Submitted by Fossidarity in programming
edmund_the_destroyer wrote
I agree with some of the points of the article, but not all of it.
In my experience, you need some kind of general task-tracking system. It can't be too formal, because it buries everyone in paperwork and bureaucracy and sucks. But neither can it be absent, because you run into two problems.
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Some people simply won't do anything at all. That's fine in an open source or volunteer project. And slow progress because of unexpected problems and so forth is fine too. I don't ask my teammates or manager or anyone else to write down everything they do. A ticket update, "Spent two days on getting user lockouts for bad passwords to work" is fine. But some people go weeks without doing anything, period.
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For cross-team work, sometimes I have to ask other people to do things. Usually it's the sysadmins. They don't use a task-tracking system of any kind, they refuse to do so, and it's maddening. Is my request third in the queue? 15th? 92nd? I don't know, they won't tell me. I just have to wait until someone emails me with a note that it's done. The rest of the engineering group has done all sorts of wacky nonsense to code around problems - network tunnels, file permissions, backup processes, server configuration changes - that could be solved with five minutes of sysadmin effort. Because you can submit a request for a new VM in one subnet and get it the same afternoon, and then there are other VM requests that took two years - not kidding - to get filled even though we repeated the request every month.
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