Interviewing

Let’s assume we want to hire engineers who are “smart guys who get things done”.

Translating this expression to corporate-speak frequently seen in job descriptions, “smart” means “quick learners”, while “get things done” means “excellent problem solvers”.

Here is my preferred interview routine.

Before the Interview

  • the hiring manager takes the job description, translates it into a list of areas of expertise to be evaluated during the interview
  • the hiring manager talks to the interview team. Each interviewer picks an area of specialty to questions the interviewee, prepares problems to ask.
    • remind the team which questions they are not allowed to ask (in US this includes age, religion, family status and many others)
  • The hiring manager ensures interview tools and – usually white board, computer – and calendar invites. Allocating 1 hour (including a break) per interviewer is usual – sometimes longer time may be necessary. Panel of 4 interviewers is typical – one of those being the hiring manager.

During the Interview

We would like to identify and hire engineers with top technical abilities. One can think of engineer’s technical ability as

ability(t) = learningSpeed * t + experience

where ability(t) is person’s technical capability over time, experience is the experience the person already has at the time of the interview and learningSpeed is how fast the person can learn.

Best hires have both learningSpeed and experience high – these individuals are likely star performers, highly prized and hard to find.

Next best are those with high , low experience – “high promise”, also known as “potential star performers” – and low learningSpeed, high experience individuals, who fall under the category of “experienced professionals”.

During the interview

  • Each interviewer asks problems, similar to Google and Microsoft style, as opposed to chat about previous experience.
    • It is acceptable to chat about previous experience to map out breadth of interviewee’s background, yet problem solving is far higher priority and should consume most of the time.
    • Example: ask software development candidate to code problems.
    • Example: ask digital design candidate to design a circuit, simulate it and synthesize it.
  • Interviewer should always ask same problems to interviewees – asking same problems to all interviewees makes it easy to compare interviewees “apples to apples” and collect statistics for grading – explained below.

Now, let’s look at how we can assess learning speed vs experience.

Assessing K – Quick Learner Ability

  • At least interviewee – usually the hiring manager – should ask a common sense problem solving question, Microsoft style. The common sense problem should not require previous knowledge of or experience in any particular technical area. Success likely indicates the candidate is “quick learner”, ideally and hopefully regardless of candidate’s experience and area of expertise.
  • Ask a problem specifically outside of candidate expertise – something the candidate does not know. Keep the problem simple. Let the candidate take time, Google tutorials and find a solution without any help.
    • For example, while interviewing a web software developer, ask him/her to build and run an Android app that simply displays Hello World, nothing more complicated than that.
    • Make sure the candidate indeed has no clue about the subject. Make it clear to the candidate that the reason you are asking a question he/she does not know is to test candidate’s learning abilities as part of job’s requirements.

Assessing E – Expertise

Job description sets out expectations – what the successful candidate must be able to do, what kinds of problems to solve and at what difficulty level – senior, junior, intermediate. Pick your interview problems to be representative of job requirements and associated difficulty.

  • Example: software web developer engineer should be given problems on front end web development (write Angular client doing this and that), back end web development (write Node.js backend with endpoints), databases (connect Node.js to MongoDb, define data schemes if applicable), collaboration tools – version control (create repository, create branch, make pull request), issue tracking, Javascript, etc.
  • Example: hardware printed circuit board engineer should be asked problems on schematic design (design a certain circuit and make schematic ), electronic circuits, board layout (lay out sample circuit), understanding of noise in circuits, etc.
  • Example: machine learning/deep learning engineer should be given problems on probability and statics, classical machine learning, deep learning (network types, key methods, popular models, solving training issues), college algebra fundamentals, popular tools including TensorFlow, Python coding, familiarity with latest publications, familiarity with latest popular techniques (e.g. reinforcement learning), etc.
  • Example: digital design engineer should be given problems on RTL coding (code Verilog with certain function), digital design fundamentals (state machines, etc.), simulation (simulate RTL, gate netlist), synthesis and timing closure (identify paths not meeting timing), optimization for area and power, design for FPGA vs. ASIC (re-design RTL code to make it implementable, how to cross clock domains), Linux/python/C coding, hardware micro-architecture (architect a larger design), System C modeling, design for test, ASIC routability, etc.

