10 ms·

The Dreaded Weekly Status Email

201 points by ryanlm 10y ago

wiradikusuma 10y ago
What's missing is a Concrete Example of the "status report that's enjoyable to read because important information laid out in a digestible format." Sure, she lists down the format, but would be great if she can put some samples.
- op00to 10y ago
  I'd love to see what HN folks can come up with. Me, I'll just start spamming my coworkers in IRC about what I want to get done in the morning.
philip1209 10y ago
We have replaced our in-person team retros every week with LatticeHQ.com's weekly check-ins, where every employee answers 4 basic questions (the defaults on Lattice): 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.
- prawn 10y ago
  I could see this being useful for families too. Third question could get people help when they might be reluctant to ask about moving furniture or getting time without kids to catch up on work, etc.
robert_tweed 10y ago
Funnily enough this format is nearly identical to what I call the "scrum email" which is something I've previously asked remote freelancers to send in daily and found it works as well if not better than actual stand-ups. That list of things to put in a sitrep is one of the things that Scrum gets right: - 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!
- douche 10y ago
  I love the idea of the standup. Getting a read on what everybody is doing is a great idea. It's idiotic to do it as a synchronous operation that stops the world and frigs up everybody's day, though. This is one of those things that would take five minutes to think about, write up, and post to someplace public first thing in the morning, after which you could dig in and actually get some work done.
  - peterwwillis 10y ago
    Why the hell don't more people do this? I sit on lengthy stand-ups where people gripe or lecture with no expected resolution, meanwhile all I have to say is "business as usual" and I don't need anyone else's status, and could skim over updates in a few seconds, and even catch up with them later if need be.
    - kragniz 10y ago
      If you don't need or are interested in what other people are working on, maybe your team is too big?
      - flukus 10y ago
        It can happened with a small team spread across a number of projects too. Or sometimes you just really don't care.
lawnchair_larry 10y ago
I'm not sure what it is, or if it's justified, but I've always hated having to explain what I'm doing and why. I think that I will involve people as needed and when needed, and assume others will do the same. Most senior engineers I've worked with have been this way. Are there effective teams who don't do anything like this at all?
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  I often have this feeling -- but it is because it's impossible to explain a mass of technical background to connect my current work to buisiness goals (assuming there even is such a connection). 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).
- clifanatic 10y ago
  > Are there effective teams who don't do anything like this at all? I'm pretty sure that the only effective teams are the ones who don't do anything like this at all.
bitshaker 10y ago
At our remote company, we use http://Jell.com http://Jell.com which was built for this purpose.
leroy_masochist 10y ago
My personal view of status emails is that they are largely an artifact of engineering-driven companies in which managers, who must possess a given level of engineering competence in order to have supervisory credibility, often have very poor social skills. 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.
- emmett 10y ago
  Status emails are not a "Potemkin supervisory framework". They're a scalable way of communicating progress broadly in a way that can be referenced later, rather than an ephemeral way to communicate to one person.
  - leroy_masochist 10y ago
    That's kind of the point I was trying to make when I said that sending weekly stats is valid. I'm not saying that status emails are implicitly bad, I'm saying that they're poorly implemented. 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.
iamleppert 10y ago
"Send me your status in an e-mail" is a way for a lazy, un-engaged manager to dot his i's and cross his t's. If you're doing a good job managing your direct reports, you'll have a good pulse of what they have been up to at a resolution of at least one week, without being a micromanager.
- vacri 10y ago
  What was your underling doing seven weeks ago? Thirteen weeks ago? Didn't they mention a particular issue five weeks ago? What about reviewing the data for long-term trends, rather than gut feelings?
- _RPM 10y ago
  This is literally what I'm required to do every Friday. Also, I've never received feedback on this status report. What is the point?
PapaSlug 10y ago
https://home.idonethis.com/ https://home.idonethis.com/ for remote teams.
swsieber 10y ago
I actually liked the linked article about the art of OKR more. While I've been exposed to SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Timeframe?) as a missionary, for some reason it didn't ever really carry over into the real world. 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.
elgoog1212 10y ago
Google has "snippets". You basically write up what you did last week. They aren't mandatory, but encouraged. I have found them useful because I can then just go through them and pick the things I want to write in my performance review. Before I started keeping snippets, I had a hard time digging up a sufficiently meaty list of accomplishments, because I'd just forget most of them. And you can subscribe to other people's snippets as well.
ktRolster 10y ago
Trust your employees enough that as soon as something goes wrong, they will let you know. Don't expect them to wait until the end of the week to alert you of something, that makes no sense.
- true_religion 10y ago
  In my experience, people find something is going wrong then enter a temporal vortex where they only focus on fixing this problem. They will then emerge on a Friday at 4:30pm, to tell everyone. 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.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    Apparently the real takeaway from the checklist research was that other people, usually lower status employees like nurses knew that the doctor was about to amputate the wrong leg or whatever, but the dysfunctional working relationships made it very hard for them to point out idiotic mistakes being made by the big shots without endangering their careers. 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-out-the-mistake/ http://beyondthechecklist.com/2013/03/thank-you-for-pointing...
