I'm spending more time on status recording and reporting than I ever
expected (2-3 hours a week), and I'm also spending more mental energy.
When I finish a status report, my mind is exhausted and I want to take
a walk around the block, not write code or dive into the SVN dev@
mailing list.
I've tried to analyze why it's so exhausting, below are some thoughts.
This is not as well-organized as I'd like, but it's a start.
Some problems with our status reporting system.
===============================================
* It punishes extra hard those who have lots of little tasks, rather
than a few big ones, because the system adds multiple overheads to
each task. The categorization burden, for example, is much greater
for someone doing many things in many categories, because each
category gets repeated twice, in COMPLETED vs ONGOING, and sometimes
also in Objectives, so the burden is not just Nx, but somewhere
between 2Nx and 3Nx.
* It requires information to be repeated, and since it's text files
instead of a database, that means cut and paste. Worse, it's cut
and paste between different files, and since the source and
destination of a given item may be in different COMPLETED vs ONGOING
(IN PROCESS) categories, so you can't just do block moves either.
Thus, it's very hard not to lose data occasionally, and even when
you don't lose data, you spend a lot of time figuring out where it's
supposed to go.
* The whole "STARTING" vs "COMPLETED" distinction is bogus anyway.
You can't tell at the time if a project is completed; it's only
after a while has gone by without it needing more attention that you
begin to suspect it might be done. But that's impossible to reflect
in a status report. "Hmm, seems a couple of weeks have gone by
without my needing to do anything more on the XYZ issue, so I guess
I'll just mark that as COMPLETED now." Yeah, right, like anyone's
going to think of that :-). (And even if one did think of it, there
would be no way to reflect it properly in this week's status report,
since the relevant report was already handed in two weeks ago.)
Why can't we just say what we're working on without having to make
highly fallible judgements about whether it is done at any given
moment? My manager, Mahesh, is in close enough touch with me to
know when major things are completed anyway -- but I don't think he
gets that information from my status reports. I think he gets it
from email, IRC, and phone conversations (Mahesh, please correct me
if I'm wrong on that).
* Everything is expressed in percentages, not hours, and the
percentages must sum to 100 exactly. Thus:
a) You are forced to calculate percentages at the end, summing and
dividing across all the data, instead of recording hours as you
go and just adding to the hours of a given task when you do more
on that task.
b) There is no way to express effort greater than 100% (i.e.,
working, say, a 50 or 60 hour week during crunch time). "100%"
of a million years looks the same as "100%" of ten minutes.
* You have to keep track not only of what you did in a given week, but
whether you started doing it that week, or whether you had been
doing it before. You also have to predict what you're going to
start in the next week, which sounds reasonable on its face, but in
practice is pointless: in my experience, the only things that can be
predicted for next week are the things I was already working on this
week. Why not just predict the percentages alone for next week, and
let the details speak for themselves in next week's report?
* Sections that are different look visually alike. If you have a lot
of little status items, the section headers will be scrolled off the
screen, so you have to keep shifting your editing window to remember
where you are.
* The final and most important claim:
I don't think anyone's really reading these!
My status reports have varied wildly in quality; also, every week
since the last ice age, I've been putting only a little joke in the
"Risks/Recommendations" section because putting non-jokes seems to
have no effect. As far as I can recall, I've never gotten a single
comment about the content of my status reports (except from another
team member who noticed a formatting problem or something trivial
like that).
If any use is being made of my status reports, it is invisible to
me. That is somewhat discouraging. To put in what feels like a lot
of makework every week is bad enough; to put in the work and hear
nothing back about it is even worse.