Work Life: One Man Scrum (SDLC)? Maybe temporarily

My new boss wants me to also use scrum to track the side projects that I have been working on. I am the only person in my "team" (which begs the question if a team can be one person). So I will be the developer, product owner, and scrum master.

My initial thought is that this is just a waste of energy and time. All the ceremonies are quite useless in a single person team (SPT) except maybe the retrospective. But this all basically falls under personal software process.

If I were to be forever on my own, I would suggest Kanban.

But I do not wish to be the only person to support an ever growing teams that I support. I basically have these side projects just to keep up with the work load. Managers keep promising new member(s), but it has been over a year.

So I got to thinking that a One Man Scrum (OMS) is feasible. I also think the important part is that it is an individual that is strict with themselves in maintaining best practices. This is not a thing that any manager should just ask an individual if they can manage it (why a manager would ever trust in individual like that is beyond me but that is besides the point). My people I know would not have the discipline to do it.

In some ways, the individual needs to be able to act like split personalities. Act as SM when it doing SM tasks, developer when doing development tasks, and setting objectives when doing PO tasks. Most people I explain to can barely understand most of the roles much less all of them. 

Although not related to OMS, I have to continually explain to them why I can or why I cannot because of other roles. For example, I have to continuously push back that testing is required. People are always pushing changes to production as quickly as possible and always seem to want to skip QA testing. At most the developer who created the change says they tested the code. I even give them the option to "skip" testing by having QA sign off on not testing. QA almost always say they will not sign off. They also complain that they are pressured to move things out faster too. I tell them that they should get sign off from managers to skip testing if they need to expedite the process. And when this occurs, manager also almost never signs off. Then suddenly everyone agrees on a real time-line. I have to explain this every time, many times to the exact same group of people.

Back to OMS, the important thing is that the "process" is maintained. Yes, the process can change but it should change like a normal scrum team. The goal is that when there are new members, the process does not need to be defined at the point of time. It would move forward like any new member of a scrum team.

Perhaps a better way to explain would be to imagine an ideal scrum team and keep eliminating a person until there is a person left with potential replacements in the future. I have not thought this one completely through.

Work Life: Why do managers assign the person with the least meetings to schedule a new meeting?

Managers in general should be creating meetings instead of their underlings or other people's underlings.

Why do managers do that?

1. Because they like that rush of power (intentional or not)

2. They think they are too busy to do it

3. They do not want to appear to not understand what the meeting is for

What I think?

I guess there is nothing that can be done with someone who is power hungry. Feeling too busy is too disrespectful of other people's time. Not understanding what the meeting is for is not even the ask.

Scheduling a meeting with a person who's calendar is full, plenty of double-booking, etc., only makes any sane person just sit there for a minute or two to think things over... like does that person not understand that is calendar is full for the next 2 weeks or year? Do they think we can see why the time is even blocked out to at least see if maybe a block is less important? If they ever scheduled anything, they will realize that 99% no one can see what is there at all... it is just a big blob of unavailable times. So this is easily 5 minutes just to scan the calendar for an open spot. AND THIS IS JUST FOR ONE PERSON!! Most of the time I have to deal with multiple people...

How long would it take him to schedule? 1-2 minutes. Why because he can see his own calendar that he does not even maintain to keep up-to-date so that someone else can schedule a real meeting. He can clearly see that a spot is available. He can see which meetings typically run short.

More importantly, he has more authority to get other people to join the call. If I have a call with more than one manager... I spend another day or two just to reschedule because they respond that they cannot make it or a change in schedule....... then they have the audacity to not even recommend a new time.

So, in best case... 5 minutes vs 2 minutes. That is 2.5 times. If it takes him longer, it'll probably take me much longer, so 2.5X is probably best case.

Company Cost?

Let us take 2.5 times as the lowest difference in our time. Does my manager make 2.5 times what I make? If he's Warren Buffet, I probably should continue to waste the rest of the year rescheduling.. but that's an exception. Most middle managers probably don't even make 2 times my salary. So it is not even worth company time for middle managers to delegate scheduling to someone else.

Also my job isn't scheduling stuff. If anything that is what middle managers do. So what is the company even paying you to do? Sit in meetings and waste everyone's time? (I'd like to say that sarcastically... but it'll probably sound more like a weak laugh while crying inside)

On top of all that, this also wastes the managers time too. More time than if they just scheduled it themselves. Manager has to check calendar. See if it is more important. Then send email that they cannot make it. Read another email on the complicated list of when all the other people are available, put in another time. Then have to read another email because another key person cannot make it (usually their own person), and repeat. 

