How much sausage making do you want to see?
May 4, 2009 – 7:12 amMy company’s CTO has a saying about building software. He says that it’s a lot like making sausage. There’s a level of detail you want to know in order to be happy with it- are you using quality ingredients, when will I get the finished product, is the facility clean… and then there’s a level you definitely do not want to know if you don’t want to feel ill or ever intend to eat sausage again. My grandfather owned a slaughter house; trust me, he’s right.
Something my company has been struggling with for years has been how much detail is enough for project reporting. This has been even more complicated by the founding of our PMO. Here’s a few of the issues you run into when the business folks look too deep into the project details:
- Reporting overhead: the deeper you look, the more effort is put into telling others what’s going on by the managers who are supposed to be spending time getting things done. If you pull away too much of their time, the project actually starts to fall behind- because you so busy looking at it that you monitor it to death. At some point, you have to trust the project workers to handle the details that they gloss over in meetings.
- Knowledge transfer overhead: this goes in part with reporting overhead. The deeper a detail you look at, the more explanation goes along with it. This is especially true in the IT world. Some tasks and problems require a very in-depth technical knowledge to understand. The deeper you look into them, the more background information and technical detail that has to go along with it. All of that communication overhead pulls people away from the real work. They are talking about doing rather than doing.
- Executive attention syndrome: if the reporting goes deep enough down the rabbit hole on every project, your company’s leaders soon find themselves spending all their time drinking from the information firehose and not enough time actually leading.
- If one of your projects seems to be having more status meetings, reports, or level of detail than the other successful projects, be suspicious. Do you need the level of monitoring you have in place?
- If you are regularly breaking off into explanations of technology in your status meetings, you may be looking too hard. Status meetings should be making sure you are in the right track. Knowledge transfers are part of the natural workflow of requirements gathering and design.
- If your managers driving your projects are, consistently among the team, struggling with getting assignments to their teams, updates back from their teams, etc, you might have a problem. The process of delegating and receiving feedback is a small part of the overall job- if they don’t have time for that, something is amiss- and it could be your project.
Popularity: unranked [?]
