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> Your non-techie peers just don’t get it, no matter how many times you try to make them understand In my opinion this is more common to software development o

by mmarq 5y ago

> Your non-techie peers just don’t get it, no matter how many times you try to make them understand In my opinion this is more common to software development only because software developers, at laest in Europe, do not have the same social recognition as other professionals. An undisciplined PM/PO interrupting everybody to get estimates to update their GANTT chart will be as disruptive in an operating theater or in a legal office as they are in a software development team. Society just decided to not allow randos (as in people with no medical training) in operating theaters while welcoming them (as in people with no development training) in software development teams. Worse than that, these randos often have more power than the professionals doing the work. Surgeons would be complaining and people would be dying, if scrum-certified noisy "servant-leader" PMs were allowed to decide how to carry out operations.

the_other 5y ago
This is one of the things scrum is meant to help fix. In your daily scrum, tell your team you need X hours that day w/out interruptions and explain why. If your Scrum Master doesn’t protect you from interruptions by others, they’re not mastering their Scrum effectively. Ideally knowledge of the codebase would be spread around your team already such that other people can handle the interruptions I think it would be fair not to request this “no interruptions” every day.
- mmarq 5y ago
  I don't want to get into a debate on the "true scrum", but in my experience non-technical scrum masters/POs/PMs who don't write code (randos in my previous comment) are generally detrimental to the productivity of a development team. Software developers who act as scrum masters and whatnot, while also writing code, are way better. In my past 10 years of experience (as a tech lead, principal and dev manager), the single change that always increased productivity has been to get rid of PMs/SMs and take over their roles. A brain surgeon coordinates brain surgery, a software developer coordinates software development.
daedalus_f 5y ago
I have not worked in software development but I do work in healthcare. At least in my country, management of hospitals has largely been taken away from healthcare professionals and given to career managers whose background is usually administration, HR or finance. They largely display the same irritating traits as you describe and increasingly interfere in clinical decision making while remaining largely unaccountable - unlike everyone else who works in healthcare they have no professional standards body. I think the wider problem is a conflation of administration and leadership and a tendency for healthcare professionals to not be good at the politics that comes with leadership positions.
- mmarq 5y ago
  That may or may not be a problem. For instance a career manager may be better suited to make strategical decisions than practitioners. I don't necessarily have a problem with a non-technical leadership or with non-technical people cooperating with the development team (the latter is often essential for the team to work on meaningful tasks). What I have a problem with is scrum masters, project managers and their like entering an operating theater to distribute candies and pizza, to ask people questions about an unassigned Jira card stuck in the "To Do" swimlane, and generally treat professionals with 10-20 years of experience as if they were a bunch of partially-socialized four-year-old children.
- vjdingdong 5y ago
  That's a pretty disfunctional state of affairs you describe in Health-care. A little bit like what we have in Tech. Where career managers/MBAs/PMPs control execution of projects with various levels of technical complexity - essentially Tech projects where the project succeeds inspite of the powers-that-be.

by mmarq 5y ago

the_other 5y ago

This is one of the things scrum is meant to help fix. In your daily scrum, tell your team you need X hours that day w/out interruptions and explain why. If your Scrum Master doesn’t protect you from interruptions by others, they’re not mastering their Scrum effectively. Ideally knowledge of the codebase would be spread around your team already such that other people can handle the interruptions I think it would be fair not to request this “no interruptions” every day.

mmarq 5y ago
I don't want to get into a debate on the "true scrum", but in my experience non-technical scrum masters/POs/PMs who don't write code (randos in my previous comment) are generally detrimental to the productivity of a development team. Software developers who act as scrum masters and whatnot, while also writing code, are way better. In my past 10 years of experience (as a tech lead, principal and dev manager), the single change that always increased productivity has been to get rid of PMs/SMs and take over their roles. A brain surgeon coordinates brain surgery, a software developer coordinates software development.

daedalus_f 5y ago

I have not worked in software development but I do work in healthcare. At least in my country, management of hospitals has largely been taken away from healthcare professionals and given to career managers whose background is usually administration, HR or finance. They largely display the same irritating traits as you describe and increasingly interfere in clinical decision making while remaining largely unaccountable - unlike everyone else who works in healthcare they have no professional standards body. I think the wider problem is a conflation of administration and leadership and a tendency for healthcare professionals to not be good at the politics that comes with leadership positions.

mmarq 5y ago
That may or may not be a problem. For instance a career manager may be better suited to make strategical decisions than practitioners. I don't necessarily have a problem with a non-technical leadership or with non-technical people cooperating with the development team (the latter is often essential for the team to work on meaningful tasks). What I have a problem with is scrum masters, project managers and their like entering an operating theater to distribute candies and pizza, to ask people questions about an unassigned Jira card stuck in the "To Do" swimlane, and generally treat professionals with 10-20 years of experience as if they were a bunch of partially-socialized four-year-old children.
vjdingdong 5y ago
That's a pretty disfunctional state of affairs you describe in Health-care. A little bit like what we have in Tech. Where career managers/MBAs/PMPs control execution of projects with various levels of technical complexity - essentially Tech projects where the project succeeds inspite of the powers-that-be.