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Your goal as a manager is to maintain flow - provided that you hired competent people. When you lose it and you feel the blame starts shifting your way your te

Your goal as a manager is to maintain flow - provided that you hired competent people. When you lose it and you feel the blame starts shifting your way your tendency is to set up more control and visibility. Here comes the daily standup and jira board of tasks. You lose even more flow as yoir team spends majority of time estimating and administering tasks in real time so that when you look at it once a week, it is semi-up to date. What you were looking for in the first place were to discover obstructions to the flow and finding process bottlenecks. You want to find out that one person that everything depends on to move and everybody slamming them with tasks and now the extra task tracking. You want to find out why that important task is not getting finished because the person is getting blocked on some infra problem and instead of reporting the blockage to you they pick up another task from the queue. Why would they report that if the only thikg you desire reported is what everybody ia working on - the important blocked people will always tell you they are busy enough as they found something else to work on. As a manager, how are you expecting to get any outcome if you never find the workplace bottlenecks and you only demand pople to get busy.

nuclearnice1 4y ago
> You want to find out why that important task is not getting finished because the person is getting blocked on some infra problem and instead of reporting the blockage to you they pick up another task from the queue. I think blocked on a high priority task is exactly what scrum with daily standup is sold as surfacing.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  > I think blocked on a high priority task is exactly what scrum with daily standup is sold as surfacing. A 'daily standup' seems sort of the lowest-common-denominator way of surfacing that. someone recognizing on their own, and reaching out to raise a flag is one way. 1-1 checkins more frequently with those working on larger items would be another.
  - nuclearnice1 4y ago
    > lowest-common-denominator way Well said and exactly the psychological state one feels when participating. > someone recognizing on their own, and reaching out to raise a flag is one way. 100% agree Note that the OP has this blocked developer not announcing the block of a high priority item, but rather just pulling another item from the queue and making progress. Depends on the person and the instructions, but I guess it happens. 1-1 also makes sense to me. That said, I can picture the manager after back and forth playing telephone with blockee sand blockers, believing that an efficient way to handle this is to have all the relevant people in one spot.
    - mgkimsal 4y ago
      > I can picture the manager after back and forth playing telephone with blockee sand blockers, believing that an efficient way to handle this is to have all the relevant people in one spot And... it likely is more efficient in those scenarios. If something can't be resolved via 1-1 in less than, say, 3 exchanges, get everyone together for a synchronous meeting. But have that be the exception.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> estimating and administering tasks Not to mention said manager is (for some reason) laboring under the false assumption that most useful software development tasks can be accurately estimated.

nuclearnice1 4y ago

> You want to find out why that important task is not getting finished because the person is getting blocked on some infra problem and instead of reporting the blockage to you they pick up another task from the queue. I think blocked on a high priority task is exactly what scrum with daily standup is sold as surfacing.

mgkimsal 4y ago
> I think blocked on a high priority task is exactly what scrum with daily standup is sold as surfacing. A 'daily standup' seems sort of the lowest-common-denominator way of surfacing that. someone recognizing on their own, and reaching out to raise a flag is one way. 1-1 checkins more frequently with those working on larger items would be another.
- nuclearnice1 4y ago
  > lowest-common-denominator way Well said and exactly the psychological state one feels when participating. > someone recognizing on their own, and reaching out to raise a flag is one way. 100% agree Note that the OP has this blocked developer not announcing the block of a high priority item, but rather just pulling another item from the queue and making progress. Depends on the person and the instructions, but I guess it happens. 1-1 also makes sense to me. That said, I can picture the manager after back and forth playing telephone with blockee sand blockers, believing that an efficient way to handle this is to have all the relevant people in one spot.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    > I can picture the manager after back and forth playing telephone with blockee sand blockers, believing that an efficient way to handle this is to have all the relevant people in one spot And... it likely is more efficient in those scenarios. If something can't be resolved via 1-1 in less than, say, 3 exchanges, get everyone together for a synchronous meeting. But have that be the exception.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> estimating and administering tasks Not to mention said manager is (for some reason) laboring under the false assumption that most useful software development tasks can be accurately estimated.