2022-12-19 – Monday
- We had an interesting stand-up this morning. There are several moving parts; I’ll try my best to be as clear as possible.
- I mentioned on Friday that this week we need to get a release candidate ready for the client to do some testing before the end of the year (I’m not being a Scrooge here, the client wants to work Christmas week, despite my protestations).
- To achieve that, we have a bunch of tasks that need to be completed so we can submit the app for review and release it to Production.
- At the same time, Marcus is helping Eleanor to feel more confident taking control of the stand-ups.
- First, I was mightily impressed that Eleanor was taking control of the board and ensuring that we had all the cards in the correct sprint columns.
- However, one thing we were missing was setting the sprint goal. This is the question we have to answer. What is the outcome for the client we’re aiming to achieve through the delivery of this work?
- The answer to that question provides the priorities
- Sometimes, you need to tell people what to do. Other times you need them to discover the answers.
- So I tried my hardest to ask questions to get the team to understand the outcomes and to decide if the priorities they were discussing were the proper focus for the sprint.
- This always feels a little cludgy to me, and I hope it doesn’t come across as condescending, but it’s easy to forget when you’ve been doing this sort of thing for such a long time that this way of thinking is not natural.
- Most people focus on their tasks, their part of the puzzle. It is someone else’s job to make sure it all fits together properly.
- I firmly believe that in a commercial product development team, Everyone has to understand the big picture because they will need to determine if the effort they are putting into their current task is appropriate or not.
- They may not always know what is appropriate or not. That’s the job of the senior team, but they have to be able to ask themselves that question.
- After a few questions, the team realised that the approach they were taking wouldn’t have moved us toward the outcome we needed, and we were able to course-correct pretty quickly.
- Hopefully, the team learned something from the exercise, and next time they’ll be able to think it through and ask themselves better questions.
- Time will tell, but I’m pleased we had a teachable moment and I hope the team took something positive from the stand-up.
- This morning, I had to look up how to do a colspan in an HTML Table! I used to write code for a living one upon a time. Past Matt would have scoffed at me!
- I also completely forgot how to kick off a deployment to push the change I made to test!
- So, I had my own teachable moment with the team
- I love how that happens!
- Reading: Agency by William Gibson
- Wordle: 548 3/6
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Matthew Goddard 