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This is a good 1000 foot view of the job, but never in my 22 years building software have I seen this work smoothly. Most business stakeholders will never be a

This is a good 1000 foot view of the job, but never in my 22 years building software have I seen this work smoothly. Most business stakeholders will never be able to describe what they want in a way such that you can implement it. You will just have to live with the fact that you will often rework things you implemented because what you think you heard is not what they said. 2 weeks is an eternity is a fast moving business. That's more than enough time for stakeholders to change their priorities and to forget why they prioritized something in the first place. This will lead them to be angry that their current priority is still at least 2 weeks from being done. Depending on if the team has done something like what they are being asked to estimate before or not, estimates will be low by either a factor of 2 or 3. This is true even when you take this fact into account. No matter how many times you say that an estimate is a best guess, everyone else will take it as a promise. There is no way around this. Never use the word 'commit' because it will be used against you. No one cares that there is an objective process once something had gone wrong, and they don't blame the process. They blame each other for either strictly following the process, following the wrong interpretation of the process, or not following the process. They will also argue incessantly over what the process actually is. I don't want to come off as incessantly negative here, but you shouldn't pretend that there exists some method that will change the basic fact that your job is chaos management.

cptaj 7y ago
Everything you say happens in real life. But these are all signs of bad management and a toxic workplace. They're not at all inevitable. When a company works you don't hear about it. You just see their success, or maybe you don't since there's more to success than sound process. You always hear the bad and the ugly. The software industry is plagued by managers without domain knowledge, people faking it till they make it and immature processes. I think this is probably the main reason you have had such a tough time all these years. I think process definitely helps mitigate these things but you also need reasonable human beings at the helm. If a 2 week development cycle is not fast enough for you, then you have some serious problems.
- alangibson 7y ago
  I've worked everywhere from small startups to the Big 5, and the only thing that changes is severity. At some point you realize that the exception of disfunction is really the rule, and that smooth sailing is textbook theory. I've been looking into ideas like No Estimates and delivery forecasting as a replacement for 'traditional' Scrum-flavored agile, but AFAIK these newer approaches aren't very battle tested.
iratewizard 7y ago
One of the things I do as director is make pixel perfect mockups which can be clicked through. In a day's time, I can have two months of project work presentable. Work doesn't start until what we are building is locked in, and when it's locked in it doesn't budge without a change order. An added benefit of the mock ups would be that these types of change orders have become rare since I took over.
- mattm 7y ago
  Isn't this basically the waterfall methodology?
  - iratewizard 7y ago
    If we're doing T&M, it's pretty agile. If it's fixed bid - which is often - we are bidding on a release's worth of work and working them through. If we were to go full agile on fixed bid projects we would lose our shirts with a lot of indecisive clients. We also don't charge project overages on our fixed bid and guarantee our work.
crazygringo 7y ago
It's a lot of work to make it work smoothly, but I've done it at several places, so it absolutely can. :) Some notes: > Most business stakeholders will never be able to describe That's what planning poker helps with. The engineers envision what they think business wants. Then you go back with the estimate and a description of what will be built, and they either sign off or say "that's not it at all!" The latter happens frequently. You may have to do a couple rounds of planning poker, especially in early days. > 2 weeks is an eternity is a fast moving business. I've never experienced that. What industry are you in? Obviously there are urgent exceptions, but when you take into account design, engineering, testing, and deployment, it's hard for me to imagine things taking less. > estimates will be low by either a factor of 2 or 3 That's what the points estimation and sprint burndowns are for. After a few iterations, estimates become surprisingly accurate. (They never are at the start.) > everyone else will take it as a promise You need management's support for the process. And it takes a lot of communicating. 10x more communicating than you think it will. The rest of it sounds like you work somewhere that's pretty toxic. And of course no process can fix that. But if you call your job chaos management, I highly recommend looking for a new job. ;) That happened to me as well at one unfortunate job...

cptaj 7y ago

Everything you say happens in real life. But these are all signs of bad management and a toxic workplace. They're not at all inevitable. When a company works you don't hear about it. You just see their success, or maybe you don't since there's more to success than sound process. You always hear the bad and the ugly. The software industry is plagued by managers without domain knowledge, people faking it till they make it and immature processes. I think this is probably the main reason you have had such a tough time all these years. I think process definitely helps mitigate these things but you also need reasonable human beings at the helm. If a 2 week development cycle is not fast enough for you, then you have some serious problems.

alangibson 7y ago
I've worked everywhere from small startups to the Big 5, and the only thing that changes is severity. At some point you realize that the exception of disfunction is really the rule, and that smooth sailing is textbook theory. I've been looking into ideas like No Estimates and delivery forecasting as a replacement for 'traditional' Scrum-flavored agile, but AFAIK these newer approaches aren't very battle tested.

iratewizard 7y ago

One of the things I do as director is make pixel perfect mockups which can be clicked through. In a day's time, I can have two months of project work presentable. Work doesn't start until what we are building is locked in, and when it's locked in it doesn't budge without a change order. An added benefit of the mock ups would be that these types of change orders have become rare since I took over.

mattm 7y ago
Isn't this basically the waterfall methodology?
- iratewizard 7y ago
  If we're doing T&M, it's pretty agile. If it's fixed bid - which is often - we are bidding on a release's worth of work and working them through. If we were to go full agile on fixed bid projects we would lose our shirts with a lot of indecisive clients. We also don't charge project overages on our fixed bid and guarantee our work.

crazygringo 7y ago

It's a lot of work to make it work smoothly, but I've done it at several places, so it absolutely can. :) Some notes: > Most business stakeholders will never be able to describe That's what planning poker helps with. The engineers envision what they think business wants. Then you go back with the estimate and a description of what will be built, and they either sign off or say "that's not it at all!" The latter happens frequently. You may have to do a couple rounds of planning poker, especially in early days. > 2 weeks is an eternity is a fast moving business. I've never experienced that. What industry are you in? Obviously there are urgent exceptions, but when you take into account design, engineering, testing, and deployment, it's hard for me to imagine things taking less. > estimates will be low by either a factor of 2 or 3 That's what the points estimation and sprint burndowns are for. After a few iterations, estimates become surprisingly accurate. (They never are at the start.) > everyone else will take it as a promise You need management's support for the process. And it takes a lot of communicating. 10x more communicating than you think it will. The rest of it sounds like you work somewhere that's pretty toxic. And of course no process can fix that. But if you call your job chaos management, I highly recommend looking for a new job. ;) That happened to me as well at one unfortunate job...