Management reports remind
me of the peephole in my front door. I seldom see anything I
recognize.
Management reports are
backward-looking documents,
rehashing the recent past. Often used as part of
a roll-up, by people charged with repeating others’ reports,
usually without understanding them. (See GIGO)
At best, they represent 90
minutes of diversion condensing the last 50 hours/30 days/90 days of
work.
Worse is a response of
“Let’s discuss,” which turns into hours of the dance of gray
fantasy, “Tell me what you want, I’ll agree.” A smart economist told me last month, “You don't torture a dataset until it confesses.”
If the right answers were
available, don’t you think I’d have put ’em in there? I wrote
one of these reports last week.
Ever notice that when the
right answers are available, they are no longer worthy of the report?
We’ve already moved to a next stage.
“Just checking, did we
get through the next gate when I wasn’t paying attention?” It’s
a management fantasy, like being on a cruise ship and waking up in a
new port.
If you weren’t going to
use management reports to reverify known history again, or trying to
change reality to observers’ preconceptions, what might you do?
I’ve always found
management reports are light on senior commitments, “When I
come down the trail, hotly pursued by the entire population of
hostiles, you’re sure you will have that
skyhook
rented and ready?”
“I
assure you, we’ll really try our best!”
Or what about celebration?
The middle of a project can get kind of dreary, or it can be
wonderful. That’s up to manglement. Which do you think gets you
better work product?
Heck, something good must
have happened, otherwise how will we remember what good is?
If you’re just going to roll
up your GIGO, how about supplying some top down information that improves
strategy, speed, or safety? Best practices are either blindingly
obvious or they’re fiction. Best practices are hard work, a lot
like blogging, and that’s why we pay the top guys the big bucks.
How would you improve this
list?
