Ask HN: How do you report your progress or status to your Manager/Boss?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5424843

by dawie • 13 years ago

8 11 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

1) How do you report your progress or status to your Manager/Boss?

2) How often do you submit these reports?

koos• 13 years ago

1) At my job we have a Word Template to fill in and send to our boss every Friday. At a previous job we just created an email answering: What did you work on this week? What are you planning on working on next week.

2) We had to submit these reports weekly.

nonamegiven2• 13 years ago

Text file, today at the top, copy that part at the end of the day and email it.

dawie3• 13 years ago

So you have to submit them daily? Would you mind posting it here or sending it to me at davidsmit at google's email service?

nonamegiven2• 13 years ago

Yep, daily, and then we recite the same thing at our daily morning standup.

Don't think I'll share a real one, they're probably proprietary and no upside for me in that. But I can give you a fake one.

Below is the top of my file. The last entry, the dated one, gets pushed down every day under a fresh one, and I update it as I go during the day.

The markup syntax is vimwiki http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2226, but it could be any markup. Years ago I used to use markup something like this without transforming it, before there was anything like markdown or reST.

At the end of the day I run Vimwiki2HTML from within vim, and my daily status html page is updated; it's just a local page, I don't serve it. I copy today's entry from that and email my boss. Ten years ago I would have just copied the plain text from the vim file.

Every once in awhile I email the ever growing file to myself at home.

Scripts that generate the daily template after the example.

  =Status=
  
  ==Long term ToDo==
  * Some long term thing that currently doesn't have any tasks:
  
  * Some slightly more interesting long term thing:
      * practice elocution
      * study needed inventions
      * study electricity
  
  
  ==Immediate ToDo==
  * Follow up on that thing by end of the week.
  * See if that other thing is ready.
  
  
  ==2013.03.22 Friday==
  
  ===Today===
  * Wrote test ABC.
  * Reviewed test BCD.
  * Passed test CDE.
  * Failed test DEF.
  * Wrote bug ticket 234 describing test DEF failure.
  * Cleared ticket 345.
  
  ===Tomorrow===
  * Write test XYZ
  * Run tests MNO, PQR. 
  
  ===Roadblocks===
  * My cube mate keeps looking at me.

This generates a date:

  $ cat bin/adate
  #! /usr/bin/env bash
  
  dt="$1" || "today"
  date --date="$dt" +"%Y.%m.%d %A"

  $ adate
  2013.03.22 Friday

  $ adate Monday
  2013.03.25 Monday

  $ adate "last Monday"
  2013.03.18 Monday

  $ adate "next Friday"
  2013.03.29 Friday

And this generates a daily entry skeleton:

  $ cat bin/edate
  #! /usr/bin/env bash
   
  dt="$1" || "today"
  echo "==$(adate $dt)=="
  echo ""
  echo "===Today==="
  echo "*"
  echo ""
  echo "===Tomorrow==="
  echo "*"
  echo ""
  echo "===Roadblocks==="
  echo "*"
  echo ""
  echo ""

  $ edate
  ==2013.03.22 Friday==
   
  ===Today===
  *
   
  ===Tomorrow===
  *
   
  ===Roadblocks===
  *

Then in vim, put your cursor above the previous day's entry, and:

  :r!edate

which creates a new blank entry with one empty bullet per section.

srpt2• 13 years ago

I only submit reports to my boss when he asks for them, either in person or by email.

I do this maybe once a week if he's not at the office and maybe 2-3 times a week if he is at the office. (It really just depends on his mood.)

dawie3• 13 years ago

Whould you mind sharing one of these reports with me?

srpt2• 13 years ago

Emailed reports are usually project-specific, like "Projects X and Y are done, I'm stalled on project Z with this issue...".

In person it's usually a 2-minute meeting where we clarify which projects are done, which are priorities, etc.

...and sometimes the 2-minute update meetings turn into 2-hour planning meetings.

sharemywin• 13 years ago

used version one for a while but it was kinda painful. hard to update a lot of status all at once. We also did daily stand ups.

dawie3• 13 years ago

What are you using today?

acesubido• 13 years ago

We use a project management tool:

1) We make "progress reports" by updating our own tasks assigned to us within the Sprint. The "boss/manager" just takes a peek at burn-down and other charts. For more details he just takes a peek at the latest updates on the comments.

2) Daily, I take 5 minutes to write a simple comment on the task assigned to me. Daily updates are better than weekly ones, weekly comments and paragraph type progress reports tend to be too abstract for it to have actual meaning. Sometimes paragraph-type reports are too verbose for a decision maker to make decisions upon. We let the charts speak for themselves in terms of weekly overviews.

If a software development team uses docs and text files to submit reports, 1) the development process is still in its infancy or 2) no budget is alotted for project management tools because quality software development is not a priority for the company.

Ask HN: How do you report your progress or status to your Manager/Boss?

Related Stories