I’ve been doing a lot of work with Sarbanes Oxley governance compliance lately. It’s interesting how many similarities there are between what it takes to put good accounting and financial processes in place, and what it takes to do the same for software engineering. I’ve found that many of the core project management principles — transparency, honesty, “doing it right” all the time — which Jenny and I write about are very important in accounting and finance as well. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that we software project managers can learn something from our cousins in the accounting discipline. They’ve identified an important idea which I’ve encountered many times in software enigneering, but which I’ve never had a name for: “tone at the top”.

Essentially, if your senior managers don’t have the right attitude — if they don’t honestly support the idea of transparency and good practices — then that’s an reliable leading indicator that there are more serious problems down the line. You can fail an audit if the auditor finds that your company has poor tone at the top.

In an organization with poor tone at the top, the senior managers are simply unconvinced of the value of good practices. They will often reject the ideas of transparency, honesty and measurement. They run the organization based on gut instincts rather than sound planning, and they reject attempts at improvement. I suspect that the reason this is a more recognized and discussed problem in accounting than it is in software engineering is that there are codified ethics principles and more visible consequences. Poor tone at the top in a software project manifests itself in micromanagement or lack of leadership, which leads to project failure. That may sound serious, but in contrast, poor tone at the top in accounting manifests itself in ethical breaches and fraud, which can lead to shareholder revolt and even jail time for executives. If project managers could go to federal prison because they lied to their stakeholders about the project schedule, we would see much more transparency in software organizations.

The “tone at the top” problem may sound very familiar to anyone who has tried to put a good practice in place only to find resistance from the boss. A basic tenet of software project management is that a project manager has no hope of putting better practices in place if his company’s senior managers aren’t behind them. I’ve talked to many project managers who recognize that sinking feeling that they get when the boss — who previously said he was completely behind the PM’s effort — did an about-face as soon as he heard a complaint from a programmer or stakeholder about the new practice. It turns out that that’s a classic example of bad tone at the top. The next time I need to talk about that problem, I’ll have a name for it!