Weekly Reports

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

This page describes the compact "Achievements and Objectives" report format that some Wikimedia Foundation staff and contractors use for their weekly reports.

Each report is for a one week period, beginning on Monday and ending on Sunday.

Reports may have a one-line summary at the top of the report.

Reports have two or three main sections:

  • Achievements, which lists progress on the three to five objectives from the previous report.
    • Each achievement should be a bullet point (no more than 140 chars), along with an optional commentary line below it (also no more than 140 chars).
    • Each objective should be marked as being "[DONE]", "[PARTIAL]" or "[NOT DONE]" after the bullet point.
  • (optional) Bonus, which lists things you got done that you hadn't planned for.
  • Objectives, which lists three to five goals for the week of the report.

Each report should highlight the most important work done for the given week. The goal of the report isn't to communicate "Wow, look at that huge laundry list of stuff...they are really, really busy!"; the goal is to highlight the most important work and make sure it doesn't get overshadowed by minor tasks.

Also, the objectives for the next week should be a little bit aspirational. You don't need to beat yourself up for not completing everything that you plan to do in a week – if you do manage to complete every objective that you have for a week, you may not be signing up for enough tasks. A completion rate of 70-90% is a reasonable objective to have.

Example[edit]

Here's an example using a mix of plausible tasks and nonsense tasks. See mw:User:Zakgreant/Report/2010-09-20 for a real report.

Achievements[edit]

  • [DONE] Deploy fix for bug NNN - unicode problem in comment log
  • [DONE] Figure out why CSS doesn't load properly on some special pages
    • Seems to have been a caching problem
  • [PARTIAL] Increase rubber band ball from 4" to 5" diameter
    • Only managed to make it 4.5"
  • [NOT DONE] Make origami lamp from fluorescent purple post-it notes
    • We seem to be out of the purple, and I didn't want to make a yellow one

Bonus[edit]

  • Rewrote spec for Dynamic Mulfission pref panel

Objectives[edit]

  • Rework the preference panel for Dynamic Mulfission
  • Develop fix for bug NNNN - rendering problem on pages edited on second Tuesdays
  • Increase rubber band ball from 4.5" to 5.25" diameter
  • Make origami lamp from fluorescent purple post-it notes