Best Practice: Status Reports

For project teams, status reports have been a necessary evil for getting clear communication. Status reports often take the form of a document produced to communicate the status of activities, a practice with some common drawbacks:

• a side-activity often seen as a time burden
• document format proves burdensome to gain contributions
• status reports are based on arbitrary intervals rather than when status actually changes
• status report lets a manager scan multiple project efficiently, but without requisite context or detail
• a status report is centralized - one person needs to gather the status information
• a status report is static and inefficient - comments go through a bottleneck manager

Socialtext provides a flexible environment for not just reporting on the status of activities, but performing the activities themselves. Below is a suggested pattern for using Socialtext for status reports which you can customize to suit the needs of your team.

Project Page

A project page the center of project communication and team co-ordination. This is where the current shared understanding of the project's status goes. Team members can update their own components of the project schedule, removing the bottleneck of a central gatherer. Managers can drill down from the overview into the component detail without time-wasting status meetings.

Components of the project page can include...

• Description/Goal
• Project News
• Project Status
• Meeting Notes
• Team Members
• Resources

Project Blog (example)

The weblog helps team members communicate, and gives managers visibility, without adding an extra step to the process. Blogs allow contribution as easy as sending a message -- team members can cc: email to the weblog, making blogging a natural part of communication. Blog posts can refer to web resources and project documents within the workspace, putting comments in project context, unlike email threads where the context is difficult to discover.

• What's new
• Narrative thread of the project
• Any team member can post on anything that impacts the project
• Use Categories when post impacts task status: Completed, In Progress, Not Begun

Personal Blog (example)

Individuals can use personal blogs to share updates and information without spamming team members, and building a memory of daily activity. Bloggers are motivated by a desire to communicate with team members and remember for themselves, rather than by a mandate to keep track of minutia for a report.

• Personal contributions to project communication
• Knowledge sharing

Status Reports as a byproduct of daily work

Using a social software working environment, with "wiki" collaboration and "blog" communication, a team is able to communicate status as a byproduct of daily work.

Socialtext is valuable for a variety of daily activities, including:

• collaborative document editing,
• augmenting teleconferences and meetings,
• mailing list archive,
• annotated file sharing,
• shared spaces for other projects, groups and organizations

Simply checking "Recent Changes" provides team members and managers a valuable glance at project activity.

With the Socialtext capability for managing multiple workspaces, team members and managers can scan progress in multiple projects with a quick mouse click.

Benefits of this pattern

• Reduces the burden of reporting
• Motivation to contribute comes from social feedback
• Continual updates help surface issues immediately, rather than at a weekly or monthly lag
• Continual visibility without the drawbacks of email overload
• Ability to perform activities within the same environment they are discussed
• Greater visibility across multiple projects for multiple managers and team members