It’s Monday morning.
How many of you are filling out weekly reports?
Why do so many of us have to endure this pain in the 🍑 task?
All weekly reports started from a pure, rational, and meaningful place:
Boss up the food chain wants to review the business thoroughly, and wants to hear from the ground up.
- A subordinate of Boss needs data from her team to inform Boss
- She needs these data to be consistent. She needs the data weekly
- So she creates a form disguised as a report
She asks her lefthand man to create this report (aka fill out this form):
- Lefthand man needs data from his team, consistently, weekly
- So he creates a form disguised as a report and gives to his team
This continues downstream, and now it has reached you.
I call these “Slow Scope Creeps.”
- We carelessly allow the scope of our work creeps into our teams’ scopes.
- These slow scope creeps spread quickly through the org.
- Once they colonise the org, they are extremely hard to remove, because everyone depends on someone to fill out a form.
There is nothing much you can do about it, except one thing:
Boss, before you create another “report,” just think for a sec-
is this one of those “slow scope creeps?”