Manager Tools Logging

Intro

This Manager Tools Logging tool is designed for tech-savvy line managers who spend a lot of time on the command line and would like an easy way to record notes from Manager Tools practices. Today, the tool supports one-on-ones and feedback.

Requirements

The tool requires Ruby 2.0+ and the Asciidoctor and Bundler gems, among others.

The 'mt' script

I created an omnibus script in Ruby to call the various functions from one script. Over time, it replaced some standalone scripts.

Usage

$ bundle install # ... installs all the gems required

[ look at lib/settings.rb and create a data/config.yml file ]

$ ./mt new-hire -t avengers -n "Tony Stark"
Creating data/avengers/tony-stark

Reviewing data/avengers/tony-stark/overview.adoc... generating

Here, I'm making a one-on-one entry. Note that I can specify a partial name to look up a person.

$ ./mt o3 tony
For your 1:1 with Tony Stark, enter the following:
Location: |none| Avengers Tower
Notes: |none| Tony told me about the altercation with Steve today. I
suggested a less confrontation approach.
Actions: |none| See if HR offers anger management classes.

$ ./mt o3 steve
Team: Avengers
First: Steve
Last: Rogers
Creating data/avengers/steve-rogers
For your 1:1 with Steve Rogers, enter the following:
Location: |none| Avengers Tower
Notes: |none| Steve was upset by Tony trying to provoke him in the team room.
Actions: |none|

Notice a couple of things here. I used the new-hire command to create some infrastructure for Tony. However, when I didn't do that with Steve, the command prompted me for the data it needed. Here are the files that were created:

$ tree data
data
└── avengers
    ├── steve-rogers
    │   └── log.adoc
    │   └── overview.adoc
    └── tony-stark
        ├── log.adoc
        └── overview.adoc

These commands store their data as Asciidoc files. I can create an HTML export of the log file pretty easily:

./mt report steve

There are a number of types of diary entries. You can also provide feedback:

$ ./mt feedback tony
With feedback for Tony Stark, enter the following:
Polarity: |positive| negative
Content: |none| When you try to provoke people in the team room, it makes
bystanders uncomfortable. Can you do that differently next time?

You can make observations about direct reports. Observations are an entry type for adding content to a log which does not come from an interaction with the direct report.

$ ./mt observation steve
Enter your observation for Steve Rogers:
Content: |none| My manager came to me after seeing Steve getting some basic
computer help. She asked if computer training was part of his annual goal
plan.

You can also make observations about multiple people at once. You can use relative time specification in date fields.

$ ./mt obs rogers stark
Enter your observation:
Effective date: |2020-01-25 10:15:50 -0700| yesterday
Content: |none| Came into the office early to help set up for the team
meeting

When I enter that, the following entry is put into their log files.

=== Observation (January 24, 2020, 12:00 PM)
Applies to::
  Steve Rogers, Tony Stark
Content::
  Came into the office early to help set up for the team meeting

Other entry options not covered here are:

• goal, for recording goals or individual development plans
• interview (which uses a team called zzz_candidates)
• perf, which uses a performance checkpoint template
• pto, for recording time out of office
• team, which acts like the multiple people entry above, but it auto-selects all members of the specified team(s)

After our examples, this is what data/avengers/tony-stark/log.adoc contains:

== One-on-One (July 29, 2015,  2:49 PM)
Location::
  Avengers Tower
Notes::
  Tony told me about the altercation with Steve today. I suggested a less
  confrontation approach.
Actions::
  See if HR offers anger management classes.

== Feedback (July 29, 2015,  3:02 PM)
Polarity::
  negative
Content::
  When you try to provoke people in the team room, it makes bystanders
  uncomfortable. Can you do that differently next time?

=== Observation (January 24, 2020, 12:00 PM)
Applies to::
  Steve Rogers, Tony Stark
Content::
  Came into the office early to help set up for the team meeting

Notice that the command did some word-wrapping for you.

