Reporting

Writing reports to managers is a big and important part of work. If you don't write some nice things about what you are doing in the weekly/monthly reports, who will? Some times, in big in distributed teams if managers change often, these reports could provide 90% of information about your work.

I recently realized there is a bias in my reports. I knew from books it should have existed, but thought I was somehow immune. I am not. Recently I found few occurrences of it in my own monthly reports.

The bias is simple. It is in my best interests to emphasize the achievements that are best aligned with business goals. Instead very often people, including myself, tend to emphasize the the work that was most technically challenging.

For example, last week I received a report from a customer stating that they achieved a very good performance results with our sample platform and their software. My job was to help them in optimizing it. I had helped them before, but this time they managed totally on their own. So as my stake in the result was nearly zero I had an urge to describe it just in few words in a last bullet of the weekly report, and list technically interesting but not as business relevant thing as a main work I did during the work week.