Chapter 6. Reporting outward and upward
This chapter covers
- Protecting the team from administrative details
- Reporting hours for capitalized projects
- Reporting project status for traditional, adaptive, and mixed projects
- Minimizing the effort of management reporting
At higher levels of management, people make different kinds of decisions than would be made at the team level. They need to know what’s going on across an entire program, an entire product suite, an entire value stream, or the entire enterprise. Whereas you make decisions about how to keep the work moving forward, they make decisions about whether a project should be continued or canceled, and whether a given initiative ought to be capitalized or expensed. Details about individual work packages or user stories aren’t helpful for that kind of decision-making. Those individuals need relevant, summarized information without any clutter.
At the same time, software development teams must be able to focus on their work without being distracted by administrative activities such as recording the number of hours they worked or estimating the expected completion date for a given software feature. Distractions like those interrupt flow, create delay, increase lead times, raise costs, and cause stress.