The management information problem

1. Management information ←
2. Working out loud
3. Collaboration opportunities
4. Activity feeds
5. Activity feed design
6. Information pages
7. Information page URLs

Centre for Ageing Better

Managers need to know when work flows smoothly, and when something slows work down. In software development, meetings and tools address this information problem by making key activities and milestones explicit, and visible.

The information we gather - what we learn from doing the work - informs decision-making. Without this continuous learning and adaptation, we would to revert up-front planning, and endless meetings.

Status meetings

In software development, a lot of management work involves making decisions based on the outcomes of work by designers and developers. Managers gather and analyse information about these specialist’s work, and use it to make decisions about future work.

The old-fashioned approach to management information puts the specialists in a status meeting, where they describe their work verbally. The specialists generally hate this, because it feels like a waste of time, and especially programmers, who see this as a solvable information technology (IT) problem.

Management information

The old-fashioned IT solution adds reporting capabilities to business applications. This provides operational reporting on daily activities, rather than management reporting’s analysis and performance metrics.

Good reports reduce demand for status meetings, but their gaps lead managers to look for more input. In manufacturing industries, for example, management by wandering around (MBWA) improves on reporting by randomly sampling the actual work right now.

Lean manufacturing’s Gemba walk, in turn, improves MBWA by sounding more sophisticated. However, unlike other Japanese manufacturing concepts, such as kaizen and kanban, gemba has seen less direct adoption in software development.

Realtime visibility

Gemba’s Japanese meaning - the actual place - translates less obviously to software development’s purely digital realm. While managers might conceivably hang out in Figma, or attend team programming sessions, this doesn’t seem to have caught on.

Instead, demand for realtime visibility starts off as demand for realtime dashboards. Dashboards sound good, but often fail because they fail to pin down exactly which problem they solve:

1. mixing audiences and dashboard types - strategic, analytical, operational, etc.
2. manual updates - no budget for full automation, and out-of-date data
3. no focus - a random selection of too many data points
4. poorly-defined information - no-one really knows what the number means.

Operational visibility requires a more concrete approach.

Direct work visibility

When I first started using Confluence, years ago, I found it particularly useful to include a list of all updates on each space’s home page. Seeing who’s edited what in the last day or two goes a long way to keeping track of team members’ current work.

Individual tools potentially offer a more concrete kind of team-level visibility, merely by exposing the results of people doing work. Unfortunately, they don’t all do this. Sadly, even today, Notion’s home page doesn’t list other people’s activity, and instead focuses on what I already know, such as my own.

In practice, not every team figures out how to make their work directly visible. Their ‘rewards’ include status meetings, whether they like them or not.