In Lecture 5, I played a minesweeper game. The goal was to eliminate the planned "delayed mines". However, there were always some "mines" that were hard to guard against. When we were making plans, we obviously had thought very carefully, but it was only after a few days of actual work that we realized that many things were not that simple.
1 Learning scenario: Estimate 3d, and the result is 2w?
"We are working on the course system. Due to policy reasons, we now need to urgently expand and modify the shopping cart function. In the initial evaluation, the research and development team thought that the function was not complicated, and 3 days would be enough. But after the start of work, we found that this "pit" change involved too much Big, the old order system is so messed up that it's hard to get started, and it seems like it's been at least two weeks now."
But the problem is that this task is just on the critical path, if it is postponed, everything must be postponed. The boss specifically confessed that this launch is related to the most important KPI at the end of the year and cannot be postponed!
Let's calm down first! Mount Tai collapses before the color remains unchanged. This is the mentality that project managers must cultivate. Even if you do a good job in planning, you will still encounter various situations, even emergencies, during the project monitoring process. Effective communication and reporting is essential at this time.
The three main points of project reporting that must be mastered during the monitoring process can help you promote the resolution of problems through reporting.
2 Urgent Reporting: Facing Problems Directly
As a project executor, I just want to work with peace of mind and don't want anyone to bother me with questions. If you encounter difficulties in the implementation, you are often more accustomed to pondering on your own, working overtime to catch up with the progress, and never revealing the problem until the last moment. As a result, when it is discovered, there is often a huge progress deviation!
Admitting that you need help when you have a problem can be difficult. After all, many people have the mentality of "I really want to do things well and impress my boss". But as a project manager, when things are beyond your control, we should face the problem directly, present and give feedback on the difficulties as soon as possible. This kind of honesty and honesty is the most beneficial to the whole project.
how to be honest
report! See how to report an urgent problem.
emergency report
exist:
- Project emergencies
- Or when an important risk status change is indicated
real-time reports such as:
- high risk delay
- big online issues
- or important customer complaints
- …
The purpose is to communicate important changes to the project to the entire group or key stakeholders to:
- Timely Coordinate Response
- Or seek external support for the first time
How to write an emergency report?
Due to the suddenness of the incident, emergency reports generally do not stick to specific forms, the key is to convey information concisely and organize follow-up actions. An emergency report contains 5 basic elements: event description, impact and consequences, follow-up analysis, response measures, and required support. The following cases:
- Description of the event: The shopping cart modification function has a high risk of delay
- Impact and consequences: Since this function is on the critical path of the project, it is likely to cause an overall delay of 2w
- Follow-up analysis: In this issue of the shopping cart transformation function, some adjustments involve the underlying order system, which contains a large number of legacy codes, which have not been maintained for a long time. The previous assessment of this risk was not sufficient, and the risk of modification is very high, which may affect the stability of the order system of the whole station, and the specific impact still needs to be analyzed in detail
- Response measures: The main project will go all out to do a good job in technical evaluation, and give a detailed task evaluation schedule within this week; at the same time, product personnel will intervene to investigate the feasibility of avoiding the old system and meeting the needs, and will give a research within this week in conclusion
- Support needed: Senior technician familiar with the old system and a case of caffeine
After submission, the sponsor will immediately notice that the project team is facing difficult issues and possible impacts. At the same time, he also learned:
- The team is trying to solve this problem
- what is the current solution
- What kind of support and help do you need?
If you can communicate with the initiator face to face in the first time, the effect will be better. The specific content of the communication can also refer to this template.
Back to the case, because the project manager:
- Timely and honest risk warning
- Orderly Arrangement of Emergency Measures
The impact of this problem can be quickly controlled. Finally, the product logic is modified together with the development to avoid all high-risk items after launch as much as possible. This urgent report allowed them to timely adjust the schedule of the follow-up grayscale release and the operation plan after launch, avoiding greater impact and loss on the user side, and at the same time minimizing the impact on KPIs.
In fact, the sudden emergency during the implementation process is a test of the professionalism of the project manager:
- You must face the problem head-on and stand up to take responsibility in an emergency. This will not make the boss less impressed with you, and it will allow the decision-maker to choose a better way to deal with it in the first place.
- You should describe the possible impacts and consequences as concisely as possible, the current proposals and the support required, and try to maximize the coordination and cooperation of all relevant links to jointly deal with the problem
3 Regular reports
Three questions to be answered in the project weekly report.
3.1 How should routine reporting be done?
Many students’ project weekly reports are as shown in the picture below. Although the weekly report clearly lists what they did last week and what they will do next week, I am often at a loss after reading it.