Behavioral Assessment

Here we have to check candidate’s a host of behavioral aspects – good work attitude, ethics, integrity, is he/she a good team player, can the candidate handle feedback, can the candidate handles the stress, is the candidate open-minded or has the not-invented-here syndrome (likes only his/her ideas, rejects other’s ideas), is there an ego problem, are there potential sexual harassment tendencies? Make sure the candidate is civilized, not rude, communicates well – can explain him/herself clearly, convey points and so on.

Lastly, check if the candidate fits your particular company’s culture – the way company does things. For example, if working long hours is part of your company’s culture, check if the candidate is willing to work long hours as well if hired.

Best way to check all these aspects has been to observe how the candidate solves interview problems. Explain the problem to the candidate – is the candidate listening carefully? Can the candidate explain his/her proposed solution to the problem? How the candidate reacts to your critique of his/her solution? How the candidate treats each interviewer? Does the candidate chat and get along with the team during lunch?

When interviewing senior candidates make sure to have a junior interviewer on the team – ask the junior interviewer if the senior candidate treated the junior interviewer with due civility, as opposed to ignoring.

After the Interview

  • each interviewer scores candidate’s answers, calculates an aggregated score, – see below, – writes up feedback and chooses recommendation to hire, hold or pass. This is done before discussing feedback with other team members –  to avoid potential bias.
  • Next, team members share their hire/hold/pass recommendations with each other. If all recommendations are unanimously “hire”, usually make offer. If the recommendations are less than stellar – pass on the candidate.
  • If the recommendations are largely to hire, but one or two interviewers recommend holding or passing – the hiring manager calls a meeting to  “calibrate” the team and to troubleshoot poor interviewing.
    • Calibration means making sure all interviewers use similar expectations about the level of expertise required to get this job.  For example, if the opening is for a senior analog design engineer, excellent knowledge of analog circuit design is a must. An interviewer recommending “hire” to a weak candidate has to be instructed to only recommend “fail” candidates like that.
    • Poor interviewing means interviewer did not ask the right questions, did not ask hard-enough problems – resulting in the wrong impression that the candidate is great, while other interviewers correctly saw the shortcomings.
  • The hiring manager double-checks with each interviewer on how was the interviewee attitude – will everyone on the team like working with the candidate? If any team member reports questionable attitude, usually reject the candidate.
  • Before making an offer –  the hiring manager also asks the team to compare the candidate in question to previous candidates. Don’t make offers to barely-passing candidates – only to top-ranking ones.

Candidate Scoring

  • Interviewer grades problem answers on scale of 0 to 10 and keeps records of grades for candidates interviewed so far. Having interviewed a handful of candidates, these records become statistics – the interviewer can plot a distribution of grades for each question and see which candidate answered that question poorly, at an average level – and most importantly which candidate’s answer was well above average, perhaps an outlier.
  • To decide on hiring recommendation, grades for individual problems should be combined into a single score. This can be done by assigning each problem a weight and summing up – a weighted sum of candidate’s grades.
  • The choice of weights is decided between the interviewer and the hiring manager to tailor scoring to the job description – assign larger weights to core, must-have skills, while giving less weight to auxiliary nice-to-have skills. Keep the sum of weights to 1, so that the resulting aggregated score ranges from 0 to 10.
  • Lastly, take aggregated scores for previously-interviewed candidates and the candidate being interviewed, plot the scores as a distribution, see where the candidate being interviewed  falls in the plotted distribution. If the candidate’s aggregated score is exceptionally high and shows as an  outlier – recommend hiring.

Meeting Minutes

Why Keeping Meeting Minutes is Important

Keeping meeting minutes is a sign of a well-managed project.

Reasons and importance of writing down meeting minutes may be all too obvious. Yet, time and again teams and organizations big and small choose not to bother about it. It may be tempting to assume that professionals attending the meeting will understand and remember everything that was said during that meeting. Besides, the meeting organizer must be a busy person and has better things to do instead of copying things down.

Meeting minutes:

  1. Ensure everyone knows what they have to do, what they are responsible for

This eliminates confusion and frustrating situations when people show up to the next meeting without having worked on action items assigned to them. When asked why they came unprepared, the staff answers they did not understand that something was assigned to them.

  1. Provide visibility into the meeting and project progress

Reading meeting minutes can be great for everyone who is not attending the meeting

  1. Help monitoring project progress

Seeing action items and issues stay unresolved one meeting after another can signal the upper management that there may be an issue requiring upper management’s attention.