My Suggestion

Managers should open your outlook, click new meeting, click a time on the calendar, add me to the calendar, then send. It'll take you one minute to do. I will fill in the rest or give you the people who needs to attend.

And if you already know me... I send that list before you even create it.

Stop wasting both our time.

Paradox: Corporate Leadership Communication. Can it be fixed?

One of the most common issues with leadership from worker surveys is communication. I have been thinking how to resolve this issue, and feel this is somewhat of a paradox.

If leadership has communication issues with delivering and receiving communication, how would a worker communicate this properly to leadership to correct this action?

If leadership was capable of delivering and receiving communication, the workers would not be required to come up with a solution to correct fundamental communication issues.

I believe this can only be corrected by leadership on their own. Workers need to still voice their concern, but should not invest time to explain to leadership how to correct the problem. Because if leadership was able, workers do not need to explain. But if leadership was unable, no amount of explanation will fix the problem.

I am dumbfounded on why communication is so difficult with leadership. Is it because they have never worked at our level? Have they never been conned, cheated, or unfairly deprived of opportunities? Is it because of their personal greed to earn significantly more than their workers? Do they just not understand our plight?

Or is it because they have been in our position and is now taking their "fair" share to compensate for the life that we still live in? Is it an elite class where they now have to do that to fit in with the existing leadership?

Or is it that I do not understand? I suppose leadership is getting what they want out of this, so perhaps this is the real grand scheme of things. Just keep creating chaos faster than the workers' can cope with, while their value to the company is to swindle our efforts.

Then the question becomes, why can't a "fairer" company outperform a greedy company? Does power corrupt absolutely?

Leadership Pitfalls: Hearing versus Listening for Surveys

For the purpose of this article, hearing is the words you hear and listening is the meaning of the words.

I do not know how many company leaders fall into this but leaders seem to misinterpret surveys all the time. Maybe I am unlucky in the companies that wishes to hire me or perhaps I just do not understand what it takes to be a leader.

I have filled in many surveys in hopes that it will truly change how leadership leads. Every year, almost the same results are returned: 1. Communication, 2. Training/Development. So each year, I become less and less hopeful that leadership would ever change. Even after several reorgs.

Communication

Even with other companies, there always seem to be a gap in communication. And for whatever reason, leadership thinks this means to have more meetings. Why do we even pay leadership more money if they do not understand what the workers are saying to them?

Just because the workers say "We do not know what is going on?", does not mean to have more meetings. Not only more meetings, especially not meetings about how the entire corporation is doing. Why do I care we have double digit growth (ie more than 10% growth)? Then you follow that up with record profits. Yet, you do not hear the biggest question that no one will bluntly ask "why are our salaries still the same with no additional people?" So basically what we hear is "can you feel us kicking you while you are down?"

Why should we care that you are telling us what the numbers are from the survey? We told you what we think, we have some idea what we said. Tell us what you are doing about it. Tell us you are going to set up more meetings. Then we can at the very least respond with... "that is not what we really meant to say" or the main question we do not dare ask "why are you so stupid?" so that we can correct your thoughts.

High percentages with manager satisfaction yet you know there is a lot of grumbling going on. Our surveys always scored more than 85% manager satisfaction and 90% trust in leadership. This is not an indication that you are doing a good job. This is an indication that we no longer trust you. Increased employee turn-over, unable to retain top talent, superficial questions at the end of meetings, etc. are all clues that your surveys are telling a different story.

I understand there are certain level of optics that leadership should keep. But if you are going to play dumb, you are only going to keep dumb people or smart people doing status quo. For example, company employs thousands of people and many with decades of experience. Yet during innovation events, only the new graduates attend (and most strongly "encouraged" to go).

We actually had someone dare ask the question about fair compensation. If we are putting up record numbers, why are we only treated to fair market value while executives get to enjoy all the added bonuses. To add a little more background, the top employees barely reached 1% raise each year (at least that is what leadership told us). On top of that, company "perks" (which we already low standards even compared to small companies) have been slowly picked away.

On top of that, the response was (paraphrasing) "we understand because aren't we all here for the money?" WOW! Not even a hint of sarcasm in there. Clearly only heard, "we are greedy and want more money." Listen carefully and you might hear, "we just want our fair share (going forward for what we clearly did for you for the past several years)". Of course, this come the day after the CEO just sold some shares for millions of dollars.

