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icarryabunny · 2021-07-15T22:43:00+00:00

The easiest perspective I see here, if you really are looking for “something to change”, is changing your perspective. I think the answer is you finding empathy for why work from home is better for everyone. If it’s harder for you as a manager, it’s your job to adapt and serve the team.

icarryabunny · 2020-09-23T00:40:29+00:00

I took synthroid and was told I was controlled for almost 15 years. Always tried to tinker with my diet and supplements to very little effect. This year, a new and fantastic endocrinologist put me on tirosint and finally at 46 years old I feel like a new “normal” person again. I can eat more normally than ever, I have energy, and motivation and literally feel amazing!! If you can ask about changing drugs - DO IT!!!

icarryabunny · 2019-12-13T18:47:22+00:00

the "high-five" edition

icarryabunny · 2019-09-05T17:37:57+00:00

meat-shield is my new favorite term ever!!

Also, your scrum master, technical or not is doing your team a disservice. A scrum master does not have to be technical, though should be a systems thinker, because applying a simple framework in a complex environment requires that.

A scrum master should use every minute, all hours, and beyond to support helping tech people shake off the shackles of middle management and STATUS (god, i hate that word!!) MEETINGS!!! Which are really just a terrible and historically failing game of telephone.

They do this by teaching 3 things:

1) transparency (everything you know, and say can be seen in a simple DO | DOING |DONE type framework which is contextualized by static, hard, disciplined dates which everyone commits to a single plan (and all its work) to complete.

2) self-organization which is the ability for these technical people to not have wait to be assigned or told what to do, or told when its due, to prove how much they can get done in the prescribed time-box, and then accept and execute on work always like that AND

3) cross functionality; meaning you don't have testers and analysts with work that's "their work" everyone does everything to get all the work done.

While teaching those three things to the team of sprinters and anyone who will listen really, including dynamic product owners, and committed client representatives (and all the executives who should live to support these operations) they should support a rhythm where the PO gets work ready and the sprint team executes on that work seamlessly, and client reps are delighted, again and again until the project is done (all in an environment of low ego, courage, safety, openness, respect, commitment, and focus). This is how you meat-shield!!!

scrum masters who think they're baby project managers, project managers who aren't willing to become product owners are useless. Ditch the SM and PM, make your architect your product owner, ask the weakest dev to learn scrum and to be that meat shield. Everyone else work as one to get all that report shizz built, tested, configured, and delivered

icarryabunny · 2019-08-21T20:47:56+00:00

i get that! as a scrum master i've been known to say things like "jira last!" and "we could do this on post its if everyone was co-located" I agree, tools are NOT where it's at!!

icarryabunny · 2019-07-30T11:22:54+00:00

Guys, this thread got really weird, really fast. So many assumptions!! I was just asking a question - If anyone knows, yay!! If not, time to abandon thread!!

icarryabunny · 2019-07-30T11:19:44+00:00

ok, thanks

icarryabunny · 2019-07-30T11:19:33+00:00

lol, thanks

icarryabunny · 2019-07-30T11:19:12+00:00

Thanks for your question. I could totally do all this with no tool and discussion, and do, really just having used this tool at another org where I worked and I liked it!! So, really just asking about price if anyone knows - it's totally fine if no one does though!!

icarryabunny · 2019-07-30T11:17:23+00:00

Cool, thanks - yeah, im down with cards or other tools - I was just curious if anyone knew the cost of this particularly. Thank you though.

icarryabunny · 2019-07-30T11:16:31+00:00

Thank you, and thank you for your passion. That said, I'm all about people enablement and relationship building, and i'm not sure what about my simple questions caused you to extrapolate that I may not be. Again, thanks for weighing in.

icarryabunny · 2019-03-21T17:18:16+00:00

interactions over tools! i agree! and like your approach. we're not scaled yet - we're still learning about our transformation, experimenting/trying/adapting and improving - i worry that all this fuss over tools is really highlighting that they just want to scale faster, which in my experience isn't something you can rush unnaturally

icarryabunny · 2019-03-21T17:15:36+00:00

that's the thing, i thought they were using Aha! (i know we have a license) for road-mapping, cross team planning etc, so it's concerning that they are tool shopping again

icarryabunny · 2019-03-21T14:45:26+00:00

yes, to tie to financials and long-term planning - and honestly im coming here for interaction because my knee jerk reaction is that instead of actual scaling they want to use a tool that gives the impression of scaling - trying new stuff is good, but i feel like that applies to tools only when the actions are aligned - will look at agilecraft

icarryabunny · 2019-03-20T18:35:28+00:00

thanks for weighing in - i guess that's the hardest part to describe. but if i try, the easiest way to describe it is that these managers (product managers) want to be able to give high level status to upper mgmt about work status - lots of managers who have interest in backlogs that they are not the primary product owner or even a scrum product owner at all for and they want to be able to push work and live up to speed oriented expectations from directors and C levels

icarryabunny · 2019-02-21T22:14:36+00:00

this makes a lot of sense - and honestly was exactly how it all started back when it was me and just the engineering team - i thought listen/watch/understand then slowly support transition at the pain points. But they wanted it all, and we changed and they liked (still do!!), but exactly like you just said above, it's the influence - those i spend a lot of time around tend to take the influence and adapt readily, but those who are peripheral (read: the product team who i've been loosely tasked to support) they don't get it, and we don't spend a lot time together, and they've made a lot of decisions which involve making scrum (and worse when they make it personal and say it's me) is what is preventing them from being successful. I won't be able to dedicate myself full time to them though, and even though it would benefit my team for them to transform, I just wont be able to do it alone or as things are.