  - bmj 10y ago
    There's also a potential cultural issue, where someone may feel like asking for help, or pointing out an obstacle, but thinks it may reflect poorly on them.
cel1ne 10y ago
> "List last week’s prioritized tasks, and if they were achieved." 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.
- ianai 10y ago
  Yes, definitely feels a little intimidating and static.
- eric-hu 10y ago
  That's one way to interpret it. Here's another: be honest and open about what you committed to. 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.
  - dkrich 10y ago
    I don't understand the point of this. So the goal is to get better at estimating? In my experience tasks vary in difficulty from one to the next, and it's very difficult if not completely useless to formulate an estimate for the time required to do it. The only time work estimates are useful, IMO, is when you are estimating an exact fixed amount of labor which you have completed under similar circumstances at least a few times. 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.
    - 10y ago
cyphunk 10y ago
This article and much of the conversation here-in reminds me of THX 1138. There is a disconnect between how-to-manage and how-to-be-productive discussions on HN. Definitely daily mails, and also probably weekly's with intense liability attached to them in the name of "quality" seem to go against promoting humane productivity. 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.
- clifanatic 10y ago
  My experience is that this works well in an IT infrastructure sort of environment where you're assigned tickets that takes a couple of hours on the average. It sort of works in a project-based product development effort where programmers are implementing features and fixing bugs, but breaks down horribly on anything that involves any sort of research and experimentation (you know, the sorts of things that actually create breakthroughs and make money?) And God forbid you ever try to learn anything new: "Yesterday: read 50 pages of the ElasticSearch manual. Today: read 50 more pages of the ElasticSearch manual. Tomorrow: get fired for not having anything immediately profitable to put on status report."
hga 10y ago
For me, when handled well when working for a good boss, starting the week with one was an excellent way of organizing that week. I'd remember, think about, and memorialize what happened last week (and enough times there's a large portion of "what happened" vs. "what I did", i.e. putting out fires), and then planning what to do in the next 5-6 days (6 for crunch mode: 6 days x 7 hours of real heads down work in each, which I could sustain for a number of weeks). 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.
brlewis 10y ago
I've been using 15five, which is a weekly report format with the usual done/to-do/blockers questions, but every other week asks for suggestions to make your team/role better. It sends reminders, tracks your longest streak of completing reports, and has a public/private comment system with likes. This is a referral link: http://ssqt.co/m5blUWz http://ssqt.co/m5blUWz
pzh 10y ago
It's much better to have a weekly status email than a daily standup. Status emails can simply be scheduled with a cron job if one is not disposed to write them in the accorded time...
- infinite8s 10y ago
  How would you write it automatically? I suppose you could just have it pull your commit messages for the past week, but that would be manifestly missing the point, which is a quick high level summary of what was done and plan for following week. Otherwise the reader of the status email could just pull the commits directly.
- clifanatic 10y ago
  Everywhere I've worked has made up for it by demanding both a weekly status e-mail and a daily standup (and a daily status e-mail and a twice-a-year performance review).
SmellTheGlove 10y ago
I'm a director. I developed an easy test for whether my status reports mattered. One week I simply stopped sending them. It was mentioned to me once, about 3 months later, so I sent one that week. And then never again, for about the past year at least. It's not like I didn't have weekly 1x1s with my boss, in addition to our hallway conversations, so what we were doing was already communicated. 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.
- overcast 10y ago
  First rule of email, no one is going to read your email. Keep it incredibly short, I mean one line if you can. Then maybe a small percentage of recipients might glance at it.
  - SmellTheGlove 10y ago
    If no one is going to read it, I'm not going to take the time to write and send it. That's my first rule of email. I really don't like to do things for appearances, and while I am professional I also do what I can to cut out the things that truly don't need doing - for myself and for my teams. I'd like to think I'm a good manager in that regard.
engi_nerd 10y ago
At one job, our management asked us to write a status email to be sent in every Friday afternoon by COB. After about six months, the management decided that it couldn't be bothered to sift through 30 emails from engineers each Friday afternoon. Therefore, they requested that we put our weekly status into a single Word document stored on a Sharepoint site. 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.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > After about six months, the management decided that it couldn't be bothered to sift through 30 emails from engineers each Friday afternoon. Therefore, they requested that we put our weekly status into a single Word document stored on a Sharepoint site. 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.
  - engi_nerd 10y ago
    They didn't have us update the Word document in place -- meaning each status didn't take the place of the previous week's status. So you can imagine that the document quickly grew quite long. Managers started complaining that they couldn't see what was happening quickly enough because they had to scroll too much.

