Agile reporting methods for project managers

By Rick Freedman, Special to ZDNet Asia

Rick Freedman describes the four reports that PMs typically create at the end of each iteration of Scrum agile projects.
Before we explore specific agile reporting methods, it's important to return to fundamental principles and refresh our motivations for project status reporting.
No project manager (PM), agile or traditional, denies that stakeholders deserve visibility into the project for which they are paying and on which they are relying for added business value. Any disagreement is one of degree and focus.
In traditional project management, we often spend a significant amount of our development time either trying to predict our development path or trying to track our path against these predictions. We frequently find ourselves pitted against our own predictions as we report to our customers ("You said you'd be 56 percent complete, but you're only 42 percent complete...what went wrong?").
One of the unspoken misfortunes of traditional project methods is that the PM and the team typically start out behind and in trouble and get progressively deeper and deeper into "task debt", destroying the team morale and diverting the PM from productive leadership activities to justification and detail obsession.
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