Are you an organized person? Do you understand information flow in your organization? The importance of categorization and taxonomy? You might be a good fit for Engineering Management! Having now spent a number of years in management and leadership positions, I have noticed a number of successful patterns, and unsuccessful patterns. In this post I want to focus on one of the more successful patterns: good information management.

Engineering managers are expected to have loads of information ready at all times. The architecture of the systems their team is responsible for, current project priorities, cross-team points of dependence or collaboration, and a myriad of other snippets of information. It’s a lot, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a person to maintain so much information in their active memory. That’s why information management is very important for a management role, I don’t need to remember everything, but I do want to remember where everything is documented.

Some of the productive patterns that I have seen and utilized:

  • Decision Log: it’s great when a team can make decisions quickly, but an inventory of decisions made is increasingly important as the team grows or evolves over time. This should include a synopsis of the decision being made, the alternatives considered, the trade-offs discussed between options, and the reasoning behind the decision ultimately made.
  • Link everything: Tim Berners-Lee wants you to hyperlink all your hypertext! Creating a meeting invite? Link to the meeting notes page in the agenda. Creating a meeting notes page to discuss a project? Link to the project in the issue tracker. Creating a ticket in the issue tracker? Link to the decision made to implement that solution, or the customer support ticket(s) it relates to, or the other projects that this ticket blocks. Creating a commit to complete a ticket, link to the ticket in the commit and pull request. Every link created is a breadcrumb for the manager and the team to tap into this web of useful and related information.
  • Research must produce documentation: frequently a manager or engineer needs to answer a question, that’s it. “Can this technology be used to solve this type of problem.” That research work doesn’t usually result in a direct code or systems change to a production application, but the output of that research should be documentation in the wiki. In essence every bit of work in engineering should produce an artifact. Most tasks will produce a pull request, but research tasks should produce a document which outlines what was learned, or create a new decision in the decision log. This allows the manager to benefit and reference back to knowledge gained during a project that did not lead to tangible code changes.
  • Metadata is crucial: At least in the Atlassian suite of tools there are a myriad of ways to categorize pages and tickets. Use them. A good taxonomy of labels can go a long way. In the case of documentation in the wiki, this allows for creating aggregations of pages around a particular topic. These aggregation pages can provide a quick overview for all resources relating to a specific technology or project. In the issue tracker labels can provide a useful point to query tickets relating to a point in the ticket lifecycle, a project, or even a specific customer’s needs.

From my perspective it is not the project managers job to add the necessary links or information hierarchy, it is not even really the engineering managers job. It is however the managers job to build the culture of information management that allows them and the team to quickly recall or re-discover critical information about the projects that are being worked.

Some managers I know use running Google Docs or Spreadsheets to manage their workload, which may work for personal task tracking, but I typically discourage their use. They’re not linkable and discoverable enough! Many spreadsheets are write-once and read-once. By building and collaborating with a shared information management scheme, the team and the managers can benefit from the on-going “gardening” of information.

Regardless of the system you use or consider, if you are a manager, please consider that a large part of your job relies on managing information, and institute the practices and systems necessary!