> My (related) experience has led me to believe reporting to management should be strictly separate from any tools or processes used to track actual work,

This probably increases the accuracy of the work trackers but increases the B.S. level of management reporting in organizations where there are fundamental problems between management and the working level.(Which is the only reason anyone would want to separate these two things.)

While this probably seems like an improvement from the working level, it's probably bad for the organization. The solution is not dis-integrating communication tools so that management's view is not connected to the actual work tracking, but dealing with the fundamental trust issues. Which is hard, of course, but things that are important often are.

I get why they want it, but I think it's a case of false improvements from adding more computers. If the reports to management are such BS that they don't usefully resemble reality they should be able to figure that out before long and sort things out, one way or another. If they want insight into the tools the bottom-of-the-ladder workers are using to coordinate then that coordination will suffer, greatly, and those tools themselves will be full of BS, for sure, gaining little aside from some pretty "real-time" BS graphs for management and worse communication for workers.

[EDIT] more to the point, I think if it worked we wouldn't still constantly see management surprised when things aren't delivered "on time", and yet, that still happens all the time. IMO the team needs someone "on their side" to report reality upwards, diplomatically, not their own work tools reporting up directly, or they'll lie to their tools, which leads to more surprises, not fewer.