201 points by ryanlm 10y ago

What's missing is a Concrete Example of the "status report that's enjoyable to read because important information laid out in a digestible format." Sure, she lists down the format, but would be great if she can put some samples.

op00to 10y ago
I'd love to see what HN folks can come up with. Me, I'll just start spamming my coworkers in IRC about what I want to get done in the morning.

philip1209 10y ago

We have replaced our in-person team retros every week with LatticeHQ.com's weekly check-ins, where every employee answers 4 basic questions (the defaults on Lattice): 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.

prawn 10y ago
I could see this being useful for families too. Third question could get people help when they might be reluctant to ask about moving furniture or getting time without kids to catch up on work, etc.

robert_tweed 10y ago

Funnily enough this format is nearly identical to what I call the "scrum email" which is something I've previously asked remote freelancers to send in daily and found it works as well if not better than actual stand-ups. That list of things to put in a sitrep is one of the things that Scrum gets right: - 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!

douche 10y ago
I love the idea of the standup. Getting a read on what everybody is doing is a great idea. It's idiotic to do it as a synchronous operation that stops the world and frigs up everybody's day, though. This is one of those things that would take five minutes to think about, write up, and post to someplace public first thing in the morning, after which you could dig in and actually get some work done.
- peterwwillis 10y ago
  Why the hell don't more people do this? I sit on lengthy stand-ups where people gripe or lecture with no expected resolution, meanwhile all I have to say is "business as usual" and I don't need anyone else's status, and could skim over updates in a few seconds, and even catch up with them later if need be.
  - kragniz 10y ago
    If you don't need or are interested in what other people are working on, maybe your team is too big?
    - flukus 10y ago
      It can happened with a small team spread across a number of projects too. Or sometimes you just really don't care.

lawnchair_larry 10y ago

I'm not sure what it is, or if it's justified, but I've always hated having to explain what I'm doing and why. I think that I will involve people as needed and when needed, and assume others will do the same. Most senior engineers I've worked with have been this way. Are there effective teams who don't do anything like this at all?

adrianratnapala 10y ago
I often have this feeling -- but it is because it's impossible to explain a mass of technical background to connect my current work to buisiness goals (assuming there even is such a connection). 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).
clifanatic 10y ago
> Are there effective teams who don't do anything like this at all? I'm pretty sure that the only effective teams are the ones who don't do anything like this at all.

bitshaker 10y ago

At our remote company, we use http://Jell.com http://Jell.com which was built for this purpose.

leroy_masochist 10y ago

My personal view of status emails is that they are largely an artifact of engineering-driven companies in which managers, who must possess a given level of engineering competence in order to have supervisory credibility, often have very poor social skills. 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.

emmett 10y ago
Status emails are not a "Potemkin supervisory framework". They're a scalable way of communicating progress broadly in a way that can be referenced later, rather than an ephemeral way to communicate to one person.
- leroy_masochist 10y ago
  That's kind of the point I was trying to make when I said that sending weekly stats is valid. I'm not saying that status emails are implicitly bad, I'm saying that they're poorly implemented. 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.

iamleppert 10y ago

"Send me your status in an e-mail" is a way for a lazy, un-engaged manager to dot his i's and cross his t's. If you're doing a good job managing your direct reports, you'll have a good pulse of what they have been up to at a resolution of at least one week, without being a micromanager.

vacri 10y ago
What was your underling doing seven weeks ago? Thirteen weeks ago? Didn't they mention a particular issue five weeks ago? What about reviewing the data for long-term trends, rather than gut feelings?
_RPM 10y ago
This is literally what I'm required to do every Friday. Also, I've never received feedback on this status report. What is the point?

PapaSlug 10y ago

https://home.idonethis.com/ https://home.idonethis.com/ for remote teams.

swsieber 10y ago

I actually liked the linked article about the art of OKR more. While I've been exposed to SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Timeframe?) as a missionary, for some reason it didn't ever really carry over into the real world. 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.

elgoog1212 10y ago

Google has "snippets". You basically write up what you did last week. They aren't mandatory, but encouraged. I have found them useful because I can then just go through them and pick the things I want to write in my performance review. Before I started keeping snippets, I had a hard time digging up a sufficiently meaty list of accomplishments, because I'd just forget most of them. And you can subscribe to other people's snippets as well.

ktRolster 10y ago

Trust your employees enough that as soon as something goes wrong, they will let you know. Don't expect them to wait until the end of the week to alert you of something, that makes no sense.

