Welcome aboard!
If you read this post thus far, two questions probably came to mind:
1. Who?
2. What?
3. Why (well, it’s a third one, but it came anyway…)
I’ll try to answer both (or troth) with this post…
Hop right in.
Age of darkness:
- For more years that I can count I’ve been doing different variations of the same role, which is walking the fine line between developing software and managing a team of software developers.
and for more years than I care to admit the dynamics of work was a bi-polar one, hence -
- periods of nothing clear to do, and a big project being managed somewhere. (dunk, write some sample code that will maybe be useful some day, tetris, minesweep, coffee-breaks)
- periods of panic: either the deadline is too close (have we implemented all that is needed? why doesn’t this work?, the ship is ‘bout to hit the fan..) or tons of support cases piling up.
At both cases, the feeling was that we are not doing what we should, someone up there must have a clearer idea of how things should run, but we are expected to swing it.
Gantt-charts were a nightmare to use, since dependencies were always moving and reappearing, and ms-project … well.. don’t get me started…
Let there b lite!
And then at one place I worked a decision was made to start developing in another fashion, there were rumours that the development procedures would change, and as someone who hates bureaucracy all I had to say was, oh shift.. another document set to read, more forms to fill, and just more mis-communication between the top floor (BTW — why does management always have the top floor?!) and the people really doing the work.
But you know what? this time the idea was actually a good one!
the direction was how to increase communication, how to not do redundant work, how to have good close visibility of what is required, and how to (as the good book said on the back) NOT PANIC!
And the name of this new thing was: …
.
.
.
I’ll tell you next time.
(but I can hint is starts with an ‘S’ and end with a ‘CRUM’)
till nextime
the Scrum.m.bear