  1. Save time for staff

Some staff, e.g. upper management, needs to be appraised of meeting results, but does not need to participate in the actual discussion. Having well-written minutes allows this type of participants to skip attending meetings.

  1. Help writing weekly status and update schedule

Project manager can use meeting minutes reports when writing the weekly status and to update schedule

  1. Help ensure meeting decisions and minutes are error-free

Meeting minutes recipients can inspect the minutes and flag any errors. In particular, each staff member is likely to check carefully exactly what action items were assigned to them.

Meeting Minutes Example

Meeting minutes report can be a brief email that looks like this. You can download the meeting minutes sample in PDF format from here.

Meeting Minutes Sample - Engineema

Let’s look at the contents in detail:

  1. The email title contains meeting name, project name and “Meeting Minutes” heading
  • This makes it easy to find meeting minutes later in your email.
  1. The email is addressed to meeting both meeting attendees and non-attendees who need to be appraised of meeting results
  • For example, functional managers may not be attending project meetings, yet need to know in general what is happening with the project. Another example is when there are two or more teams working on the project. When the teams are located in vastly different time zones, some of the teams may not be able to attend, yet must know exactly what went on in each weekly meeting.
  1. Action Items section
  • Comes first and clearly lists what activity has been assigned to whom (note name specified in parenthesis), along with the due date
  1. Decisions made section
  • Clearly documents decisions. Decisions are not assigned to anyone.
  1. Attendees section
  • Lists all attendees – this is helpful to “debug” communication, attendance and efficiency issues.
  • Example: staff or the management may notice that someone else should be also attending this meeting.
  • Example: staff or management may notice that some attendees should not be attending the meeting – maybe those individuals don’t contribute to discussions or decisions and it is better to save their time.
  • Example: we may notice someone should attend, but keeps missing meetings (due to a schedule conflict?) and address that – maybe have a someone fill in for the person who cannot attend.
  1. Action Items from the Previous Meeting section
  • Take your minutes of the last meeting and copy action items into your email for today’s meeting
  • Cross out completed action items
  1. Attachments section
  • attach all documents presented at the meeting (e.g. PowerPoint, Word, PDF, emails)
  1. Email footer
  • All internal email communications should carry a standard “Confidential and Proprietary” footer. Having a disclaimer like that in all your internal correspondence might help you if (when) your internal email ends up with someone outside your company. I will talk more about marking company documentation in another post.

In the example above please note the following:

  • Barbara has completed an action item since the last meeting (set up synthesis flow) – that action shows crossed-out under “Action Items from Previous Meeting”
  • John has an action item last meeting (feature definition), listed under “Action Items from Previous Meeting”. That action item was not completed – its due-by date 1/15/2017 is same as email’s date 1/15/2017. This items remains listed under “Action items” and its due date has been extended to 2/1/2017.
  • Barbara has been assigned a new action item (to finalize choice of IP), due 2/1/2017
  • Three decisions were made about product schedule. The project manager can now copy these dates from the meeting minutes into the project schedule.
  • Barbara presented a document at the meeting (Synthesis_Report.ppt) – this document comes attached with the meeting minutes email

Keeping Meeting Minutes

The project manager (or staff acting in lieu of the project manager) can write down meeting notes after the actual meeting. However, it may be best to take minutes during the meeting, in real time. Although this may be obvious, there are several steps to keeping meeting minutes.

  1. Start meeting by reviewing progress since last meeting
  • Cross out completed action items
  1. Let the team discuss the business at hand
  2. Write down decisions and action items as are assigned
  • While you are sitting at the meeting table (or desk, if this is a remote meeting) with your notebook PC open
  1. Confirm correctness of each decision and action item
  • Show meeting notes to the meeting attendees in real time. Open up your email editor and type up the action items and decision as they are made/assigned during the meeting.
  • Turn your notebook screen (or display your screen using a projector – screen sharing software if this is a remote meeting) and ask attendees to confirm correctness of your notes. In particular, double-check correctness with whoever the action item you are typing up belongs to.
  1. Email minutes out
  • Promptly send out the minutes without delay at the end of the meeting or shortly thereafter.
  • Speedy and clear reporting is a sign of a well-managed organization and actually demonstrates that to your staff by example.

