In the corporate workplace, there are many methods and standards of communication. If you are an employee in a smaller company, discerning how and what to report is not always a straight forward process. This author has noted formal training on the reporting process is commonly overlooked and the act of delivering status is frequently passed on to new members in a form of tribal law, where a peer will inform the new employee by word of mouth, not able to rely on documented processes for training. The new employee will also be subject to more subtle clues as to the nature of aggregating and delivering project status. More pointedly, it has been noted in small, emerging companies a habit of not reporting progress if the report is negative in nature. When critically reviewed, this method of reporting will have the appearance of an abnormal behavior being conveyed and promoted. Upon further review and more details as to the common behavior of small emerging companies, it will be revealed the true nature of the behavior is normal for this stage of development.
Take the example of an individual employed at an emerging high tech company in the Digital Resource Management (DRM) application space. Having experienced recent distinguished successes, the employee roster has grown from five people only three years ago working in a local office, to over one hundred working worldwide in every time zone. In the early years, positive progress was common, easily repeatable, and expected, as competition was fairly light. Because successes were easy to recognize and achieve the expectation of always reporting success was soon recognized as a corporate standard.
As the application matured and grew in complexity, there were more factors to account for in coding and testing, thus making it more difficult to determine and report positive progress. In this workplace, there is a condition that can only be described as behavior of "The Three Monkeys". For the uninitiated, The Three Monkeys is a reference to a common Japanese legend depicted by three monkeys in which one is covering it's eyes, another it's mouth, and the last covering it's ears. The usual understandings of the poses are: "See no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil". The basis of the legend stems from the Koshin belief of everyone has three monkeys which refuse to speak the misdeeds of their owner. In this modern instance, the behavior can be described as "I will not speak if I have negative results to report" An example of this would be, if a person had to make a report of a project not progressing as expected, they would do their level best not to say anything. Even in the circumstance of if the report were to be neutral, the subject would still be reluctant to make the report. Only in the event of being able to produce a positive report, would they feel comfortable reporting status. The subjects studied were actually observed planning a series of "ghost" lunches in order to avoid being able to be scheduled into a meeting where they would have no choice to report negative status.
There is a noted atmosphere of ensuring positive outcomes regardless if the outcome was a stated objective. In other words, if the team were focused on creating a specific application, and for whatever reason had not made appropriate progress, the team lead would chose not to report on the progress, but instead would insist on reporting positive progress on another similar, but unrelated project, even if they were not supposed to working on the similar project. This unspoken tribal law of "speak of good, not bad” permeates the entire organization at every level. This theory of operation comes from surveying the subjects behavior over the past eleven months, following their individual progress (in the form of daily status reports), and comparing the weekly reports, which are supposed to summarize past weekly activity. The behavior is so pervasive, even in the circumstance where this condition was brought up in a departmental meeting, the subject still insisted on delivering the incorrect positive information, rather than what was written in the daily reports.
The negative business outcomes resulting from this behavior are people being required to work unexpected extra shifts or project timelines being stretched due to "unforeseen" issues appearing near project end. This is turn causes employees trust in project reports (and the managers who gather them) to decline, which goes further to make people question the ability of the company to operate in a fiscally responsible manner. The faith placed in the company processes to produce applications is shaken from the employee to the end-user.
When first exposed to this conduct with earlier companies, it was thought this behavior was an abnormality, a misperception on behalf of the author, further observation (and job opportunities with other companies) proved the facts otherwise. In the normal role of a single department manager (Software Quality Assurance), only having insight to one perspective of a multi-department effort, this perception could easily have been arrived at mistakenly. However, as the authority to govern other departments (Engineering and Customer Care) was granted to the individual, it was noted through documented reports the noted behavior was accurate, and not subject to misinterpretation. The status being reported in the weekly summaries did not reflect the status noted in the daily reports.
