45   Keep Others Informed

“The manager, your team, and the business owners are relying on you to get tasks done. If they want your status, they’ll ask you for it. Just keep your head down, and keep working.”

By accepting a task, you have agreed to deliver it on time. But, it’s not unusual to run into problems and face delays. The deadline arrives and at the demo you are expected to show the code working. What if you arrive at the meeting and inform everyone that you haven’t finished? Besides being embarrassing, it’s not healthy for your career.

If you wait until the deadline to deliver bad news, you’re just begging your manager and technical lead to micromanage you. They’ll be worried that you’ll surprise them again so will check with you several times a day to make sure you are progressing. Your life is now evolving into a Dilbert cartoon.

Suppose you are in the middle of a task. It looks as if technical difficulties mean you won’t be able to finish it on time. If you take the proactive step of informing others, you are giving them an opportunity to help figure out a solution ahead of time. Maybe they can ask another developer to help. They may reassign the task to someone else who may be more familiar with it. They may help you by giving more input on what needs to be done, or they may adjust the scope of work to what’s doable in this iteration. Your customer may be willing to trade the task with some other equally important task.

By keeping others informed, you eliminate surprises, and they are comfortable they know your progress. They know when to provide you with helping hands, and you’ve earned their trust.

A traditional way to keep people informed is to send them an email, send them a message on a sticky note, or make a quick phone call. Another way to is to use what Alistair Cockburn calls “information radiators.”^[42] An information radiator is something like a poster on the wall providing information that changes over time. Passersby pick up the information effortlessly. By pushing the information at them, you eliminate the need for them to ask you questions. Your information radiators can display the progress you are making on your tasks and any additional information you think will be of interest to your team, manager, or customers.

You might use a poster on the wall, a website or Wiki, or a blog or RSS feed. As long as you put the information somewhere that people will look at regularly, then you’re in the right place.

The whole team can use information radiators to broadcast their status, code designs, cool new ideas they’ve researched, and so on. Now just by walking around you can get smarter, and your manager will know exactly what’s up.

Keep others informed. Publish your status, your ideas and the neat things you’re looking at. Don’t wait for others to ask you the status of your work.

What It Feels Like

You don’t feel pestered by managers or co-workers constantly asking for your status or your latest design or research efforts.

Keeping Your Balance

• The daily stand-up meeting (see ​Schedule Regular Face Time​) helps keep everyone up-to-date at a high level.

• When presenting status, make sure the level of detail is appropriate for the audience. CEOs and business owners don’t care about obscure details of abstract base classes, for instance.

• Don’t spend more time or effort keeping others informed than actually getting your work done.

• Stay head’s up, not head down.