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This idea is probably more interesting if applied to software engineering management. There is a bit of a competency crisis among software managers where it isn
by roenxi 1y ago
This idea is probably more interesting if applied to software engineering management. There is a bit of a competency crisis among software managers where it isn't possible to tell whether they are any good at what they are allegedly doing.
The kneejerk reaction of most businesses seems to be either metrics that don't really work or relying on hypercompetent individuals in the higher parts of the management tree. Neither approach works particularly well. But I haven't seen a skill tree style competency training & testing approach and I suspect it'd work better than the apparent status quo. At least on paper the managers have been trained to do something instead of just dumping smart people into the role and hoping that they figure it out.
For example someone can get certified in Agile and that is ... in some sense a bit silly because then they just spend the rest of their life noticing that most people don't use Agile. But a skill-based approach to the components of Agile development and training them to raise hackles in particular situations where people make common bad architectural decisions would cause productive cultural shifts. I suppose the sort of training that gets done doesn't go far enough.
- PaulHoule 1y agoIf people decomposed agile into little bits they probably wouldn't be doing agile anymore. The other day somebody posted a question about "how do I push back about management going to one week sprints?" My answer, which I didn't post then, was "if management really wants to go fast give up on sprints" That is, Kanban + Continuous Integration >> Scrum by a lot. Seen from that viewpoint sprints are not something that speeds anything up (seductive name there!) but rather a bunch of phony deadlines and needless meanings (you really think people feel psychologically safe in a retrospective meeting that was scheduled just to have a meeting? is there really something worth talking about in an every two week one-on-one in your manager which isn't important enough to knock on their door and ask about right now?) If I was evaluating a manager I'd probably get them to give me a list of practices that they say their team is following and then check to for conformance against that. I am less bothered with do they do code reviews or not but rather "did they tell me that they enforce five conventions in the code and looking at the code I find they rarely do... Lets sit in on a code review"
- sshine 1y agoIt always struct me as ironic that something that takes one or two weeks is called "sprinting". In competitive athletics you will not sprint more than 400m, because sprint is anaerobic. The fastest 400m ever run was 43.03 seconds.