Yes, surveys do say something but are you really listening or just hearing what you want to hear? All I know is that things have not changed one iota since I started except now we have more company meetings that just seem to waste more of my time. The saddest part for me is that I have actually spent a lot of time writing a response to most of these meetings but have never sent it out to anyone. Why? Because I do not trust anyone. What have you done to earn my trust in you?

Training/Development

Every year, they say they try to add more budget to train people. Yet the only people who seem to get training, or have time for training, or go to interesting events, are the new graduates. Then we slowly watch as each one slowly move on to other companies.

What do you think that communicates to all your veterans? More promises, and more broken promises. There was one time a group got their training, then got replaced by interns because the interns couldn't fix the legacy stuff (or at least were not interested in it). On top of that, they were expected to make use of the little training they got.... a year later. No practice, not even a small project.

Why is HR in charge of training? HR should be in charge of making directors or managers to create time for training for their direct reports. HR barely knows enough to hire the person. You think they know what specialists how to improve on their existing skillsets? The manager/supervisor will barely know that.

I have yet to ever receive any sort of training. They say I need to be more pro-active about it. Yet when I ask questions, I seem to be dumped with more work. Even if I find something interesting, they will ask if there is a cheaper (ie freer) option. If I knew, wouldn't I just request that one?! After a while, I just do not care anymore. I just do my own training now and pay for it myself.

Company has been around for decades and they do not know where my position should grow into. Yet they say they are all about career growth. They should already know what I should move into... they clearly care when it comes to our salary.

The Truth

But in all actuality, the real truth is that corporate leadership really (really, really, really) does not care about their employees. Oh, they'll promise you the world. At the end of the day, they get to return home with their payday. They care so little and they have so much of a monopoly over your life that they do not even care to create a fake optic to make you feel better. Just bribe a few people with a 2% raise or a fancy title just to make it look some people are happy. Which they probably are because they are friends of the leader and are not doing much work.

The company has let go of people with vast experience, yet the company still employs a person who does absolutely nothing. Literally, nothing. Who knows, maybe she's the making of a future leader. It is the only real explanation.

But just in case there is actually a "good" manager/leader somewhere out there that just happened to read this... people are complex, most people are good people, and they won't say directly what is needed. One, they may not actually know how to phrase it. Two, they also want to save your ego by not saying you're dumb to your face. Three, spending a little bit of time with all (or most) of your directs will at least open the opportunity for someone like myself to trust you.

From personal experience, there was on CEO of a company of hundred. He remembered my name a year later (randomly in the hallway) and only after meeting me once. You cannot imagine how much more I did if something came from him after that. Now, a director (not my director) that sits about 15 feet away has no clue that I even exist. She won some national award... and no one here even cared.

You may not have to believe in all the things I say. But if enough people say the same thing, there ought to be some pattern worth investigating.... just saying...

Reference

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/specials/1535_questionanswer/page30.shtml

Leadership Pitfalls: Working hard is the path to success

"Work hard, work hard, and work even harder."

Some leaders who are asked to give a lesson on their success to their legacy typically gives this speech. But in my opinion, this is one of the most demoralizing things to say.

First, are they saying those around them did not work hard? What about those who actually did work harder? They also typically add that they are first in, first out. And, they truly believe that.

This claim is very detrimental to morale. Whether you do work harder than everyone else, not everyone may believe that you do. Even the worst employees truly believe they work hard. It is equivalent to asking a person if they are a good person.

Somehow, I sit near these people (at different companies) who say these kinds of things. They rarely are even close to being the first or last people in the office. Not only are they not staying late, they are out the door very quickly. I am not saying that they don't work hard, but don't be claiming to be working more hours than you are. Also, I am typically the last person out the office. I have never been recognized for work effort.

Second, they appear to not understand how success works. Most of us know that success is not only hard work, but also being in the right place at the right time (and many other things). Those who feel that they were passed on a raise or promotion will feel more jilted listening to this speech. These people are now more likely to move on as their talents appear to be not recognized.

Alternative

If given the opportunity to give a speech, leaders should focus on how the company has opened opportunities for people like him to contribute more to the group. Then follow up that the company is working on recognizing current talents and finding new opportunities.

My Sentiments

Most companies have backfilled my role with multiple positions. Also in almost all my roles, I have been the go-to person to backup almost everyone within my team. Basically, I am able to more than my roles but few are able to cover mine (even when I am the most junior on the team). I say this because I can personally say that hard work will not get you anywhere.

