In a rush? I’ll email you a copy of the project status report template, an instruction slide, and a full video walkthrough for free. Fix my project reporting
If your product management team is anything like mine, you:
- Constantly have to work to keep stakeholders on the same page and up-to-date on what’s happening
- Spend more time on project management than you’d like to
- Would much rather be product managing than project managing (but someone’s got to do it, right?)
Well, the report for keeping stakeholders across project statuses at our company was broken. Of course, conversations are a vital piece of the puzzle, but it helps to have a central report to speak to (and share asynchronously – especially as a remote team).
It felt like a chore to update the report every week, and in a way, we felt like we were micromanaging ourselves…
Inspired by Shape Up, I spent a couple of hours while watching TV reworking our reporting process, and it’s already shaping up to be a game-changer! (pun intended)
The book is filled with excellent tools and frameworks, but we had to start somewhere. After all, I’m a product manager, so I can’t help but prioritize.
Our project reporting process was broken and tedious
As our team had grown, our project reporting process hadn’t. For the most part, we’d walk key stakeholders through the status of our projects in meeting once per week. As we grew though, this became time-consuming and was starting to feel rushed even in a 90-minute meeting. At the same time, we’d grown to have team members in NYC, Europe, and Australia. This meant we could never have everyone in the same meeting – so we alternated week-to-week.
We needed a way to document and broadcast the status and progress of our projects
The reporting document we were using was focused on:
- whether the project needed external intervention
- when it was scheduled for completion
- what work was done last week; and
- what was planned for next week
It caught a lot of the detail but lacked a lot of the essential but abstract aspects like risk, uncertainty, and progress against the high-level goal.
We felt like we were micromanaging ourselves
The old method wasn’t terrible, but by listing the tasks completed and tasks planned every week – we spent a lot of time in the detail and discussing what was happening next instead of the bigger picture. Plus the details were already captured in Jira.
We want to spend our time talking strategically about our project dependencies and our rollout plans, but we’d get stuck in individual tasks and why they hadn’t been completed in the time originally planned.
After reading ShapeUp I knew we could take inspiration and fix our project tracking process
Each and every chapter of the book was filled with great ideas that I wanted to try out in our team (and have started to) – but the section on showing progress stood out as an approach that could help us better report on our projects.
The chapter on “showing progress” inspired me the rewrite our process and project status template…
Ready to skip to the good stuff? Grab a copy of the slide templates, instruction slide, and walkthrough video. Just enter your email address, and I’ll send it over.
We use Atlassian’s Jira extensively across the business, so we couldn’t just switch to Basecamp
If you’ve read the book, I’m sure you’re thinking, “why don’t you just use Basecamp?”. Basecamp is literally designed to streamline this process, and they even have a chapter dedicated to putting the system to work in their product.
Our company is a massive user of Jira across the business (not just in product & engineeri