Practices vs. Accomplishments

 

Per our Head of Software Development, IT managers are henceforth being evaluated on the “quality” of their status reports.

A little background on this: We have a weekly conference call during which managers report project status. Every week you the hear the same things over and over: We’re waiting on this. We’re waiting on that. We’re working on requirements. We’re figuring out the architecture. We’re doing the design.

Very rarely does anyone say, “We delivered working software to a customer.”

Even more rarely does anyone say, “We delivered working software to a customer, the customer is using it, and can’t stop raving about how great it is.”

What would be our motivation for evaluating practices rather than accomplishments? When I do projects, I like to be evaluated on one thing: my ability to deliver business value to a customer.

Everything else is waste.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

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