coneblog

Pretty deep into this Incident Reporting System project, I find that the reporting requirements are a large and critical part of the system, yet undefined. I check back to the original estimate document for the size and scope of the reporting effort.

Good news – I had quantified the report count in the estimate. Bad news – it was a big number (20), and I only had 10 Mandays of budget for all twenty.

I needed to move the reporting requirements rapidly towards a state of “well defined”, so that I could get working on them and get them done. First I divided the problem in two. In any system, there is a set of basic table maintenance reports: User lists; Organization setup reports listing Division, Group and Area; a Codes and Descriptions report, listing all of the pull-down choices in the User Interface, and their id codes; etc. I identified eight such simple reports, and had a developer quickly lay them out. So I was down to twelve reports.

For those twelve, I met with the Client, stressed the limited nature of the reporting resources (twelve reports), and got her to assign them to the different groups. We went over the samples that she did have, and we began building the reports from a data base populated with test data. Back we came with samples, and did a review. I captured her comments and changes on a Reporting Punchlist.

I established a process: we do sample reports; she reviews the reports with the interested parties and produces a consolidated list of changes; I capture the changes on the Punchlist; the developer makes the reporting changes, and the cycle starts again. Plus I quickly grabbed another developer skilled in query and reporting to concentrate on the reporting side of the project.

In summary: I had enumerated the number of reports in the original estimate; I had divided the reporting problem into two parts, and resolved forty percent of it; I had gotten the Client to parse out and assign ownership for the remaining twelve reports; I had established a process by which to get to closure; and I had shifted resources to focus on this area of risk.

All I had to do now was work the process, and hope the requirements started to jell.