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.