Delivery Reports - Reasons to Adopt this Practice
How a simple practice can add a lot of value to a team's work.
In this post, I list some of the pains I faced with my teams and how the habit of preparing a Delivery Report helped me with them.
My Delivery Report format
The report consists of a list of deliveries made by each team, with emphasis on the impact these deliveries have for the company or our clients. It is worth reinforcing that the impact is the most important part of the report. This is what shows the rest of the organization how important the team's work was during the given period.
Here's an example with some anonymized information:
📋 Deliveries and Progress from Last Weeks - [TEAM] - [DATE]
In the last two weeks, [TEAM]:
Advanced in the implementation of [FEATURE]. We will start a new release of the app with these first changes in the next two weeks.
Updated [APPLICATION] with the 2023 Bovespa holiday calendar. This will prevent errors related to [FEATURE] on this type of date.
Implemented automatic email notification for users who need [SCENARIO], preventing these customers from ending up [ANOTHER SCENARIO].
Solved more customer issues in the process of [SCENARIO].
Reduced the number of licenses we use in [TOOL] and will have a savings of approximately 40% per month.
We canceled a development metrics analysis service used by engineering and will save [AMOUNT] this year.
It’s important to emphasize overall that I try to use accessible language for those who are not from the same background as the teams, making it easier for this audience to read the message.
At the end of each work cycle, I share the report in an open channel on the company's Slack.
Next, some of the issues solved by adopting this process.
Delivery Reports give visibility to the team's work
This was the first issue I wanted to solve. It is common in multidisciplinary organizations for teams to naturally isolate themselves and lose sight of how other team’s work impacts the organization's results.
With Delivery Reports, we give other teams the opportunity to have a little more contact with the progress our teams have been making.
Delivery Reports help prepare work cycles
It should be part of every agile team to work with a focus on delivering value to the user or organization. However, how do we avoid falling into the autopilot of simply prioritizing a set of tasks that are ready to be executed but are not essential for that moment?
As a good practice, I started writing my team's Delivery Reports during the planning of each new work cycle (Sprints).
By doing this, I added another layer of security that our work cycles are generating value, always with the reflection: "is this delivery report something to be proud of at the end of this cycle?" If the answer is "no," it is necessary to review the planning.
Delivery Reports provide sense of progress to the team
Teams working on large projects may go through periods of feeling in a big "limbo". The initial excitement of working on a new initiative has passed, and sometimes the horizon seems very far away.
With Delivery Reports, we can reinforce how valuable the progress made in the last cycle was, assuming that good planning was done (see the previous topic).
To address the true cause of this pain, there are other practices that can be adopted, but that is a subject for another post.
Conclusion
Delivery Reports are a simple list of activities done in the last cycle with a focus on the impact of these activities for customers and the organization. They give more visibility to the work done both for the rest of the organization and for the team itself, as long as they are acting on good planning.