3 ms·
There's a lot of backlash here against the idea that managers will use this to micro-manage. That's possible, sure. Bad managers will be bad. The reason I'm in
by apike 13y ago
There's a lot of backlash here against the idea that managers will use this to micro-manage. That's possible, sure. Bad managers will be bad.
The reason I'm interested in Peak is that it may be a good tool to implement the "trust, but verify" approach to management. I feel like I under-manage my team (7 people) because I really dislike interrupting people. I generally assume everybody is doing something productive, and understands the goals and priorities of our products.
However, when a team member gets stuck or goes off into the weeds, they may not realize it themselves. Before they've spent a days doing unnecessary work or spinning their wheels, it would be great to have a non-interrupting way to notice this and give them the support they need to get back on track.
Of course you need to take the numbers for what they are - if you directly incentivize people to get their dropbox files changed numbers up, you're gonna have a bad time. Still, I see this as a potential tool to help me understand what might be going right and wrong with my team without bugging them, and that's a good thing.
- felipe 13y agoThe key issue is what you just described in your last paragraph. Micro-managing by metrics without thinking in side-effects is actually harmful to the team. There is a reason measuring productivity by LOC is considered a bad practice (which was actually very common in the past). I completely see the need for metrics, but they are very easy to gather by specialized tools for the job (software engineering, customer service, etc...). It seems that Peak is just a glorified dashboard, and by assuming that the product is actually "automatically tracking work" (referencing their slogan) one would be damaging the team's productivity and morale, and not increasing it.
- rpicard 13y agoA less intrusive alternative might be to start using something like https://idonethis.com/ https://idonethis.com/. That way you can start offering help when you see, "Still trying to find that bug; didn't get much else done."