Weekly Report with Task Status – Individual Contributor

Here is an example of customizing the weekly report template to fit your needs. Some teams and organizations prefer to include Task Status into weekly reports. Task Status shows progress – usually as percentage of completion – of tasks assigned to the individual contributor. Receiving weekly task status may be helpful for the project manager – the project manager can simply copy task completion percentages from each individual contributor into the project management software, e.g. Microsoft Project.

You can download this sample report in PDF format here.

Weekly Report with Task Status Sample for an Individual Contributor

I feel that posting task status in this fashion is a little old-school – there are good, mature online project management and tracking tools where the individual contributor can log in and directly update his/her task status. In this situation, the project manager does not need to manually copy task completion percentages into the software – the online tools automatically roll up updates that individual contributors directly entered into one nice report or chart.

Customizing and Troubleshooting Weekly Reports

Customizing Team Member Reports

The basic report serves as a template that can be customized to fit the particular organization and its needs. Here are some possible customizations.

  1. Task status

Reporting tasks assigned to the team member and the percent of their completion can be helpful for project management. Task status can be formatted as a table. The project manager can copy this information into his schedule tracking software such as MS Project. Alternatively, if the team member updates schedule directly, he can copy relevant portions of the updated schedule into the report. See the article about online schedule tracking for more details.

  1. Activities for each day

Sometimes upper management may want to know how time was spent every day. Reporting daily activities can be done in the form of a table or by copying the daily time card, when applicable.

  1. Other Accomplishments

Some accomplishments may not relate directly to the projects at hand and thus may fit well into the “Highlights” section. Such items can be reported in a separate section named “Other Accomplishments”.

Customizing Team Manager Report

  1. Project or task status

When appropriate – particularly when the team manager is also the technical lead (called in short team lead), the report may contain a snapshot of the project completion status and schedule. The completion is usually specified in percent. The schedule can be reported as a snapshot of the Gantt chart or a table of task names and associated percent of completion.

  1. “Work in Progress” section

Have a “Work in Progress” section if the upper manager is interested to know what the team was doing during the reporting period, how time was spent – instead of or in addition to what was done, accomplished. This section should list all items from individual reports that did not go into the “Highlights” section.

  1. Translation

If the team member does not speak English, his or her report could be written in the native language. The team manager should translate that – or have that translated – into English and place in the Individual Activity section. A summary translation – a shortened version – may be acceptable.

  1. Shortened report

Individual activities and plans section can be removed and replaced with links to individual contributor reports. Alternatively, individual reports can be attached to the weekly instead of using the links. However, this approach may lack the convenience of seeing at-a-glance how time was spent by each team member. Next week plans cannot be seen at-a-glance too.

Troubleshooting Weekly Reports

Late or Missing Reports

  1. Do send weekly reports on time, even if some individual reports are late. This demonstrates that you take deadlines seriously.
  2. If an individual report is missing, summarize what you know about the progress of the team member who’s report is late. Substitute your own summary for team member’s report and indicate clearly that you wrote the status for that team member.
    If the team member’s report contains critical information which you don’t know, consider calling or texting the team member and getting the status in real time.
  3. After publishing the weekly, send a quick email to team members who’s reports are missing asking to send their reports ASAP anyway. You still may need those reports, even if they are late. This is especially important if the team member is under-performing. Late or missing reports may document the performance problem and serve as the paper trail to justify corrective actions. Lastly, by requesting the report you are also sending a message that being late is not acceptable – discipline is important.
  4. Schedule time with weekly reminder for the team to prepare individual reports. This will help ensuring it will not be taken away by other meetings. For example, in Outlook create a 30-minute weekly meeting before the reporting deadline with a pop-up reminder.
  5. If the reporting person has a planned absence on the day of report, he/she is responsible for sending in a report before he/she leaves. Planned absence is not an excuse. Only unplanned absence is.
  6. If the reporting day falls on a holiday, send a friendly reminder on the last day before holidays begin asking to send individual reports before leaving home.
  7. Do not miss reports yourself. Always designate a second-in-command to write the weekly report for you when you cannot do it. Show by example that taking care of business is a priority and things must get done regardless of someone’s absence

Reporting Language Problems

What if the reporting language is English, but some team members cannot not write in English well? If the team member can write broken English that can be understood – ask to use English. If the team member cannot write in English at all – make an exception and allow reporting in the team member’s native language.

