👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I help engineers become great engineering managers - whether you want to become one or are already leading a team.
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A manager I’ve been talking to was responsible for a project. That project had an owner as the project lead, and my friend spent two months getting basically the same update every time he asked for one:
“Still working on it.”
Sometimes it was slightly more specific than that, but the thing is - he had no way to track how it was going.
The project was complex and it was obvious the lead was busy with it.
One day, my friend checked out the latest changes of the new repo, and he noticed that it was getting contributions from a few other engineers. What a surprise! Up until that moment, he thought it was only being worked on by the project lead.
Vagueness
There’s a ton of really useful advice about status updates out there.
How to ask good questions to get good updates, have them be async, make it safe for people to raise when they’re stuck…
All of that is great!
But I think there’s a difference between someone who struggles to explain clearly what they’re doing, and someone giving you the exact same update for eight weeks.
“Still working on the migration” tells me nothing. And can be true regardless of if the project is:
on track
at risk
delayed
barely started
The update works in all these scenarios.
Now imagine a beautiful world where instead of hearing that, you hear something like:
We’re on step three out of seven. Step four needs a decision by Thursday from X to stay on track.
From experience, I have seen that when projects are struggling, status reports tend to make things look better than they actually are. It’s not that people are lying.. Sometimes, they really believe they’re almost done... every week, for six weeks.
Complex projects don’t suddenly fail. They fail gradually, after plenty of warning signs.
An update that hasn’t changed for two months is probably one of them.
The same words can mean very different things
When I hear “still working on it”, I think it means one of three things.
The work is blocked.
That happens.. Usually though, there should be something more concrete to share. A failed approach, a technical decision gone bad... something.
The work isn’t being done.
Especially if that’s on a project with people from different teams that you don’t have as much visibility on. Maybe their priorities changed, or they have not been able to create time for it.
It’s in progress but the lead has delegated work to others and doesn’t know what’s going on.
This is the interesting one. The lead might create a POC, or start the implementation, and because or “reasons” they decide to hand over parts of it to other people.
The handoff
There’s an old HBR article called Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?.
The original article talks about work moving upwards.. Someone brings their manager a problem and somehow the manager walks away owning it.
This obviously happens downwards too.
A lead is working on a thing, asks someone else for help and suddenly that person owns that piece now.
Sometimes we create the problem ourselves. People are less likely to report bad news when they think the delay is their fault. So if people get punished every time they’re specific about something going wrong... eventually they’ll stop being specific.
How can we get high quality updates on projects consistently?
That’s the paid part of this issue 👇👇👇
Four things I’d check and the conversation I’d have.