4 ms·
The by far strongest correlate of a complete clusterfuck of a project is how often, per meeting, agile is invoked. In fact, I've discovered you can use agile a
by marginalia_nu 2y ago
The by far strongest correlate of a complete clusterfuck of a project is how often, per meeting, agile is invoked.
In fact, I've discovered you can use agile as a sort of meeting hand grenade, if you don't like the direction a meeting is headed, like they're about to decide on something stupid, you can just throw in "wait, is that agile though?" and the rest of the meeting will discuss methodology, never arriving at any sort of conclusion.
- cjk2 2y agoThis is my methodology. Set two PMs on each other and go and do some work that generates ROI.
- yyggvbb 2y agoThis is a good way to get laid off. A developer has never generated ROI in the history of finance, it was ALWAYS an MBAs idea.
- brightball 2y agoYea. I do Fractional CTO consulting and usually have good results with developers because I focus heavily on removing bottlenecks, unhelpful processes and meetings, etc. The challenge is always when you run into sacred cows from other levels of management. - Hard deadlines while acknowledging we don't have enough information to commit to those deadlines - Story points as a measure of time - Absolutely overloaded teams being asked to deliver new features without being given time to improve underlying issues in the system...and then having to constantly stop what they are working on to deal with production issues caused by those underlying problems. It's like clockwork sometimes and the conversations are always hard.
- dmix 2y agoSo kind of like the stereotypical communist meetings where they spend all their time in meetings debating each other and obsessively discuss the finer points of socialism instead of ever accomplishing anything.
- bitwize 2y agoI still remember one PM's response to my complaints about the number and length of meetings on one Scrum project I was on: "Let's have a huddle on the question of whether we have too many meetings?" (She tended to use a rising terminal in a very passive-aggressive, velvet-glove-on-iron-fist sort of way.)
- dmix 2y agoI’m so so happy no one at my company has a job title called PM That’s always a bad sign people justify with the work load generated by these same busy bodies
- bitwize 2y agoOh, it's worse than you think. My team were employees. But the PM and several developers all came from a Canadian consulting firm. We were being project-managed from the outside. And any time some piece of functionality needed to be added, the new boss kept asking, "Why don't you just use a stored procedure for that?" In the end, the boss decided to just fire everybody and replace us with Oracle stored procedures. Not even kidding, this is not a "things that didn't happen for $400, Alex".