Real developers write code — not status reports.
I Need It
There are typically 2 reasons for needing status reports: 1) collaboration and 2) monitoring.
Agile shops recommend status reports for the first reason. Software development is a team sport. Rarely do individuals work in a vacuum, so regular status is important to address dependencies, remove blocks, and ensure folks don’t step on each other’s toes. The manager may collect reports for logistical reasons, but the reports aren’t for managers — they are for the team.
Monitoring is more common in consulting arrangements. Work is being done on someone else’s behalf and that person wants to monitor the activities. Very simply they want to ensure they getting what they are paying for. Every once in a while you read about dysfunctional uses of status reports. This “use case” is commonly the scenario where that’s found. The reason is that people often don’t care until there is a problem. Then the reports are reviewed to help understand where things went wrong.
Read More
This article on call-center CRM popped up on the radar. While the piece talks of the challenge in monitoring and managing call center agents, one paragraph in particular caught our eye.
Analyst Gartner: “Cautioned contact centers and enterprises to listen closely to whenever a vendor uses the term ’suite,’ as many bundled offerings now on the market actually consist of components that were built using a variety of tools. As a result these offerings are more ‘portfolios’ than they are suites, resulting in countless administration environments, support complexities and overlapping functionalities that are both unnecessary and costly.”
Anyone who’s wrestled with application development and reporting suites will recognize this parallel. IT vendors have grown their development and reporting “suites” through the years and during multiple acquisitions. The result? Tools that were intended to help reporting on projects that actually hinder the process and cost money into the bargain (through licensing and support). These tools fail to collect data in real time while lack of integration with the rest of the portfolio makes its difficult for customers to filter data or access information in real time.
The suites argument has always been something of a smoke screen by IT vendors. It’s time to get back to tools that actually do what they say on the packet.
