Project Management – How to Report Agile Project Progress to Non-Programmer Employer

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I have a problem on reporting progress to my employer. I am a part-time programmer, handling a software project for my school's (non-technical) department.

Contact person:
1. The staff who actually uses the software and raises feature requests,
2. My boss (non-programmer), and she is not the software's user.

The project's nature:
It is a ready-made software, which has been bought from third-party.
I have to modify or add feature/function to this software in order to cater for department's need.
This is a software is need to use throughout the semester.
Not all features needs to be used at the beginning.

Hence we are using the Agile model:
When the staff needs a certain feature, they raises a request, and I make the changes. By the end of the semester, I suppose all the required features will be raised and implemented.

The problem:
Everytime my boss asked me how the progress, I can't answer, because I don't know how to answer.
I don't have complete list of all the required features.
Even though I have completed features which were raised last week, I still can't tell my boss I have "completed", because new features are coming in too, and I don't know how much.
I can't tell "We have how many % completion" nor "We are going to complete it by xxx".
Sometime out of 3 requests, I manage to complete 2, I would tell my boss "I have completed 2, but there is one feature not complete yet".
After a long period of time, I sounds like "I always have something not finish, after so long".

Being unable to report the progress makes me looks really bad.
It's not about how much I've done, it's about how to let people know.
If I were the manager, and my staff keep failing to report the progress to me for months, I will feel this guy is incapable too.

Do you guys have any idea how to report, or answer question as simple as "what is the status / progress of the software modification"?

UPDATE
My boss doesn't involve in development task directly, so she doesn't have a clue on what I am doing, or how the program works. We don't meet regularly as she is busy, and I feel it will be waste of time because she is not the main user, she doesn't know the detail of the program.

I meet regularly with the staff who uses and knows better about the software.

I feel hard to explain the progress to my boss.

Best Answer

This is a common problem when you're a programmer who works independently, and you report to somebody who's not technical.

Bosses like that mostly want to be able to figure out a few things:

  • How happy are the users?
  • Are the things the users want getting done?
  • Is what you're doing worth the money you're being paid?

An Agile burn-down or anything else like that would be a terrible idea!As you said, your boss is really busy, so they wouldn't have time to learn about it, and probably isn't interested in it anyway.

So if I were you, I'd email them a report once a week containing:

  • An "executive summary" at the start: "Finished 3 features this week, and got 2 new feature requests. At the start of this week, there were 11 unfinished feature requests, and at the end there were 10."
  • A feature status list, with a brief sentence each, in three groups:
    1. The features you got done during the week
    2. The feature requests that came in during the week
    3. The other features in the "backlog"
  • A brief discussion of anything that was complicated or unusual, preferably using non-technical language.

If I were your boss, and I hadn't been getting any reports, I'd be very happy to get that every week. And if I wanted something different, I'd ask you for it.

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