Because the weekly report only has a bunch of task journals listed, but the project:
- What's the overall status of progress?
- Risk controllable?
- Is there a problem with achieving the goal?
For a good project weekly report, the most important thing is to answer these 3 questions well. In order to describe the status of the project more intuitively, we can use the weather icon to divide the project into the following six levels:
With weather icons and risk level prompts, the project report is much clearer, as shown below:
The project weekly report is a common means to communicate the status of the project to the project team and stakeholders. You should present the overall picture of the project in a concise manner, objectively display the project problems, and promote problem solving.
Weekly report template, you can choose the appropriate content module according to the needs of your project team:
The most essential are the overall project status assessment, risk list, project overview and plan changes. A good weekly report should allow everyone to form a unified and clear overall understanding of the three questions about the status quo of the project. This overall cognition allows people who are usually stuck in detail work to understand and look at the whole from a global perspective, so as to better complete their work.
The weekly newspaper reading time should not exceed 5 minutes. Therefore, when writing about progress and problems, avoid details, just write the main points. The weekly report is not to show the workload, let alone to show the sense of presence, it only talks about the key points!
4 Data reporting: make good use of the power of "transparency"
As I mentioned in the first lecture, as a novice project manager, I often feel that there are problems everywhere. I urge this today and push that tomorrow, but nothing can be pushed, and no one cooperates. Later, I found out that instead of following one by one every day, it is better to spend more time to "transparent" all these situations!
Just do it! I started working on various diagrams in Jira. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Take the improvement measures for online accidents as an example. Every time it is said that a comprehensive security system must be established, but often a month has passed without any progress. So, I pulled out the accident data, and according to the cause location, I made an intuitive data chart by category. Later, I found that as long as I insist on posting in the project team group for three days, the data on the form will change silently, and the speed of clearing the improvement items will be much faster.
That was the first time I experienced the power of "transparency". After that, in project reports and daily follow-up, I will not use words if I can use charts and data. As a project manager, you may not have much power in your hands, but there is a powerful power that you can obtain unlimitedly, that is "transparency".
I will introduce you to several common project dashboards. You can quickly draw these charts in JIRA. Among them, the countdown chart is a very eye-catching sign, which can help everyone establish a clear sense of time, and the status distribution of work tasks And the distribution of remaining workload, it can clearly show the work arrangement of each member, and quickly find and locate the bottleneck of the workload of the personnel in the execution process.
Here I want to introduce the Burn Down Chart in particular, which is a work chart used in the agile development method to represent the trend of task completion. The horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents workload. If you enter the tasks and workload into JIRA after planning, and set the expected completion time of the iteration, such a chart can be automatically generated.
This kind of chart can visually carry out process forecast and risk warning , among which, the gray line is the baseline of the planned completion, and the red line represents the actual completion. In the case of good progress, the red actual line will stick to the gray plan line, all the way down until it "burns out". During the daily stand-up meeting, after updating the task status, the team can look at the changes in the burndown chart together. If the red line stays high for several consecutive days and stays above the gray line, it means that the progress continues to be lower than expected, and you should pay more attention to it, analyze specifically which link is holding back, and then initiate a targeted improve.
There are rich plugins on JIRA to obtain various charts and data. However, what is more important than tools is that you have to combine the current items in the project team that need to be promoted or improved, and select appropriate data and charts to be "transparent".
5 summary
During the monitoring process, there are several methods for reporting project progress, including the five elements of emergency reporting, the important content to be included in regular project weekly reports, and how to use the power of transparency to promote problem solving through data reporting.
"Emergency reports face problems head-on, regular weekly reports are concise, and data is transparent and intuitive!" Ai Wen concluded. Aiwen spoke clearly and logically, and I couldn't help but praise: "It's great! Aiwen, it seems that you have grasped the essentials." "Well, teacher, but I still have a problem in the monitoring process. It was very procrastinating in the early stage, and the requirement draft and design draft were often given very late, and the development was under great pressure, so we had to work overtime desperately. Is there any good countermeasure for this situation?
Transparency, in order to promote changes, I try to objectively record the time distribution of each link of "planning, design, development, testing". From this simple data record, we can see that almost every version is procrastinated from requirement design to the end, and development and testing are desperate Overtime, which brings a lot of rework and quality risk. After this data was displayed in the project report, it aroused great concern from the management. In the next version, these problems were quickly improved.
The project progress report is a very important platform for the project manager to communicate and speak out to all stakeholders. If used well, it can become a powerful leverage for the project manager. The secret to using this lever effectively is: if you want to improve something, be transparent about it, the more intuitive the better!