- Brief summary of what was done since last report
- What's next
- Any blockers
- Anything else important (optional)
The only difference is the inclusion of OKRs/KPIs, which makes sense if you are using them. I tend to do something similar with project status reports as well, which will usually have red/amber/green in the subject line and if the status isn't green, the email starts with the reason!
No affiliation, just seems like a cool product. Probably wouldn't be hard to whip something similar up if it's not already on GitHub.
If you replace the standup with written reports, I doubt anyone but the manager will actually read them. I know I wouldn't, regardless of how valuable it seems in the abstract.
That's why it was called stand-up, in order to emphasise that you stand while doing it so the meeting simply can't be long since everyone is psychologically incentivised to get to the point so we can all go to break room, sit down and work, or get coffee.
Of course it didn't work out that way in many places, and now 'stand-up' is a 1 hour long daily meeting complete with minute notes, rules of proceedings, and slide-shows.
(We work in teams of 4-6 and standup is never more than 10 minutes. I've also had the "30-minute standup" which not really a standup...)
In theory this sounds good, but that is an emotionally charged and negative way of saying it. "Tell me what you promised to do and if you actually did it." You would not use such a construct in a negotiation except to intimidate the other.
In certain people, this destroys motivation, even when they didn't achieve a prioritised task because they found a better way or reprioritised for good reasons.
It doesn't sound good to me, even in theory. If I'm becoming aware of what is or is not getting done on my teams via an email once weekly, I'm really not doing my job. I should have a general sense of where things are at a more granular level than that, and be able to synthesize that information through the regular communications of my teams so as to not impose administrative burden (which takes time away from their work). Assuming I'm doing that, I can be the one that writes about it if someone else really wants that from me. That's part of my managerial responsibility to keep shitwork away from my folks.
If it was done, great. If it wasn't, do you understand why? Did you underestimate? Did something block you? Was it deprioritized? How will this not happen again, or why is it now okay?
If someone is less motivated by honest discussions about productivity, I'm not sure they can improve their productivity and collaborate with others long term.
I think if you badger employees about their estimates and not getting things done that they promised, that will lead to those employees overestimating the amount of time required, just to be sure that they don't end up not meeting the estimated timeline. That seems like a net loss for productivity. Rather than encouraging people to stretch themselves and get more done, you're leading them to believe that it's much more important not to miss self-imposed deadlines.
My experience has been that the only questions management should bother with are usually the issues that managers can actually fix. That tends to be a surprisingly limited set of things.
That is my point. If you want openness from people the original phrasing might not be the best. Nailing them with questions won't help either.
If a manager is not able to take into account human nature and it's quirks, they certainly can't improve anybody's productivity long term.
More like, "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't fire you right here and right now. Ok, well then, give me another."
To be clear, I'm all for pushing stats to the central org. Every week when I was a company commander in the Marines, for example, we sent our battalion HQ a big Excel sheet with a summary of who was on light duty, who was going on leave, weapons count, etc -- that kind of basic accountability is fine to put in a weekly email IMO.
What is not fine is abdicating your responsibility as a leader by living within a Potemkin supervisory framework that reduces or even eliminates your need to have daily face-to-face (or telephone/VTC) conversations with the people you have the privilege of supervising in order to figure out what challenges are in their way and what you and the larger organization can do to help.
The straightforward way to do it is not weekly status emails, it's limiting the number of direct reports anyone has to a reasonable number and holding them accountable for everything their portion of the org does or fails to do. They in turn should be holding their people to a high standard of not letting bad news age and being forthright about what's not working.
The problem is that status emails containing substantive subjective summaries of the challenges faced by the person writing them are often used by incompetent managers as a replacement for constructive dialogue between them and their direct reports. At least, this was the case at the two companies I worked at that had a required status email as part of the weekly drumbeat. And I've heard a fair amount of anecdotal evidence from friends at other places that the problem is widespread.
But joking aside, plans that rely on trusting everyone to act in a certain unwritten way aren't very reliable. It's like how one study showed that mistakes during surgery went down by a significant degree if doctors simply compiled a checklist of what they were going to do beforehand---even if they had done the procedure hundreds of times before.
People, in the middle of working on hard tasks are not very reliable. That's not to say they're not smart, or professional, or lack care for their coworkers. It's just a fact of human nature that we solve problems in whatever organically directed way makes sense at the time, and not what the 'best over many averages' way would be.
The checklist is only there as a public contract that "if I don't do X, then anyone who points that out is doing the right thing".
This is both more frightening, and more insightful, than the "people forget to do stuff" lesson (though that is true too).
http://beyondthechecklist.com/2013/03/thank-you-for-pointing...
If you're a manager, then the reason they do that is because you intimidate them. They're afraid to tell you when something goes wrong. This is YOUR problem.
plans that rely on trusting everyone to act in a certain unwritten way aren't very reliable.
That's the only possible plan that can work, because you can't write everything down. At some point you have to trust.
The only time I asked members of my team to write them was when I needed certain individuals to really think about their work and focus on what was important vs low priority. We talked about it, but then I had them write status each week for a while mostly to force them to stop and think about the connection of their work to the larger business objectives. I really value developers who have some level of business acumen and ability to understand the "why" of their work at a more strategic level - and if someone doesn't have that I'm going to coach it. That's just one way that works for some people. More of a coaching tool than an actual status report, though.
Are there effective teams who don't do anything like this at all?
That's a process problem. Teams I was on with this problem needed to get better at spreading such background knowledge (e.g. by having code review).
I'm pretty sure that the only effective teams are the ones who don't do anything like this at all.
You can guess what happened next -- someone would check the document out of Sharepoint, locking it for everyone else. Then that person would inevitably get interrupted and go handle the latest crisis. Meanwhile everyone else was unable to enter their status into the shared Word document.
Eventually management gave up and returned to having us send emails.
Fortunately I don't work there anymore.
Would they have/did they bother to go through the Word document either? To me, it seems like a fun new way to test a Markov chain generator.
What about reviewing the data for long-term trends, rather than gut feelings?
1. What did you focus on this week?
2. What are your plans and priorities for next week?
3. What challenges or roadblocks do you need help with?
4. Is there anything else on your mind you'd like to share?
Managers then can review and comment on each part of the check-in. That happens the same day, which means that it doesn't feel like a waste of time. Even just an emoji as a comment can provide positive feedback.
I like this process because it's efficient. I also enjoy a log of what I have done in past weeks to reinforce that we are progressing. Lattice is primarily a goal-tracking app, so tying goal updates to weekly check-ins makes the process easier.
This works for us, but we're a small team. Weekly status emails sound like a different beast relating to tiers of tiers of teams.
I suspect that part of the difficulty of the "weekly status email" is keeping track of updates from memory. As the author describes the Zynga framework, it's clear that it's easy because it asks for fairly objective things - like OKRs. It sounds like scaling a solution like Lattice to larger companies would ideally prepopulate reports with data - like "Closed these 7 goals . . . , closed these 8 pull requests . . . , analytics shows goal X did Y" - then allow the manager to edit and provide context.
Perhaps there are projects that require this level of management and communication, and perhaps there are people that work well with it. But there are also probably many projects that do not need such management overhead and where some types of people do not work very efficiently in. So, what I'm saying is that I think this management style shouldn't be an assumed default.
I do feel like OKR has a fair amount in common with GTD as well, though I'm not actually familiar enough with GTD to assert that, though from the outside they are similar.
Sure, "No plan survives contact with the enemy", but I've always found the process of planning to be invaluable.
As others are noting, all this is very subject to abuse, but it can be a very good thing.