I manually created a team-directory.adoc file:

= Team Directory

== Team Avengers

include::data/avengers/steve-rogers/overview.adoc[]

include::data/avengers/tony-stark/overview.adoc[]

And was able to generate a nice-looking HTML file by running Asciidoctor against it:

$ asciidoctor team-directory.adoc
$ ls team-directory.html
team-directory.html

If you want a report on a particular team member, use the report command, which combines the overview and log files into a nice HTML file. The overview template assumes that there is a file called "headshot.jpg" in each person's folder, and displays it at the top right corner of the file. The report-team command will combine all members of the team into a single web page.

Other commands include:

• move, for moving people to a different team
• depart, for moving people to the zzz_departed folder

The advantage of using these move commands is that it will add a diary entry indicating the team change.

• last, for displaying the person's last diary entry
• open, for loading the diary log file into the default text editor

Of course, who would want to do that manually? There's also a Rakefile that contains some of these commands. (If you followed along and now try to run rake, you'll have problems because the test data uses the Avengers too. The test suite assumes that it can create and destroy Avengers data at will.)

Lookups

The script finds people by looking at a string containing the team name and the individual's name, then finding the first match by folder and person name in alphabetical order. This is the reason that the candidates folder is prefaced with "zzz_", in order to make it last in the search order.

This algorithm can be problematic in some edge cases. For example, I have a "Tommy" team, and that person has a person named Tom on it. If I just reference "tom", I get Andy, the person on the Tommy team who comes first in alphabetical order. In order to reference Tom, I have to say, "tom-". So far, this has not been enough of an issue for me to correct.

Extensibility

Changing where data is stored

In the config.yaml file, there is a variable called data_root which defines where your data is stored. It's used by lib\settings.rb. The variable candidates_root determines in which folder interviews are recorded.

People who no longer report to me are put into a team folder called "zzz_departed". The script will still find them as normal.

Adding a new entry type

If you want to add a new diary entry type, you will need to create a new entry class in lib, using the naming convention type + Entry, for example ObservationEntry for an observation. It will inherit from DiaryEntry.

After creating a new entry type according to the subsection, you need to update lib\manager_tools_cli.rb to parse your new entry type. It makes heavy use of the Thor gem to define subcommands mt understands. Use the existing types as a guide. For simple cases, "invoke module directly" is the right option. For more complicated cases, create a custom command.

Adding a new command

Actions are handled by commands. There is an MtCommand class that implements a Command pattern using the method command. To add a command, create a new inheritor, then add the command to lib\manager_tools_cli.rb, which handles all the program interaction with the CLI.

Creating the new entry type

Looking at ObservationEntry as an example, you will see there are three methods to customize:

require_relative '../diary_date_element'
require_relative '../diary_element'
require_relative 'diary_entry'

# Template for an observation
class ObservationEntry < DiaryEntry
  # generates the interactive prompt string
  def prompt(name)
    personalized = name[','] ? '' : " for #{name}"
    "Enter your observation#{personalized}:"
  end

  # define the items included in the entry
  def elements
    result = [
      DiaryDateElement.new(:datetime, 'Effective date'),
      DiaryElement.new(:content),
    ]
    with_applies_to(result)
  end

  # render the entry into a string suitable for file insertion
  def entry_banner
    'Observation'
  end
end

The prompt text is displayed at the beginning of the recording. The personalized variable exists to gracefully handle situations where multiple people are specified.

Each element in the elements becomes a question that is asked of the user. This example shows two entries, a date and a string. The difference is that dates apply parsing to interpret the date given.

In the datetime entry, the prompt is specified in the second argument. If there were a third argument, it would be the default value. For dates, that's now. For strings, it's "None". The content entry shows that the last two arguments are optional.

The to_s method is what gets written to the log file, and the implementation inherited from DiaryEntry uses the results of the render method. The entry_banner titles the diary entry.

Usage Hints

In cases where I want to quote material, I will often use the script to fill in values. I then use a text editor like Atom or VS Code to add the quoted material, like a chat room transcript or email.

Running tests

Use bundle exec rake rspec.