true_religion 10y ago
In my experience, people find something is going wrong then enter a temporal vortex where they only focus on fixing this problem. They will then emerge on a Friday at 4:30pm, to tell everyone. 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.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  Apparently the real takeaway from the checklist research was that other people, usually lower status employees like nurses knew that the doctor was about to amputate the wrong leg or whatever, but the dysfunctional working relationships made it very hard for them to point out idiotic mistakes being made by the big shots without endangering their careers. 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-out-the-mistake/ http://beyondthechecklist.com/2013/03/thank-you-for-pointing...
- bmj 10y ago
  There's also a potential cultural issue, where someone may feel like asking for help, or pointing out an obstacle, but thinks it may reflect poorly on them.

cel1ne 10y ago

> "List last week’s prioritized tasks, and if they were achieved." 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.

ianai 10y ago
Yes, definitely feels a little intimidating and static.
eric-hu 10y ago
That's one way to interpret it. Here's another: be honest and open about what you committed to. 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.
- dkrich 10y ago
  I don't understand the point of this. So the goal is to get better at estimating? In my experience tasks vary in difficulty from one to the next, and it's very difficult if not completely useless to formulate an estimate for the time required to do it. The only time work estimates are useful, IMO, is when you are estimating an exact fixed amount of labor which you have completed under similar circumstances at least a few times. 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.
  - 10y ago

cyphunk 10y ago

This article and much of the conversation here-in reminds me of THX 1138. There is a disconnect between how-to-manage and how-to-be-productive discussions on HN. Definitely daily mails, and also probably weekly's with intense liability attached to them in the name of "quality" seem to go against promoting humane productivity. 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.

clifanatic 10y ago
My experience is that this works well in an IT infrastructure sort of environment where you're assigned tickets that takes a couple of hours on the average. It sort of works in a project-based product development effort where programmers are implementing features and fixing bugs, but breaks down horribly on anything that involves any sort of research and experimentation (you know, the sorts of things that actually create breakthroughs and make money?) And God forbid you ever try to learn anything new: "Yesterday: read 50 pages of the ElasticSearch manual. Today: read 50 more pages of the ElasticSearch manual. Tomorrow: get fired for not having anything immediately profitable to put on status report."

hga 10y ago

For me, when handled well when working for a good boss, starting the week with one was an excellent way of organizing that week. I'd remember, think about, and memorialize what happened last week (and enough times there's a large portion of "what happened" vs. "what I did", i.e. putting out fires), and then planning what to do in the next 5-6 days (6 for crunch mode: 6 days x 7 hours of real heads down work in each, which I could sustain for a number of weeks). 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.

brlewis 10y ago

I've been using 15five, which is a weekly report format with the usual done/to-do/blockers questions, but every other week asks for suggestions to make your team/role better. It sends reminders, tracks your longest streak of completing reports, and has a public/private comment system with likes. This is a referral link: http://ssqt.co/m5blUWz http://ssqt.co/m5blUWz

pzh 10y ago

It's much better to have a weekly status email than a daily standup. Status emails can simply be scheduled with a cron job if one is not disposed to write them in the accorded time...

infinite8s 10y ago
How would you write it automatically? I suppose you could just have it pull your commit messages for the past week, but that would be manifestly missing the point, which is a quick high level summary of what was done and plan for following week. Otherwise the reader of the status email could just pull the commits directly.
clifanatic 10y ago
Everywhere I've worked has made up for it by demanding both a weekly status e-mail and a daily standup (and a daily status e-mail and a twice-a-year performance review).

SmellTheGlove 10y ago

I'm a director. I developed an easy test for whether my status reports mattered. One week I simply stopped sending them. It was mentioned to me once, about 3 months later, so I sent one that week. And then never again, for about the past year at least. It's not like I didn't have weekly 1x1s with my boss, in addition to our hallway conversations, so what we were doing was already communicated. 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.

overcast 10y ago
First rule of email, no one is going to read your email. Keep it incredibly short, I mean one line if you can. Then maybe a small percentage of recipients might glance at it.
- SmellTheGlove 10y ago
  If no one is going to read it, I'm not going to take the time to write and send it. That's my first rule of email. I really don't like to do things for appearances, and while I am professional I also do what I can to cut out the things that truly don't need doing - for myself and for my teams. I'd like to think I'm a good manager in that regard.

engi_nerd 10y ago

At one job, our management asked us to write a status email to be sent in every Friday afternoon by COB. After about six months, the management decided that it couldn't be bothered to sift through 30 emails from engineers each Friday afternoon. Therefore, they requested that we put our weekly status into a single Word document stored on a Sharepoint site. 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.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> After about six months, the management decided that it couldn't be bothered to sift through 30 emails from engineers each Friday afternoon. Therefore, they requested that we put our weekly status into a single Word document stored on a Sharepoint site. 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.
- engi_nerd 10y ago
  They didn't have us update the Word document in place -- meaning each status didn't take the place of the previous week's status. So you can imagine that the document quickly grew quite long. Managers started complaining that they couldn't see what was happening quickly enough because they had to scroll too much.