8
Not only acceptable but expected in many environments. If you do project management for the US government, OMB & ECPIC absolutely require you to report progress in %.
There is a deeper problem however; not how you report the %, but how you measure progress. Glenn Alleman has many blog posts and at least one book that touches on the topic. (My only ...
7
The message should be as factual and emotion-free as possible:
Indicate the issue in a precise, straight forward, and simple way;
Describe how the customer will be impacted;
Indicate the the likelihood and degree of impact;
Detail the cause(s) of the issue;
If the issue was predicted in your risk program, outline what you did to try to mitigate it;
...
6
TL;DR
There are some other good answers here, but "percent complete" is not only tricky to calculate reliably, but it's often implicitly tied to scheduling. That makes it difficult to talk about it without talking about schedule variance, too.
Percentages of Tasks Completed
We've all seen software installers that zoom from 0% to 83% complete in a matter ...
6
Start with the "why". What information exactly is it that Senior Management is looking for. What are they using that information for?
It could be as simple as wanting to see progress, or open to closed incidents. Until you know exactly what the information is for, you'll be doing a lot of wheel spinning. For example, I started at one company and they had a ...
5
Have you considered exporting the relevant data to Excel? If you display the Task Sheet (use the View ribbon) you can certainly save that view as PDF as well. Saving as PDF just prints the current view to a PDF printer.
I would filter and show only the tasks of interest - instead of saving the entire list.
5
Other possible solution would be to upload your MS Project file to google drive. Once there, try to open it and a popup will display asking you to use a couple of free tools:
1. Gantter for google drive
2. Project viewer for google drive
Then, I guess you can share the file with your team.
Another option would be to use Office 365 online. In that way, you ...
4
First of all: Why RAG instead of numbers with a legend or text? Because it's faster to grasp. From our cultural background we know that red is a warning color, yellow is something to be aware of, and green is more like ok. If something appears in red on my screen, I automatically look at it first. If there's to much red to focus on the specifics, I know I'm ...
4
I do not know how to tease the information out of TFS, however if you are willing to use another tool that integrates into TFS, I would suggest Eylean Board. It offers time tracking as a feature and generates time reports based on what you need. The reports are generated for each team member individually, including all of the projects they are working on.
4
I would start by asking: What is the report and who is it for?
There's no singular right answer - I don't think it's safe to say that "the Scrum Master should create all reports on behalf of the development team" or "the Scrum Master should create no reports on behalf of the development team".
A Scrum Team contains three roles - Product Owner, Development ...
3
I guess it is one of the most common problems - a PM needs to use bunch of tools and methods to steer the project and keep everyone happy except himself. It is true that you need 4 core aspects:
Planning/schedule
Organizational environment for collaboration
Analytics and metrics
Reporting
I would suggest taking a look at tools that offer everything in one ...
3
The two different reporting alternatives are not mutually exclusive. Confidence level is a statistical construct but I don't think this is what you mean. I am interpreting the use of confidence level more from a PM's/Team's subjective opinion of how things look and where things are headed.
I think BOTH should be used when communicating to stakeholders. ...
3
Adding on to what salsolatragus said, in a project environment where deadlines are critical to be met, the application of colour psychology (in RAG, or any other extension of RAG) is extremely useful as it instinctively promotes a specific awareness with less ambiguity (than a scale system), while making it appear more objective. This is useful from an ...
3
I recommend determining what you are trying to measure first, and then look at how you are organizing your project data. The answer is very likely that you'll need different groupings for different purposes -- financial forecasting, resource planning, etc.
I've found people quickly tire of micro-categorizing and you'll discover everything in the "General" ...
3
I would highly suggest updating to TFS 2013. They've implemented agile portfolio management tools, with 7 levels of work items. It is currently in preview, but it is fully supported and "go-live".
Here's a good site outlining the new features
VS 2013
The 2012 alternative is to nest PBI's inside of PBI's, and manipulate area paths to simulate various levels ...
3
Seems like you have a new project. I think the simplest solution is to keep the original PMB as is to maintain as a project artifact and create a new PMB for the revamped product. It doesn't seem like a ton of value to alter the existing schedule.
However, if there is a reason to do so I am not seeing, it is totally appropriate to make old work packages ...
