I love it. It reminds me of a story.
My friend who joined the Big Search Company as tech lead was asked to report progress in four places.
He thought it was ridiculous.
So instead, he didn't report at all.
He got two questions why is he not reporting?
So for year's he was reporting in just two places instead of four.
Two others were unused/unnecessary. However, still done by all other tech leads.
Not necessarily (in general)! It could be that those other two locations are part of the eyes for someone in management. This report not adding a status update could represent 10% of 25% of the stuff they're tracking on a regular basis. Do you notice if some small percentage of all the things you're tracking stops reporting? Or does it fall through the cracks? I'm betting the people tracking that work in the other two locations would notice if everyone stopped reporting.
Should they notice the reporting drop off? Yeah. But we're only human and must rely on process and the cooperation of other humans for everything to work efficiently.
(In no way am I saying someone should have to report in four places. They should fix their process so they're reporting in one place and anyone who need eyes on those people can check there.)
Push vs pull solves it neatly; the idea of requiring subordinates manually / proactively to push status updates to various management nodes seems kind of absurd.
Well sure; basic communication skills are prerequisite (and assumed). I was talking about GP's ref to formal processes that required frequently pushing updates to 4 different upstream management nodes, which I maintain is doing it wrong.
