Status Reporting

My field supervisor, the project manager that I am working most closely with, and I decided to try and start my work with a small project that would give me a reason to meet the team I am working for and get a ‘quick win’ under my belt to start the project off right. My first task was to create a status report template. I began with a collection of status reports used to report to clients from five different senior project managers. I did a content analysis of them, first noting how incredibly different each report was and then recognizing some common themes.

In interviews with three project managers, I asked questions to find out more about each person’s perception of what clients want to know, what is important to communicate as well as how they arrived at the report they had used. I found that the PMs were often working with specific requests from clients on areas to report. I also found the PMs I talked with were pretty invested in their reports and felt that they had really found something that worked well for them. That particular finding inspired the recommendation that no one be asked to change to their interactions with a current client.

I have since learned that for smaller projects without a project manager, a web developer may serve as the contact to the client and sometimes needs to create a status report for the client. I began to recognize that the status report template that I was creating would most like be used by web developers in this situation and as a place to go from for new project managers. With this information, I sat down with a few web developers and had them to take a look at the template I had created and give me feedback. Web developers have different backgrounds and ways of thinking. They asked some interesting questions that lead me to add a lot more explanation of what kind of information should be reported on in each field. I think I got an interesting introduction to the arena through this first project and have created a template that will make reporting better. The challenge I see coming is next week when I present the product to the project managers and then explain (and defend) my choices and findings to the group.

Scoping the Project

To begin my capstone professional experience working with the information and organizational needs of project managers I gave myself a crash course in project management. My nonprofit background has always been more committee meeting minutes than Gantt charts so I wanted to educate myself on the process. I started with Wikipedia, looked at some process diagrams, then I explored a project management professional association site, and read some chapters from James P. Lewis' Fundamentals of Project Management. I also talked to a friend who used to be project manager at a software company and called up my brother, a civil engineer working on road projects as a project manager.

One of my initial impressions is that project management really formalizes something that has to happen in every successful instance of people working together to complete something complicated. I see that there is a balance to find between over analyzing and proper planning/monitoring. In some ways it seems like the dream job (you mean people get paid to plan and communicate progress) and in others I can see how it can be a professional nag. I anticipate that I’ll have to prevent my own project from becoming too meta as I essentially examine the process of examining a process.

In my initial information gathering period with my supervisors at the company, I found that the problem I am working on is that clients have expressed dissatisfaction with some of their interactions with their project managers. As I explored this problem further, I learned that the company is experiencing a lot of movement among project managers due to new hiring and internal personnel shifting. Clients got accustomed to one project manager (PM)’s way of gathering requirements, communicating status, and such. Then when the clients began working with a different project manager on another project, they felt like they were back at square one. Before I began interning the project management team had already began to tackle this problem. The solution they came up with is to provide some documentation and samples to communicate the best way to interact with clients. After my evaluation, we are continuing with this plan and also pursuing some training options for project managers as well as some quality assurance measures.