3
What happens when someone raises an issue or exception report?
Usually it is something like:
Preliminary evaluation of the problem- Is it reproducible? Is all the required information present, etc.
Pass to development for their evaluation of the impact and fix options
Review by a Change Board to accept or reject the change (or seek greater clarity), or ...
3
My understanding of the PMs job is the following:
PM is responsible for the success of the project. The PM is responsible to provide necessary information to the management in order to allow good decisions. If something out of the control or capacity of the PM hinders the PM doing or achieving this, the PM has to escalate this information also. PM is ...
3
From the strictly technical point of view:
Rise a risk. In this case the risk might be project failure due to insufficient control. The cause of the risk is missing or late reports.
Perform a qualitative risk analysis (high probability, high impact)
Perform a quantitative risk analysis (will cost xy)
Don't forget to include team members / experts during the ...
3
For anyone encountering this question, this is how I do it:
Create an overall project file like allmyprojects.tjp
Include all needed tji files with
include "path-to-tji" {taskprefix sub1}
By specifying taskprefix you can have the tasks with the same ID in subprojects.
Schedule allmyprojects.tjp
In allmyprojects.tjp you can specify reports just as in the ...
3
The best person to answer this question is the person or people who are receiving the report.
But I'd take a look at your methodology for generating this report. It sounds like you are generating this report weekly. Does it really need an executive summary? I frequently write reports that cover the previous month and they are typically one page of text ...
3
I have two standard things I use to make status reports more effective; Trending and Graying Out.
Trending: Even on a simple dashboard the use of trending can help create context. Two most common ways I do this is a trending arrow and historical data.
Trending Arrow: Instead of a simple color box for status, I also provide a color arrow that points 45 ...
3
I'd expand on Joel BC answer - 'why' is the key, and being from a very similar environment (multi location / cultural place with hundreds of people reporting to a single head) I believe that understanding why such report is required is the key to define whether the proposed approaches will succeed or fail.
I believe that understanding the target audience, ...
3
One of the free option available is to use the browser extension named Jira Assistant available in below url. This extension has lot more useful features which not only helps to generate report, but also help to log your work on daily basis with notifications, calendar integrations and lot more cool features which helps both managers and team members in ...
3
If you need to track costs, track it at the Scrum Team level rather than at the individual level.
A simple way to do this is to take a blended cost per person and multiply it by the number of people in the team and the duration of sprints.
For example:
Average cost of staff is £600 per day and Scrum Team 1 has 7 people in it and do a two week sprint. ...
3
I would have two concerns over using a committed vs delivered metric to solve this problem:
People may not care if you are committing to more points than you are delivering. Some may even see it is a good thing.
Committed vs delivered does not measure the impact on quality. What happens if the team is delivering all they commit to, but the quality has ...
3
TL;DR
Don’t create a custom set of metrics if you can avoid it. Instead, negotiate scope when possible, and leverage the framework’s built-in mechanisms for evaluating opportunity costs against significant scope changes when necessary.
Negotiating Scope
In Scrum, modest changes in scope must be negotiated between the Product Owner and the Development Team,...
2
If you are looking for a tool that makes TFS more user friendly, Eylean could be a great option. It offers a two way integration with TFS and represents the tasks in a clear task board that can be projected on a big plasma tv or elsewhere.
2
Let me suggest implementing this with the JIRA PDF View Plugin.
(Disclaimer: this is a commercial product, and I'm a developer working on this. Nevertheless it perfectly fits your needs, so recommending this should not validate any rules - hopefully.)
This plugin is fully programmable. In fact, there is already a "timesheet and invoice" template (sample) ...
2
Depending on what it is you are looking for, i see two solutions:
If you want to have some simple progress reports accessible to anyone interested, it probably would be easiest to make them yourself, with something like an excel spreadsheet. Pick out the key points you want to represent, collect the data every week and update your spreadsheet. This way, ...
2
The Copy > Copy Picture option in 2013 has worked wonders for our communication. You can copy for screen, print, full size, etc. and it will be stored as an image on the clipboard.
Before discovering this, PDF was our way of distributing MS Project information to non-MS Project users and it didn't go nearly as well.
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