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Focus more on what is important to them. They are delivering the work, you need to understand why they don't have time to update tasks and why they don't see i

Focus more on what is important to them. They are delivering the work, you need to understand why they don't have time to update tasks and why they don't see it as a priority. Your goal should be to understand their position, not force them to do something that they see as low priority. Successful projects don't come from engineers being forced to do Agile ceremonies.

propernun 1y ago
Makes sense. I understand its not priority for engineers because they like codinf so much. But then I need to provide status to my PM and my stakeholders (incl my manager) too. It becomes hard for the rest of us. I guess thats why some companies hire a dedicated person to do this work -> ask every engineer about their task -> update task -> repeat -> get $120K salary. The other way I am thinking is to ask the "scrum master" to open every one's tasks one by one, and update it syncronously. Or ask every engineer to update it before they are done talking for their status update.
- solardev 1y ago
  It's not that "we like coding so much", it's that we hate pointless busywork. If you need a status update on my project, that's something I can provide in a sentence or two over Slack or in a PR or a Kanban. Progress usually looks something like "Partial fix for #4278. Almost there.", which can be auto linked to ticket 4278. The PM should be able to at least read commits and PRs at a general level and ask specific people for more details when necessary, not drag everyone into meetings all the time just to hear everyone else's details. If you're going to make me sit through a daily meeting where everyone goes in a circle saying all that, and most of it is "Still the same as yesterday", I'm going to resent it for wasting time. I mean, stand-ups are whatever, 15 minutes isn't the end of the world. It's the additional combination of all the other ceremonies and endless meetings that cumulatively add up to way too much wasted time and interruption of flow. Agile demands way too much time and breaks of focus just to provide basic details. It results in situations where X team members are waiting and twiddling their thumbs listening to the updates from X-1 other team members just so that one manager can learn what the team is up to. Not just in stand-up but every other planning ceremony and retro. Simple async updates that happen when progress actually changes are much less demanding. Perhaps that's worth a shot? You can force people to adopt Agile with enough pressure, but that won't magically improve transparency, productivity, or morale. It's a false promise that really just teaches engineers to optimize for the aesthetics of work (overestimating points and difficulty, shuffling tickets around, coming up with BS insights for retros, etc.) to LOOK more productive instead of actually doing the work.

propernun 1y ago

Makes sense. I understand its not priority for engineers because they like codinf so much. But then I need to provide status to my PM and my stakeholders (incl my manager) too. It becomes hard for the rest of us. I guess thats why some companies hire a dedicated person to do this work -> ask every engineer about their task -> update task -> repeat -> get $120K salary. The other way I am thinking is to ask the "scrum master" to open every one's tasks one by one, and update it syncronously. Or ask every engineer to update it before they are done talking for their status update.

solardev 1y ago
It's not that "we like coding so much", it's that we hate pointless busywork. If you need a status update on my project, that's something I can provide in a sentence or two over Slack or in a PR or a Kanban. Progress usually looks something like "Partial fix for #4278. Almost there.", which can be auto linked to ticket 4278. The PM should be able to at least read commits and PRs at a general level and ask specific people for more details when necessary, not drag everyone into meetings all the time just to hear everyone else's details. If you're going to make me sit through a daily meeting where everyone goes in a circle saying all that, and most of it is "Still the same as yesterday", I'm going to resent it for wasting time. I mean, stand-ups are whatever, 15 minutes isn't the end of the world. It's the additional combination of all the other ceremonies and endless meetings that cumulatively add up to way too much wasted time and interruption of flow. Agile demands way too much time and breaks of focus just to provide basic details. It results in situations where X team members are waiting and twiddling their thumbs listening to the updates from X-1 other team members just so that one manager can learn what the team is up to. Not just in stand-up but every other planning ceremony and retro. Simple async updates that happen when progress actually changes are much less demanding. Perhaps that's worth a shot? You can force people to adopt Agile with enough pressure, but that won't magically improve transparency, productivity, or morale. It's a false promise that really just teaches engineers to optimize for the aesthetics of work (overestimating points and difficulty, shuffling tickets around, coming up with BS insights for retros, etc.) to LOOK more productive instead of actually doing the work.