It's a bright and beautiful morning on Monday, March 7 2022 in Portland Oregon and the family managed to get out of the door to school with what I'd describe as "only the usual amount of fuss".
\nNo, seriously. This happened to come up twice in the last week. One of the clients I'm working, one of the ones where I've been doing the Big Strategy Thing, has progressed past the Big Strategy Stage, paused briefly to deliver a sermon from the Mountain of Executive Alignment and Leadership and is now journeying through the Perilous Pass of Managing Progress.
\nOne of the dangers of the Perilous Pass of Managing Progress is that it's quite easy to look at something, say, a Jira board and be impressed by all the, uh donner und blitz of apparent movement, but not really know if any progress is being made toward, you know, a goal. Presuming, of course, that you have a useful, clear goal that you're aiming towards (for example, recently communicated at the All Hands Apex and then Cascaded Down).
\nAnyway: look, managing is super difficult and very complicated and sometimes people don't even get trained for it and get accidentally promoted into the position. None of this is new, and all of it is to say that at some I probably said something like this, or at least hallucinated that I said it:
\nMe: I mean, we could write a playbook.
\nTeam: Is this a trap?
\nMe: Yes, it's a trap.
\nTeam: We shouldn't write a playbook?
\nMe: No, we shouldn't write a playbook.
\nTeam: Why not?
\nMe: Because nobody reads them and even if they do read them, they're not particularly effective for what we want to achieve, and you can't even be sure the people who you think need to read them will read them.
\nTeam: Okay, what should we do instead?
\nMe: We could put something on Confluence.
\nTeam: This is still a trap, isn't it.
\nMe: Yes. You're catching on quick.
\nLet me skip to the good part:
\nI mean yes, if everyone else is documenting things on Confluence and they are actually looking at some of the things on Confluence (also known as: potentially the world's worst Wiki-that's-not-a-Wiki, I mean really, the editor has this thing on Chrome and Safari and Firefox on the Mac where if, say, I've been taking notes in a meeting and we're up to around 2,000 words then suddenly the editor will slow down to something like about a 2... characters... per... second... and... full... of... lag... and not even saving/updating the page and reloading it will help, it's like someone took the DOM for the page and threw it down a well and then covered the well up with rocks and the only way you can update it is by digging a well about a mile away and gently suggesting to the earth there that maybe the original well would like to update? Anyway, I digress-) then can you imagine how little people are looking at the rest of the stuff on Confluence.
\nSo! There are things to know that would be helpful for people who are responsible for things happening, and at the very least we have a culture where people defensively write things down, just in case in the future you need someone to say "I told you so".
\nAlso this trick is Really Useful For When You're In A Process And Checklist Driven Environment.
\nAnd that is to write playbooks as a Buzzfeed Listicle and it totally works even for time-poor executive leaders and managers because what you're promising is that you'll make their job easier for them. It just means you've got to be very, very careful and instead of writing a playbook with lots of words and things and meeting user needs, you kind of throw caution to the wind and instead you write something like:
\nThe Top ~~Ten~~ Eight Things To Look For In a Healthy Redacted If You're A Manager
\nof which I'm not quite ready to share, on reflection, but suffice to say the particular listicle I wrote included something to the effect of "if it's important then treat it as important" and "what does important look like" and then the bloody minded "these other things are important and they show up like this, so if redacted isn't showing up in the same place, then, YELLOW FLAG"
\nPeople love flags and traffic lights in project management, the next software I ever touch in an appreciable manner is totally going to have nonsensical static flag names and values and ENUMs or whatever like YELLOW and RED and OFFWHITE.
\nAnyway, consider writing listicles for documentation and also consider writing your Jira tickets/stories/whatever as clickbait[1] because it's a) funny and b) reflective of the hellscape we live in and I don't know, c) a coping mechanism?
\nLook the proper version of this is most documentation is written by people who're just jumping on the documentation grenade and documentation is super hard and writing is super hard, so people are just doing the best they can. If you want something read, then make it readable, make it relevant, make it something else that begins with R to make this phrase snappy and then talk to someone like Sarah Winters née Richards about content design. Or as a hack, imagine what your content would be like as a Buzzfeed Listicle.
\n(One example is the U.S. Department of Defense Defense Innovation Board's Guide to Detecting Agile BS) which is a Buzzfeed Listicle in one chief way which is that it's a formal, official document using transgressing language out of register which instantly attracts attention amongst a certain audience. The document both scores and loses points by including an amazing DOD-style graphic which has no fewer than eight different arrows, all of which are bidrectional, and so on. Anyway, it's worth a read, and even if you know about it, it's always worth a re-read, too.
\nThe paper "Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness[2] is a great example of a paper whose title uses language which is now out of date and potentially misleading. To me, a light-emitting eReader, referred to in the paper as reading an eBook on a light-emitting device (LE-eBook) means reading something on an e-paper device with an integrated backlight, which backlight might even be color-temperature controllable. But this is a paper from 2014, and it's about reading an eBook on an iPad at full brightness. So, you know. Not that.
\nArs Technica says Attackers can force Amazon Echos to hack themselves with self-issued commands. I say: "Alexa, play the album Eternal Golden Braid by the band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach[3] from Amazon Music".
\nThe US Government's CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency has guidance (PDFs) on what's needed to notify employees that network monitoring is happening and their consent is needed:
\nAnd look yes, I know this is complicated but, you know, this is what the recommended/example nine-factor banner looks like for a private entity:
\n\n\nBy clicking [ACCEPT] below you acknowledge and consent to the following:
\nAll communications and data transiting, traveling to or from, or stored on this system will be monitored. You consent to the unrestricted monitoring, interception, recording, and searching of all communications and data transiting, traveling to or from, or stored on this system at any time and for any purpose by [the COMPANY] and by any person or entity, including government entities, authorized by [the COMPANY]. You also consent to the unrestricted disclosure of all communications and data transiting, traveling to or from, or stored on this system at any time and for any purpose to any person or entity, including government entities, authorized by [the COMPANY]. You are acknowledging that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding your use of this system. These acknowledgments and consents cover all use of the system, including work-related use and personal use without exception.
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Which is a wonderful thing to end a newsletter on, isn't it.
\n--
\nOkay, that as twenty minutes! I am doing rubbish at this fifteen minute thing. I need to figure out another way of doing this, or adjusting my goals.
\nHow's the beginning of your week going? How was your weekend? Mine was pretty good, I saw a goddamn magic show and my kids laughed their asses off, I even smiled and it was wonderful.
\nBest,
\nDan
\nAmro Mousa on Twitter: "writing clickbait titles for JIRA tickets", via Sarah Emerson ↩︎
\nEvening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness; Chang, Aeschbach, Duffy, Czeisler, 2014 in PNAS and this is a bad cite but PNAS' citing thing doesn't... let you copy a plain text cite to clipboard? ↩︎
\nYeah hands up who else fills the stereotype of reading Gödel, Escher, Bach during undergrad, hmm? ↩︎
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