The Art of Executive Status Reporting

Over the last more than 20 years of my experience in the global IT industry, one of the key challenges I have noticed is the lack of clear and concise status reporting. Executive Management of any organization is dependent on timely availability of accurate status reports to enable them to track the progress and budget of their various projects and make informed decisions.  Various teams participating across different projects develop their own structures and formats of executive status reports, leaving the management with the task of deriving meaningful information through decks of PowerPoint, word documents, excel spreadsheets etc.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if key status reports could be tied back to some magic parameter or variable and help the executive management make faster informed decisions based on the clarity and accuracy of reporting!! It took me a long time to discover a solution to this issue, as this was never a subject taught in my school years, nor did I come across any popular publications on this topic that I could readily refer to.  While working on a large new initiative for a web based business application supported by about 25-30 interfacing systems in a leading Life Insurance Organization I got a wonderful opportunity to implement an approach that was very well received and appreciated by all the project stakeholders including the project sponsor and business stakeholders.  Early on in the project lifecycle it became quite evident that the executive management (with representation from both Business and Technology areas) wanted an easy to understand status reporting and be able to map every project task to the Dollars being spent on the project.  Putting ourselves in the shoes of the business stakeholders who were funding the project, we posed ourselves the question ” What is a common thread that can be standardised and run across the status reporting information of  all teams including Business & Systems Analysts, Development team and Systems Integration/QA/UA testing teams and still be meaningful to the Executive Management.” During the discussions it evolved that if we shifted our focus from an IT Systems centric-approach of defining all project activities to a Business Process driven approach it gave us the magic key to unlock all issues related to Executive Status Reporting across all the teams.

For example, any typical Life Insurance Carrier would have their Business Processes segmented into high-level categories related to New Business or Acquisition of a new customer followed by Post-Issue Policy Administration and Financial Information Management.  Each of these high level business processes could then be further decomposed into New Business functions such as rate quote, application submission, underwriting, policy generation and review, payment/remittance, policy placement into the administration systems and Post-Issue Business Functions such as Beneficiary Management, Loans/Withdrawls, Policy Surrender, Claims Processing, Customer Profile updates etc.  Once all the Business Processes and functions had been defined, all teams were able to report their progress in terms of their effort spent in fulfilling the needs of each of the business functions. The development teams of all the participating interfacing systems could provide the planned and actual effort spent in coding and unit testing each business function. Likewise the testing teams could provide the planned and actual number of tests and data conditions for testing each business function that could be limited to a single underlying system or cut across multiple systems. Even the defects found by the testing teams could trace back to the tests for any individual business function, thereby exposing the more error prone functionalities early on in the testing phase, which the development teams could address faster based on the severity and priority of the defects.  This also provided a seamless end-to-end view of each business process irrespective of the fact how many systems were involved in supporting the execution of that business process. The business stakeholders were easily able to relate to each business process and monitor the IT Dollars being spent on every individual functionality being developed and tested to confidently put a high-quality product in the hands of their potential customers.

Subject to approvals from our legal department, we should also be able to share some of the generic status report templates that our team conceptualised and developed over the last couple of years on the theme of Business Process based reporting. We welcome all review comments and additional questions from the interested users in the global IT community.

About the author: Rakesh is a Partner with ebusinessware, inc. a leading global IT consulting company headquartered in New York City. Rakesh can be reached via email at rakesh.singal@ebusinessware.com