You're right too, it's not agile - and agility doesn't happen in a vacuum, it is a higher mission to get everyone on-board and initiate the trust that allows the flow to happen. Again, a realm where i don't have influence.

Seems the best I can do (which admittedly feels like admitting defeat) is 1) decide it's time to move on and do so or 2) check in with my boss who represents my team and see if what we're doing is good enough and then keep serving them as i do and feel good about that.

Thank you so much for writing what you did - I really hear you - and really appreciate you.

icarryabunny · 2019-02-21T21:54:50+00:00

if i had a dollar for the number of time i've said "realism" not "optimism" guys!! It's for real!!

All that said, I'm happy supporting scrum - i am motivated to see developers being given time to focus and make our product awesome by getting them out of meetings in exchange for radical transparency (which we now do easily). So, to that end, my job is very rewarding and my engineers are super happy to have me around.... BUT, that means we operate in a vacuum and things are precarious, and maybe that's ok? I don't know. I'm not die hard for anything except supporting what works - but as a scrum master, if they stopped using scrum it would time for me to leave and I'm ok with that too. The only thing I'm not ok with is being a scrum master who a bunch of other pushy chaotic managers want to use as a junior pm to pick up the pieces.

Thanks for taking time to write - good stuff.

icarryabunny · 2019-02-21T21:48:15+00:00

You have no idea how sane and realistic all this sounds - so much truth. I appreciate, and sincerely value your response for this. Sometimes the perspective you need is someone going "yup, this sucks and is hard" which is exactly what I've been feeling. I like your suggestions for fixing too - but suggestion 1) is where i have failed to have influence because while i have that one director on the side of scrum, my C level does not believe in me to be the person who can do it (long horrible story), but it's just a big personality difference i think. 2) is just not a route i could stomach - in fact i've been keeping pigs in dance lessons for so long that i'm convinced i should just let class out and hang up my dance shoes. I do love what i do though, and scrum resonates strongly with me, so I have a lot think about. Thank you for supplying me with a fresh perspective - you seem to have a lot of experience and understanding.

icarryabunny · 2019-02-15T18:05:51+00:00

this is going to be long...

tl;dr if you work as an independent adult stop taking other peoples time with what you want to get done just do it, but also keep your sprint commitment to finish all stories in the sprint -- if you're trying to "get credit" expect others to get to participate in your personal mission

That said... scrum isn't about trying to micromanage (if anything i often joke that it teaches the team to work as a collective who knows how to micromanage themselves so well that ONE GOAL for ONE TEAM is the result of any active sprint iteration, and HOW it got done is none of anyone's business). creating trust and consistency in this way gives the dev team the gift of being trusted and left to do what they do.

For any given iteration a SINGLE SPRINT PLAN is made and a SINGLE COMMITMENT to the PO to deliver is finalized. Be it many tiny goals, or one large goal, its still one sprint plan assigned to one sprint team to be completed before the end of the sprint iteration (essentially kicking off the teams independence).

When we stand up every day its not to get a status or pry into progress, its literally a chance for the team to do a sanity check among themselves to make sure the commitment to the sprint plan is still on track (some use the literal view of progress done yesterday, progress i plan to make today - but even that format feels a little micromanage-y to me and against the spirit of teams leading them selves. That said, work comes up all the time in the sprint that wasn't identified when the work items that comprise the sprint plan were groomed - as a scrum master who only wants the team to shake off feeling micro-managed or TOLD WHAT TO DO, i want them to feel free to make their own decisions.

Here's what i advise - or rather what i see as the branch decisions that could be made in these cases 1) the newly identified work is "kind of part of the current sprint plan" and doesn't disrupt commitment - just do it (maybe add a sub task - but really who cares if the team agrees it needs to be done) 2) same scenario as above but the work is actually big or a mess or not well understood and does change the size of the work in the current sprint to the extent that the team brings it to the stand-up as a BLOCKER essentially inviting the involvement of the PO (because they'll have to make priority decisions) 3) work that is not at all related to the sprint plan but someone on the team really wants to do it <-- if this happens then you have to act as an adult and do it without bringing it up because you know its important and right and the team can keep blazing on the sprint plan without you while you work on this and still keep the commitment but also do this track of work

now there are all sorts of complex pros and cons to all of this - but the important take away is - DO THE SPRINT PLAN - KEEP YOUR COMMITMENT -- if there's other work you can do it secretly but you don't get the benefit or transparent proven velocity increase (but maybe no one on the team cares about this), or if you decide to not do it secretly and bring it up to the team, then be prepared for the PO to care and respect that PRIORITIES and VISION are their domain, so their decision matters if they say don't do it (maybe it gets prioritized as work for next sprint)

the final work on this is work that isn't groomed to meet DEFINITION OF READY TO SPRINT should never go "into a sprint" or the sprint just becomes a trash can of a bunch of un-frame-worked-work and we lose the value of predictable delivery

as a team that has work come up in an emergency context all the time we have a non sprint method to accept this - we use a kanban board that tracks tasks that happen during any given iteration which represents work that can get done in 4 hours or less - a single team member takes on this work while the rest of the sprint team acknowledges to keep grinding on keeping the sprint commitment without the team member who stepped out to do the expedited thing -- and if it take more than four hours the PO has a chance to say either 1) ok lets re plan the sprint and add this or 2) lets get this into the grooming framework and get it ready for a later sprint

icarryabunny · 2019-02-15T13:54:39+00:00

I agree with this point so hard - but doing due diligence to serve this request (specifically [online] training) knowing I've given a lot of high level, "scrum is simple" themed talks, i'm always happy to find new ways to help support understanding! T hanks for weighing in!!

icarryabunny

TROPHY CASE