However, the individual report should be translated into English – however briefly. The person to translate preferably should be the team manager – if the team manager speaks that language. Other possibilities include, if applicable, the administrative assistant or translator. Consider using translation software if all else fails.

Conclusion

To conclude the series of posts on weekly reporting – I feel that weekly reports are a critical and powerful instrument in the manager’s toolkit. The importance of this instrument should not be overlooked. I hope you see by now exactly what it is good for, how to use it and in particular how to get the most of it.

Purposes of Weekly Report

Here is a summary of purposes weekly reports can serve.

  1. Monitor

It is common knowledge that the main purpose of weekly reports is to share information for progress tracking purposes. However, there are many other important purposes a well-designed weekly report can serve. Note that the term is ‘monitoring’, not ‘tracking’ – other tools like schedules are better for tracking than weekly reports.

  1. Alert to critical issues

Use reports to formally alert the upper management about critical issues that require their immediate attention. Do you need to get your VP’s attention because you are running low on the number of tool licenses and you need more of them purchased? Write that down in your weekly report in the “Critical Issues” section.

  1. Verify communication

Check next week plans to see if recent requests for urgent work have been considered by the individual contributor(s). If a project manager asked Jack to urgently add a feature to software X, it should be reflected in Jack’s next week plan. If not, the project manager should check with Jack. Maybe Jack forgot or has other more urgent work? Or maybe the urgency of the request was mis-communicated or misunderstood?

  1. Build trust

Build trust by openly and objectively communicating the status. Firstly, forward the report back to your team, so they can read it and verify that you are reporting objectively. Secondly, strive to share the report with other teams to promote transparency. Show the organization that you have nothing to hide, no hidden agenda. Of course, the distribution may be subject to security limitations.

  1. Foster teamwork

Copy your report to leads of collaborating teams. If you want a team of people to collaborate, team members need to know what their colleagues are doing. Same goes for collaboration between teams. Keep them up-to-date to facilitate finding synergies between teams. For example, your team may have figured out how to optimize performance of a certain design or resolved a long-standing limitation. Keep other design teams updated in case they can re-use this approach.

  1. Motivate

Mention names of contributors who accomplished work in the “Highlights” section. This serves as a public recognition of their contribution.

  1. Focus on results

The “Highlights” section indicates to the team what is considered to be an achievement and what is not. This section should only mention work that has been finished, not work that is ongoing. For example, a report has been published, release was made – these are highlights. A report is being written, release is being prepared – these are not highlights and should be mentioned in the “Individual Activity – This Week” section instead of “Highlights”.
Additionally, releasing the weekly report always on time demonstrates by example that you take deadlines seriously.

  1. Provide organizational visibility

Archive your individual weekly reports, create a repository and strive to provide open and easy access to them to both staff, upper management and peer leads, when possible. This repository provide the visibility – what any particular team member was doing at any particular time.

  1. Debug inefficiencies

All weekly reports should be archived. Once in a while you and/or your upper management and/or project management should review the progress over months and years. You can consider such things as personal performance, project success and failures and organizational structure. You can look for factors facilitating personal, project and organizational success and look for factors that caused inefficiencies and failures. Who is having difficulty making progress, in which area and why? Is help or training needed or reassignment should be considered? Who and what contributed to successes, failures and delays? Why? Is the product architecture well thought-through? Did collaboration across teams work well – and if not, what caused the problems? Should organizational structure be changed for optimization purposes?
You can also “debug” project delays. Is communication between main office and foreign branches constantly causing repetitive delays? Reports can tell you why team spent more time than planned.

  1. Forecast schedule

When making estimates for new projects, it may be helpful to review weekly reports to examine how long it took to complete the activity in question in the past by each team member.

  1. Performance evaluation

Weekly reports can be excellent raw material for performance evaluations. They provide account of successes and help finding opportunities for staff’s professional improvement. High-quality performance evaluations rely of facts and examples of performance or lack thereof. Facts and examples is what good weekly reports provide. Also, you can also look for repeating patterns of performance for a deeper analysis.

