When everything’s an issue

Years ago, I read the novel “Manna” by Marshall Brain . It’s a science fiction story about the robotic takeover and it features “Manna”, an (artificially) intelligent work management software that replaces human managers and runs the shop. The story starts with “Manna” and goes on to explore the implications of such a system on mankind. It’s a good read and contains a lot of thoughts about what kind of labor we want to do.

The idea that really captivated me was the company that runs itself. Don’t get me wrong: Most organizations are so big that the individual employee cannot see the big picture anymore. Those organizations seem to “run itself” to the untrained eye, but it is still humans that manage the workload. And like all humans, they make mistakes and, perhaps very subtle, infuse their own selfish goals into the process. But an organization that has its goals and instructs its workers (humans and machines alike) directly is an interesting thought for me.

It also is totally unrealistic with today’s technology and probably contains some risks that should be explored carefully before implementing such a system in the wild.

But what about a more down-to-earth approach that achieves the core advancement of “Manna” without many or all of the risks? What if the organization doesn’t instruct, but makes its needs visible and relies on humans to interpret and schedule those needs and fulfill them? In essence, a “Manna” system without the sensors and decision-making and certainly without the creepy snooping tendencies. Built with today’s technology, that’s called an automated work scheduler.

And that is what we’ve built at our company. We use an issue tracking system to manage and schedule our project work already. We extended its usage to manage and schedule our administrative work, too. Now, every work unit in the company is (or could be) accompanied by an issue in the issue tracker. And just like software developers don’t change code without an issue, we don’t change our company’s data or decisions without an issue that also provides a place for documentation related to the process. We’ve come to the conclusion that most of those administrative issues are recurring. So we automated their creation.

Our very early stage “Manna” system is called “issue scheduler”, a highly creative name on its own. It is a system that basically contains a lot of glorified cron expressions and just enough data to create a meaningful issue in the issue tracker, should a cron expression fire. So basically, our company creates issues for us on a fixed schedule. Let’s look at some examples:

• We add a new article to our developer blog (you’re reading it right now) every week. This means that every week, our “issue scheduler” creates a blog issue and assigns it to the next author in line. This is done some time in advance to give the author enough time to prepare and possibly trade with other authors. Our developer blog has the “need” for one article each week, but it doesn’t require a particular topic or author. This need is made visible by the automatic blog issues and it is our duty to fulfill this need. On a side note: Maybe you’ve noticed that I wrote two blog articles in direct succession. There is definitely some issue trading going on behind the scenes right now!
• We tend to have many plants in our office . To look at something green and living adds to our comfort. But those plants have needs, too. They probably make their needs pretty visible, but we aren’t expert plant caregivers. So we gave the “issue scheduler” some entries to inform us about the regular watering and fertilization duties for our office plants. A detailed description of the actual work exists in our company wiki and a link to it gives the caregiver of the week all the information that’s needed.
• Every month, we are required to file a sales tax summary report . This is a need of the german government agencies that we incorporate into our company’s needs. To work on this issue, you need to have more information and security clearances than fits on a wiki page, but to process is documented nonetheless. So once a month, our company automatically creates an issue that says “do your taxes now!” and assigns it to our administrative employees.

These are three examples of recurring tasks that are covered by our poor man’s “Manna” system. To give you a perspective on the scale of this system for a small company like ours, we currently have about 140 distinct rules for recurring issues. Some of them fire almost every day, some of them sleep for years and wake up just in time to express a certain need of the company that otherwise would surerly be forgotten or rediscovered after the fact.

This approach relieves us from the burden to remember all the tasks and their schedules and lets us concentrate on completing them. And our system, in contrast to “Manna” in the story, isn’t judging or controlling. If you don’t think the plants need any more water, just resolve the issue with “won’t fix”. Perhaps you can explain your decision in a short comment for other humans, but our “issue scheduler” won’t notice.

This isn’t the robotic takeover, after all. It’s just automated scheduling of recurring work. And it works great.