management

There are three types of positions in an organizational hierarchy:

• Top management, the decision makers;
• middle management, those who detail and implement top management strategies, communicating execution plans to the people who do the real work that is,
• employees and workers.

Note that only the middle managers communicate both with the top management and with the employees and workers. In a traditional enterprise, the communication is oriented top-down, with middle management only detailing and passing on the orders.

In IT, as probably in the other hi-tech industries, bottom-up communication is of a paramount importance as the problems arrive unexpected and are sometimes not only difficult to overcome, but even difficult to explain. However, managers are still evaluated mostly on their abilities to manage subordinates, not on the ability to channel information to the top management, guiding and orienting corporate decision-making.

My brief manager's career ended partly because my company could not avoid the usual problems of software development, the problems that I knew about, could forecast, but was unable to mitigate as they arrived, mostly because I could not guide the much less knowledgeable boss through the minefield of decision-making without hurting his ego.

A manager that can not influence the decisions of the boss is only a half-manager, I now see clearly which half I was. Being aware of this handicap in advance could have helped me. Reading this post and applying it to your situation will probably help you.

More on Chaos control.

The most dangerous outcome of the underplanning is employee frustration. Without clear day-to-day targets, employees loose interest in the work. Some become anxious, not willing to take on responsibilities beyond what they consider their assignment.

The danger of the overplanning is that detailed plans are hard to change.

The rigidness of the plan is proportional to the time spent on it, as the only reason not to change plans is often sheer inertia of those that invested already a lot of time to write it up, in the first place.

An ideal planning phase is short and concise, and the planing granularity is barely sufficient to distribute the day-to-day assignments to the employees.