  1. Promoting organizational culture

Simply put, organizational culture is the way things are done. Reports help establish and reflect the existing culture. You can show leadership by promoting company culture through your reports by example. Keep your reports objective, clear, timely and complete and this will reflect throughout your organization. Make your reports fair and distribute them as openly as possible to earn trust, facilitate team work and focus on results – and these values will too reflect throughout your organization.

Weekly Report – Team Lead/Manager

The job of the team manager is to aggregate reports from team members – not filter. I believe that filtering is the job of the director and above. Corrections such as clarifying, correcting typos and merging redundant items are acceptable.

The report must clearly and concisely communicate team accomplishments, plans, critical issues, planned absence. At the same time, the report should be complete and detailed by providing detailed accounts of individual activities of each team member. Let’s take a look at an example.

You can download this example in PDF format here.

Weekly Report Sample for a Team Lead

Step-by-Step Instructions

The weekly report is aggregated by opening each individual report in sequence and cutting-and-pasting text from each section to the corresponding section in the team weekly as explained below.

  1. Highlights

This section lists accomplished work and good news. Normally, the manager compiles the contents by simply cutting-and-pasting items from individual contributor reports. Make sure that the work is accomplished – not work in progress.

Incorrect Correct
Measuring product performance Product performance report released
Working on module debug Module debug finished

Reporting accomplishments makes the report clear and concise by de-emphasizing routine details. Also, focusing on accomplishments demonstrates to your team by way of example that the manager and the organization itself are result-oriented.

Note that each item in the highlights section specifies names in parenthesis of who accomplished that work. The biggest contributor is named first. Specifying names positively motivates achievers by showing their names prominently.

Encourage the use of hyperlinks, such that reports and documentation can be easily accessed by anyone reading the report.

  1. Unexpected Problems

This section is for bad, unexpected news. Normally, the manager simply cuts-and-pastes Unexpected Problems from individual contributor reports.

  1. Critical issues

This section alerts the upper management about issues that require immediate attention. Similar to highlights and unexpected problems, the team manager typically compiles this section by cutting-and-pasting critical issue items from individual contributor report. The manager should also add any items of his own when appropriate.

  1. Individual Activities

The first three sections of the report together comprise an executive summary. The individual activities section goes into comprehensive details that the upper manager is not expected to always read – at least not right way. For example, this section can be useful for the team manager or director to find out which team member is overloaded, who has free time and should be assigned additional project, who performs well and which task and who has difficulties. We will discuss purposes for this section at length in a later article.

The team manager compiles the individual activities section by cutting-and-pasting “This week” sections from individual contributor reports. In addition, the team manager should also include his own individual report in the “This week” and “Next week plan” sections, especially when the manager is contributing individually part-time.

Again, encourage the use of hyperlinks, such that reports and documentation can be easily accessed by anyone reading the report.

  1. Next week plan

This section servers several purposes:

  • gives the team lead an understanding about what to expect over the next reporting
  • serves as acknowledgement of work requests to team members. If someone was requested to do something with some urgency, that request should be reflected in the next week plan.

Similar to the the section above, the manager cuts-and-pastes text from “Next week plan” sections of individual contributor reports and adds his own item as well.

  1. Planned absence

Here the team lead aggregates planned absences from team member reports and adds company holidays. The purpose is to avoid surprise staff absence at the most inopportune time.

Addressing Team Report

The team report should be sent to

  1. Your upper manager(s) and project manager(s) if applicable
  2. Your team
  3. Leads of collaborating teams interested in receiving your teams’ reports

You should not send reports to

  1. Temporary personnel
  2. Staff who has tendered resignation
  3. Recipients prohibited by corporate security regulations
  4. Individual contributors of collaborating teams without their manager’s permission
  • Collaborating team’s lead himself should forward your weekly to that team. Sending your weekly directly to other manager’s direct reports without that manager permission sometimes may be perceived as a violation or reporting structure.

Individual reports should be attached to the team lead weekly. These attached reports may be helpful in case of a mistake or omission in the weekly by providing the original issue information.

Team Report Writing Do’s and Don’ts

  1. Diplomacy

Do not use reports as blame press. Write and edit the unexpected problems and critical issues sections with extra care. Do be diplomatic – avoid mentioning names when reporting negative news. For example, if firmware team is lagging behind with their firmware release: “Need firmware release“, rather than “Firmware team has not released firmware”.

