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There's also an insidious pattern where entire layers of management exist strictly to report status to higher layers of management. It's challenging in such or

There's also an insidious pattern where entire layers of management exist strictly to report status to higher layers of management. It's challenging in such organizations to have meaningful cross-functional communication between the people who do the actual work and who need to understand each other. Why? Because these management layers also [try to] mediate all cross-functional interaction in formalized meetings which they run like court proceedings-- they're called by various names: "hand-offs", "gates", etc. The point is they're one-direction process-flow "ceremonies" that don't have real discussion between the parties involved. What has to happen to workaround this is that the individuals who need to really communicate must seek each other out informally (or "offline" as the PM-derps would say), sometimes this works, sometimes it's a setup for one party getting snubbed by the other because they're beset with too many meetings. So yeah, there's often of fat layer of middle management that do bullshit jobs in large-enough orgs.

satyrnein 5y ago
For years, I've made slides to report status on things (as a line manager, not a project manager) and I've tried to figure out ways to automate it. No amount of tags or epics or whatever in Jira seem to do it. It always has to be done by hand because what's actually happening is a lot of editorial curation, contextualization with other things going on at the company or in the industry, etc. (Please, if someone has a better idea, let me know!) At larger companies, I can imagine this semi-journalism taking lots of people, because you can't just aim a firehouse of information at upper management. In theory, this could all be replaced with some clever dashboards, but the reality always seems messier.
rsj_hn 5y ago
> There's also an insidious pattern where entire layers of management exist strictly to report status to higher layers of management I think everyone agrees. > So yeah, there's often of fat layer of middle management that do bullshit jobs in large-enough orgs. Here we disagree. You are positing that it's possible for there to be a large org without this fat layer, and I think this is unlikely. It's like complaining about entropy or the n^2 communication cost. Something may be terrible yet impossible to avoid. Making big bureaucracies as efficient as small bureaucracies is a really, really, hard problem. It may well be an unsolvable problem that comes with scale, sort of the flipside of how many things are more efficiently produced in large quantities, and it could be that the "optimal" size of a business is where these two trade-offs balance out -- e.g. where the scaling costs of the bureaucracy meets the efficiency gains of scale production.

satyrnein 5y ago

For years, I've made slides to report status on things (as a line manager, not a project manager) and I've tried to figure out ways to automate it. No amount of tags or epics or whatever in Jira seem to do it. It always has to be done by hand because what's actually happening is a lot of editorial curation, contextualization with other things going on at the company or in the industry, etc. (Please, if someone has a better idea, let me know!) At larger companies, I can imagine this semi-journalism taking lots of people, because you can't just aim a firehouse of information at upper management. In theory, this could all be replaced with some clever dashboards, but the reality always seems messier.

rsj_hn 5y ago

> There's also an insidious pattern where entire layers of management exist strictly to report status to higher layers of management I think everyone agrees. > So yeah, there's often of fat layer of middle management that do bullshit jobs in large-enough orgs. Here we disagree. You are positing that it's possible for there to be a large org without this fat layer, and I think this is unlikely. It's like complaining about entropy or the n^2 communication cost. Something may be terrible yet impossible to avoid. Making big bureaucracies as efficient as small bureaucracies is a really, really, hard problem. It may well be an unsolvable problem that comes with scale, sort of the flipside of how many things are more efficiently produced in large quantities, and it could be that the "optimal" size of a business is where these two trade-offs balance out -- e.g. where the scaling costs of the bureaucracy meets the efficiency gains of scale production.