you can get away with and not reporting status on your projects (like I did in the past), because you think there's not much to report, or you think you can coast for a while, then time to shift into overdrive! Making this into a routine practice is important for many reasons including:
- Your boss doesn't have to chase you and wonder how the project is faring
- You get the help you need: Even if you have it under control, your boss may have an alternate viewpoint or helpful tips or stakeholders you need to consult to make sure you have all the bases covered, etc.
- Your boss can help your with risk assessment and mitigation
Preparing the report ahead of time clarifies your thinking and makes you think of what exactly you want to report. You have to put yourself in your boss's shoes. You don't want to put too much detail in the report but you don't want to make it too high-level either. Only by understanding your boss's needs and how s/he thinks will you arrive at the appropriate level of detail.
Furthermore, preparing the report will allow you to see if you made any real progress since the last period. It will give you perspective on what you're actually accomplishing rather than what you tell yourself you think you accomplished. Nothing makes it more real than writing it down. Your thoughts are usually very different from reality! So think of these reports as reality checks.
My own manager was out of the office for the week (I have a weekly status meeting) and so I didn't have to prep for the meeting that week. However, I went through with the exercise anyway and it was very revealing. Acting as though I had a real status meeting, I was able to see what was accomplished, and what was not. There were milestones that were achieved but on a smaller scale so I had to break those down into more fine-grained milestones. I then folded these back into my project plan, estimated durations and came up with new dates. I was also able to assess risks, and contact stakeholders for more information. That to me was amazing. It represented real pro-active project management. And I had no one breathing down my back to do this. PMs need to be real driving forces in getting projects done. This is something I'll talk about in a future post.
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