Manage It!

Use a Project Weather Report

Sometimes, your sponsors or management (or even clients) want to know how things are going daily. That’s micromanagement. But, people tend to micromanage when they don’t have data or when they have data they can’t understand. If the data in your project dashboard is at too low a level for these folks, they will keep asking you for information. Remember, senior managers think in high-level bullets, and not too many of those bullets. I’ve used a weather report^[40] for reporting status to those folks who want details but not at the level of the project dashboard.

Most often, I’ve seen these managers micromanaging during the final testing, so I’ve seen weather reports more often based on data from the testers. However, ...