Agile organizations still need project status reports- Valutrics

Root of the problem

For many years IT leaders have asked development teams — agile or otherwise — to update them on the status of projects, information that they then would often use against their teams to push them harder. Teams, however, quickly learn to report only good news. Bad news gets obfuscated until it is urgent. Thus the common green, green, green, RED!! pattern of so many projects. I have seen it for decades.

How the tables have turned! Agile coaches are now telling their managers to stop asking them for project status reports.

As an agile coach and expert of many years, I have serious problems with this perspective and I think it is much more damaging than it appears.

The refusal by agile teams to provide project status reports shows a fundamental disrespect for the work that managers and leaders do.

Managers, to be sure, need teams and individual contributors or there would be no product or service to provide to the customers.

Teams and individual contributors also need managers because, as an organization scales, it becomes impossible for every person to know what every other person is doing. Management is responsible for aggregating and disseminating information.

Teams and contributors are responsible for creating and maintaining. Managers provide vision and guardrails.

In small organizations it is advisable that managers attend the meetings and events where the agile teams and contributors are discussing the status of the work. Firsthand knowledge is always better than reading project status reports.

Unfortunately, managers can’t be everywhere. At scale, some sort of reporting is necessary — and even more necessary when directors, vice presidents and C-suite leaders need to be kept in the loop. These people are all responsible for steering the high-level direction of the organization. They need to know what is happening. They need project status reports.

Proactive project status reports

It’s not hard to see where the pushback is coming from. In the traditional manager/ team relationship, the manager demands information about the status of the project. Not much context for why is given and, as noted, the information obtained is often used against the team to apply more pressure to get more done, or to find blame for why things aren’t done.