Project Status Reporting Simple Feedback - Part 1

Submitted by mauzenne on Sun, 11/20/2011 - 23:26.
in

This guidance describes how to give feedback on how you want projects reported on.

Projects are generally governed by Horstman's Law of Project Management: Who does What by When. Sometimes it's a five year project, and sometimes it's 3 weeks. But it boils down to a string of tasks and deadlines, done by humans. And often we humans end up straggling after ripe blackberries when we should be meeting deadlines.

One thing all of us Project Managers can do is to ask for what we want, and then give feedback when we get it, and when we don't. Easy!


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tco38's picture
Submitted by tco38 on Tue, 11/22/2011 - 12:49.

Status Reporting for a Help Desk

Hi everyone,

This is my first post on the fourms;  I've been enjoying the podcasts for several months.  I'm looking for some guidance on how to approach status reporting for important help desk tickets for a software company.  Some of these tickets require daily updates and just by the nature of troubleshooting I don't see a way to measure red-amber-green in meaningful way here.  

My best guess would be to use the status reporting on next steps of the investigation, but I'm not sure if that's too granular as most of the scenerios that would either be a red or green situation.  Perhaps status reporting is better suited for longer term projects instead of selected help desk tickets, but I would certainly appreciate any suggestions.

-Mike Edwards

jzklein's picture
Submitted by jzklein on Wed, 11/23/2011 - 06:20.

Help Desk Tickets

Hi Mike,

Status reporting works great for long term tasks and daily help desk tasks. Tasks are either done, not done or somewhere  in between.  I would suggest that you try your best keep your long term tasks out of your help desk ticket reports.  I also found that my boss would only want to hear about the their tasks and not so much about the tasks that everybody else asked me for help with.

 

Jacob

dipsen's picture
Submitted by dipsen on Thu, 11/24/2011 - 10:44.

Help desk tickets

Mike,

Do you have a SLA (Service Level agreement) with the business on response time?  Maybe it's just a matter of reporting if you are meeting the response time requirements of your department.  That has been my experience.  Also if tickets are "escalated" that is another area your manager may be able to assist with getting the action required.  Those are the sorts of items your manager would want to know about. 

Red = Tickets not resolved and taking too long to resolve.

Yellow = Tickets mostly being resolved, with a few outstanding issues that need fixing.

Green = All tickets resolved within the SLA.

 

Dale

tco38's picture
Submitted by tco38 on Mon, 11/28/2011 - 14:48.

 Thanks for the responses

 Thanks for the responses Dale and Jacob.  I can definitely benchmark the status according to the SLA we have and have everyone report off of those standards.  I appreciate the help!