One of my pet peeves in the business world is being required to provide regular updates and then realizing nobody is reading them.
When I was a manager, the director required her management team to provide her with weekly "footprints." These documents included all kinds of information including production stats and turnaround times, staffing issues, project status, and other ad hoc "hot-button" issues. Ostensibly these reports were required so that the director could stay informed about everything going on in the department.
It took a lot of time and work to create these footprints on the order of a couple of hours up to half a day. It wasn't just a copy/paste of the previous week with changed numbers. As you can imagine, I was very detailed. I put all the work and effort into the reports because that is what my boss asked for.
I became suspicious that the director was not reading my footprints because she would constantly ask about issues or items for which I had provided status in my footprint. In order to test my hypothesis, I started adding oddball statements to my reports. It started with a sentence here or there and eventually wrote full-blown paragraphs that would not be missed. I wrote things that would be guaranteed to get her attention if she read the report. She never once referenced any of these literary fancies.
I have a report that I complete once a week for my current client. It's a summary of open tickets, and it does not take long to complete. I make the updates in a Word doc on SharePoint, and I suspect no one is looking at the report. The reason for my suspicion is that the file is named with "FY2021 Q2" and we are well into Q3. The admin has not created a Q3 version of the report yet.
I sent an email to the director about a month ago asking if I still need to complete this report. I never got a response. I could employ the strategy of stopping the updates to see who notices; however, that would not be consistent with the Consultant Code.
When I was a manager, the director required her management team to provide her with weekly "footprints." These documents included all kinds of information including production stats and turnaround times, staffing issues, project status, and other ad hoc "hot-button" issues. Ostensibly these reports were required so that the director could stay informed about everything going on in the department.
It took a lot of time and work to create these footprints on the order of a couple of hours up to half a day. It wasn't just a copy/paste of the previous week with changed numbers. As you can imagine, I was very detailed. I put all the work and effort into the reports because that is what my boss asked for.
I became suspicious that the director was not reading my footprints because she would constantly ask about issues or items for which I had provided status in my footprint. In order to test my hypothesis, I started adding oddball statements to my reports. It started with a sentence here or there and eventually wrote full-blown paragraphs that would not be missed. I wrote things that would be guaranteed to get her attention if she read the report. She never once referenced any of these literary fancies.
I have a report that I complete once a week for my current client. It's a summary of open tickets, and it does not take long to complete. I make the updates in a Word doc on SharePoint, and I suspect no one is looking at the report. The reason for my suspicion is that the file is named with "FY2021 Q2" and we are well into Q3. The admin has not created a Q3 version of the report yet.
I sent an email to the director about a month ago asking if I still need to complete this report. I never got a response. I could employ the strategy of stopping the updates to see who notices; however, that would not be consistent with the Consultant Code.