  1. Brevity and clarity

Do report concisely yet clearly. Do edit highlights, unexpected problems and critical issues copied from individual contributor reports to make them easy to understand by the top management.

  1. Completeness and Fairness

Take your time to write a report. Don’t miss anything and be fair.

  1. Language

Do you use English when working with international multi-language teams. Another suitable common language could be used, however English is strongly recommended in any case – imagine that new team members will join later who don’t speak the language you chose for reporting and they need to read old reports. See Troubleshooting Weekly Reports for more details.

  1. Revised reports

Do avoid sending modified weekly reports after publishing the original. Sending a revised report is acceptable if the original contains a substantial mistake, especially if you made the mistake yourself. This shows that you strive to be fair, objective and thorough. In case when a team member sends his report late, don’t wait for it. See the article about Troubleshooting Weekly Reports for more details.

Weekly Report – Individual Contributor

This posting begins a series of commentaries dedicated to weekly reports. Weekly reporting is a common kind of organizational activity, which managers might be taking for granted. Let’s ask ourselves and ponder for a moment – exactly what purpose weekly reports serve? How can we perfect our weekly reports?

Perhaps the first thought that comes to mind to answer the first question is – weekly reports are used to monitor progress. Are there any other reasons? I believe there are eleven more important purposes served by weekly reports.

Weekly reports is an important management tool. The larger the team or organization, the more important it is to practice excellent reporting. I will address this topic in considerable detail and provide a number of ready-to-use templates for download. Specifically I would like to provide and discuss

  1. A sample of individual contributor’s report
  2. A sample of team lead/manager’s report
  3. 12 purposes a weekly report serves
  4. Variations on the “basic” report
  5. Advice on troubleshooting common problems associated with weekly reports

I hope that after reading these commentaries you will critically consider your own weekly reports in a new light – and perhaps take a step to redesign them for better efficacy.

Let us start by reviewing an example of what I consider the “basic” weekly report for an individual contributor. You can download PDF of the sample report here.

Weekly Report Sample for Individual Contributor

Instructions

  1. Start by filling out “This week” section. List all activities you have performed
  2. Copy items reporting finished work from “This week” section to “Highlights”

In this section, make sure to state accomplishments, not status of activities. Do not write about work-in-progress. Definition of accomplishment varies – it could be a report having been published, module design finished, test passed, release made, etc. You may also include “good news”, which designate welcome developments. For example product performing better than expected, significant customer order received and so on.

  1. If applicable, write unexpected, unwelcome news in the “Unexpected Problems” section
  2. If applicable, fill out the “Critical Issues” section.

Any message(s) placed in this section are meant to receive immediate and full attention from your manager.

  1. Fill out “Next week plan” section

Be specific and list everything you think you will be doing. If someone requested you to do certain work next week and you agreed, reflect that request in this section to confirm that you have accepted the request and will be taking care of it.

  1. If applicable, fill out the “Planned absence” section

Alert your managers and colleagues to your planned absence as early as possible

  1. Be diplomatic, professional and courteous in your writings. Weekly reports should not be used as blame press.

Keep your reports clear and complete. To help your colleagues access resources easily, embed hyperlinks to all relevant documentation, publications or reports.

Submit your report on time. If you are out of office, consider submitting your report before departing.

  1. Address your report to the team lead/manager.

It is acceptable to copy other team members, however consider that your colleagues may not want to be flooded with redundant emails if your report will be incorporated into the team lead’s weekly.

As you can see, the individual contributor’s report exemplified above aims to communicate weekly status in a clear fashion. Items of high importance – highlights, unexpected problems and critical issues – are set apart and placed at the top for immediate manager’s attention. You may notice that the top of the report now looks like an executive summary. Yet, such filtering for purposes of clarity does not come at the expense of completeness. The “Individual Activities” section provides a comprehensive account of everything that happened throughout the reporting period.

At the end of this posting I’d like to give an example of reporting activities clearly. Consider these two items

  • 55 test passed
  • 55 tests out of 230 passed (+5 this week)

The first formulation reports status, not progress. Progress is the amount of work between now and one week ago. To understand the progress the reader must retrieve the last week’s report, which could says something like “50 tests passed”, and compare the status then to the status now.

The second formulation reports status (55), progress (+5) and also puts these number into perspective (230 total). Do you think reader will appreciate this particular wording? Perhaps so.