Release It!

Supporting Processes

How many times have you seen this one: some reporting system generates a report and sends it to a distribution list, and half the people on the list have a rule in Microsoft Outlook that automatically deletes the report? It’s classic. Of course, anytime I see that, I immediately know that the report is useless. In fact, it’s probably worse than useless. Not only does it take time and effort to generate the report, but somebody has to maintain that report through changes in the underlying system. Worse still, once in a blue moon, the report might actually show something serious, but all of the supposed consumers of the report stopped reading it long ago.

That report is an example of transparency without a closed-loop ...