[wpietri]

The notion with information radiators not that you tell them to look up. The notion is that people naturally look at things while walking around or when idle, so it's valuable to make important things visible. It also serves as a way to trigger and focus discussions.

For example, consider the Kanban board. Here's one I built a while back: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/

We loved having a physical map of what we were up to. We'd have our daily stand-up around board and discuss it. You'd know when something was completed, because you'd see somebody move a card. I would often know when the product manager was thinking about something he'd go over to look right at it. That often sparked conversations. And we'd all have a feel for how work was flowing, something we'd talk about in our weekly retro.

Could this have been replicated with a system of alerts? No. Alerts are interruptive and necessarily threshhold-driven. I don't want my people caught in a cycle of continuous reactivity to things that at some point in history were seen as important enough to configure an alert. Except for emergencies, I want them to be serene, thoughtful, and proactive, which is very hard to achieve if you're continuously juggling alerts.

So I'd put up something with PR stats if it were something I wanted us to be aware of. Especially so if it were an item of concern in previous retros. Maybe that would eventually lead to an alert (although I'd hope not). But the first step in solving a problem is understanding the problem, and I think information radiators are great for that, especially when problems are thorny and don't have obviously correct answers.

[geofft]

That's fair - I think part of it is also that you don't really have a green vs. red state (which is a good part of what I object to in the demo presentation), you just have a general feel, and no specific state is defined as an actual problem. (And most of what you're trying to achieve is a shared sense of what's being done, which is very different from a shared sense of what's broken and needs fixing.)