If anything, hard work will detriment your success. Working smart also will not help with your success, but it is required. Luck and abusing the system will increase your chances to be "successful". I have talked to quite a few peers of leaders mentioned above. Most of the "success" or break-through achievements are usually based on lies and the ignorance (true or turning a blind eye to save face) of those evaluating their performance.

This appear to be most obvious with government contracts. The strategy for one past company was to simply over-promise knowing they will not be able to deliver most of the items. Once they win the contract, they simply prolong and find excuses by blaming other groups. In my opinion, this was super easy to do because most people do not know how to manage a project. Most people fail to simply just respond to emails. When renegotiating contracts, they simply say that people don't follow up and that is why the project is behind. Also to save face, it is very difficult for clients to change to another vendor unless something went beyond obviously wrong.

Maybe I have warped the definition of success for this article but I hope most readers will understand where I am coming from. I still believe in my values, and still hope I will find a decent group to build my career. I am still in a good place to support myself and those around me. I still wish I can have the opportunity to be promoted to be a leader someday because I believe I can contribute more than other leaders, not because of the status of being a leader. My belief as a leader/manager is to work myself out of the role so that the team will be self-sustaining. If miraculously all leaders are deserving of their roles, I have no problems staying at the "bottom".

Work: Executives Visit then Removes Offsite Work Perk

Recently, executives have mandated that everyone work in the office. The reason for this change is because there were a group of executives who made a visit and saw how "empty" the office is. The conclusion they came up with is that the company is wasting money on a huge office that is not fully used.

Perhaps I am reading too much into such a generalized statement, but to me this seems like a financial decision. Because they made the decision because they were onsite. I assume before the visit, they could not tell whether the effectiveness of the workforce was impacted because some of us work offsite.

This sort of decision-making also seems to be consistent with other decisions made on the executive level where they take a single instance and rule on it without inquiring if perhaps their perception of the situation could off.

I have worked in the office for quite some time before taking advantage off the offsite perk, and I can attest that most people just stay in their room. Personally, I was in my office practically the entire 8 hours except for maybe 10 minutes to go out for lunch or go to the bathroom. Even in those 10 minutes, it feels like no one is around even though you'll see people in their offices if you peek really hard.

Financially, the decision does not make sense either. Their concern is wasting money. They turn on the lights to every other hallway (to conserve energy) so this makes it look even more barren. I work in one of the dark hallways. Yet, they want to save money by bringing the people who are using their own resources to come into the office and consume the office's resources?

For most people, this has bigger impacts because they had used the perk to reduce unavailability during work hours like going to the doctor, dentist, or other personal chores that they used to have to take time off to do (although I never understood why those professionals work during the hardest period of time for normal people).

I am probably more of the minority where I spend the majority of my time offsite. Although I think that I work just as effectively where ever I am, not all people are as effective at home as they are at the office. Sometimes it is just as annoying hearing background noise of their dogs, kids, etc. I admit that this has happened to me once where my mother knew I was working from home and just kept ringing the doorbell while I was hosting an important call.

All this just because they thought the office should feel more robust.

Rant

I bet they think their flying around from corporate office to office, plus car rentals, food and hotel rooms are free too since they don't have to pay out of pocket.

Am I disgruntled? I cannot even get a cheap-ass $250 PC to write some software to streamline our process even when I said that I'd work on my time... or even a virtual system which we host and provide which probably only cost the company a couple dollars at most. I'll probably be even help testing the stupid thing.

(Sorry, my language does become a bit vulgar as I my irritation level goes up. Sometimes I just want to 'argh' and 'ugh' to get me through an argument.)

Work: New Boss, Same Learning Routine - Give Me All the Details then Complain About Info Overload

We have yet another new upper manager. I think we've probably have a new one every 2-3 quarters. Yet again, he requests that everything be spelled out just like all the others before him. Give him 1-3 months, they will start a "email reduction initiative" to be leaner and effective.

My first reaction is to ask, "don't experienced managers already know this?" Although I do at times like to think that I so wise and experienced, I doubt that these managers are really that dumb. I am starting to wonder if these are intentional and ways to set the bar low so that they have things to claim in the future.

I do notice a lot of work patterns that seem to confirm my feelings that the corporate world is more about conserving your reputation and job than to improve the ways of the company. And the more I see the relationships between so many random people, I am starting to see why this sort of culture seems to be bred by a corporate life-style.

With all these reorganizations, I find it difficult to forge any type of relationships even with coworkers that I have been with for several years. The churn just resets a lot of different things that are important to the "continual growth" of the company. We all understand that with most changes, we will take a step back to hopefully take two steps forward.

