Watermelon Reporting

This is what Wikipedia writes about the watermelon:

The Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.), family Cucurbitaceae) can be both the fruit and the plant of a vine-like (scrambler and trailer) plant originally from southern Africa, and is one of the most common types of melon. [...] The watermelon fruit, loosely considered a type of melon (although not in the genus Cucumis), has a smooth exterior rind (green, yellow and sometimes white) and a juicy, sweet interior flesh (usually pink, but sometimes orange, yellow, red and sometimes green if not ripe).

For my metaphor, I’ll use the one with red flesh but orange and yellow would work too. I think most of us experienced the phenomenon when the project status is red but is getting greener and greener when climbing the management ladder. The project’s core is red but for the management it has a nice green paring, so it looks like a watermelon. This is why I call this phenomenon Watermelon Reporting. But why are we creating such reports and how can we avoid it?

Why?

The bearer of bad news already had a bad time in the ancient world. If he was lucky, they gave him the chop but in other cases they simply chopped his head of. This hasn’t changed until now but fortunately only in a figurative sense. Some bosses aren’t interested that there are problems with a project in their responsibility because if they know about it, they are in charge. So what do they do to avoid incurring the wrath of their boss ? They tweak the project status just a bit and the melon starts growing.

Another reason could be that nobody wants to be in the focus of management, thus they embellish the project status in the hope that everything turns for the better. And as we all know hope is the last to die.

In the end the result is the same.. Eventually the overripe melon bursts and there is no rescue for the project anymore.

How to avoid it?

The answer is easy: Transparency, transparency and transparency. If there is no way to hide the current status the watermelon can’t grow. Fortunately Scrum and other agile frameworks provide tools like burndown charts and backlogs to help the team with their transparency. But there are also tools like dashboards or kanban boards to do this job, but this will be the subject of one of my next blog posts.

Conclusion

The nuts and bolts of any project are transparency. If the project status is transparent, the watermelons can’t arise. If anybody is able to get the information, it will be difficult to hide something.