Ask HN: How often do you have to update your project manager? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How often do you have to update your project manager?

8 pointsdlf7 comments

I'm interested to know how often everyone has to report your progress to his/her project manager or client.

Do they typically ask you for updates? If so, how often?

How often would you say you give an unsolicited update?

I must be the odd man out.

Daily standup. But I am in constant contact with him during the day and CC him on all my email so he knows the exact status of any development without him having to ping me.

If management is leaning on him especially hard he might ask me for status reports every 15 minutes.

I also track time spent in a crappy web app they make me use, if I don't update every day I will be getting a call from my PMs boss as our business owner will start chewing people out. It is odd to get emails sent to me with the VP of technology and the division president wrangling over why I can't update my status multiple times a day so they can watch me tick features off.

Maybe I need a new job. This is a corporation with 60k people, you would think they would have better things to do than to watch me work.

If someone is actually asking you for status reports every 15 minutes, you're long past maybe in the needing a new job spectrum...

If in doubt, over communicate. Communicate until the person tells you to quit talking so much. This is especially true for working with a project manager. Obviously this assumes that you haven't been given any other guidance.

For a client, it's best to set expectations up front. You tell the client how updates will be given and if the client is cool with that then keep to that scheme.

At this time, all the other comments are mentioning what they do, but they seem to be situations where there is already a well organized system in place. In your case, it seems there is no such system.

I work at a small startup (15 people, 8 of them coders), and once a day we have a scrum with the project manager (though a few times a day someone calls him in to show off something cool that got finished early), and once a week we have a meeting with the business analyst and project manager to update the roadmap and deliverable schedule. Once a week we have an all hands meeting with our investor where we present our progress on the roadmap.

Daily scrum standup meeting that should last 15mins but ends up going over 30, plus cc'ing pm on multiple emails so hes aware whats sucking up mytime, part of a large corp but team is only 6 ppl

agile small team (3 devs, 1pm), 5 min or less (Tues - Fri) stand up meeting to start the day.

1 hour Iteration Planning Meeting once a week on Monday to plan the iteration

small team (3 devs, 1 pm), distributed, biweekly updates and weekly team meetings

Reply on news.ycombinator.com