But I feel that (intentional or unintentionally), these rotating managers seem to take 1.5 steps back (round down) then take 1.5 steps forward (round up) so that reporting looks like they are making progress but in reality, we are in the same spot (which I feel we are always stuck in the same spot).

I do like my immediate boss, because he never really did anything like that yet still able to learn the ins-and-outs very quickly. He encourages to use executive-speak (ie KISS) where we just present the important information up the chain. My small gripe is that information is rarely summarized when information go down the chain. I am not sure why they want to waste more of our time sifting through all the information especially when there was only one paragraph that may or may not impact us. Then we wonder if it is a change or just regurgitation. Perhaps there value*time is much greater than our value*time*(# of members)... that thought just makes me more depressed how big our "value" differences are... even then it still saves them costs... so... (brain shut down on cyclic overload).

Anywho (sic), just another day at work... business as usual... just when you think we were finally reaping the fruits of our labors, we resow the ground before picking.

Work: Enterprise Defect Management (rant)

I have worked with defects my entire professional life in support, integration, project management, and release management. I found that the size of the team makes a large difference in the management of defects. In smaller companies, there were few factors to determine the priorities of defects. Simply, the client's most urgent issue is the highest priority. The reason for this is because typically there is only a single person working on each project and each project has a single client. Although a person could have multiple projects, project priorities are typically managed by the boss (i.e. manager).

As companies grow in size, there are more people involved and more priorities to manage. Management of defects move towards another team that does not have easy access to development, testing, and deployment planning. Unlike its smaller company counterpart which typically will only have 2-3 roles involved, now I have to deal with several parties. Depending on the size of the projects, there may now be up to 10 different groups each with their own resources and priorities.

One of the biggest problem that I run into is finding a single method on how to manage the defects. The largest factor to my problem is that there is no single entity that makes the final call. Because of this, there is a lot of delays to the decision because the work cannot "start" until the decision is made. Although the official start is not determined, some teams take it upon themselves to work on certain items. This actually causes more problems to managing the defects. Because a change is simple for a development group, the amount of testing is not necessarily simple nor the deployment.

A simple change in a more fundamental code base could trigger a lot of tests required. Because the lab environment only has a single instance, production may have to deploy over a span of time because it has several environments. And so far, only a single path for a single change.

If multiple development groups provide multiple solutions, there are a lot of resource conflicts that can occur across many teams especially testing. For example if ChangeA is put into testing and requires 2 weeks to deploy to production, ChangeB cannot be put into testing until ChangeA has completed testing. ChangeC cannot be put into testing until ChangeB has completed testing, but ChangeB cannot leave testing until ChangeA is completed in production.

So far it is manageable although it does not address how it can be caught up yet, but another factor on issues from deployment or testing is not considered at this point. If ChangeA faces a problem in production and needs to be backed up then what should be done to ChangeB? Depending on the criticality, ChangeB could be backed out or merged with ChangeA. If ChangeA cannot be replicated in test, then what is the path forward?

If ChangeA works but ChangeB is unable to pass testing, ChangeC is now on hold. How should the group handle if a very high critical issue now comes up? Should everything be backed out then readdressed? Should it be merged to current change?

So far I have only addressed the main actors to SDLC, but there are other actors that make this management more complex: management and product planning. Because they have their own plans resources are now being used to manage unexpected work that comes up, budget and promises need to be considered.

This is comes to another factor to the resource consumption. Regular/planned/scheduled releases are impacted or impacting to defect deployments. Although rules are made to what changes should go into a emergency/point release or a planned/scheduled release, there are always exceptions that throws the process for a loop.

There seems to be several red lights to the chaotic process that I am currently in.

1. The most obvious request from release management is to skip a few weeks of releases. And obviously, no one can stand missing fixes for 2-4 weeks. If the product cannot remain stable for a month, there is something seriously wrong with the product (IMO). What customer wants a solution that require weekly updates? I get quite irritated with weekly updates for changes that do not even impact me to begin with!
2. Similar defects keep showing up. No one wants to manually fix out-of-sync issues, while also unable to replicate or completely fix the problem. There is something seriously wrong fundamentally with the product if no one is able to figure out syncing issues that keep coming up for over 3 months (for us two years even with some fixes that didn't do anything).
3. Every team is requesting additional resources or time. Obviously something is wrong with planning if everyone (or even the majority of groups) cannot accomplish the simplest of tasks within a regular plan.
4. Always in catch-up mode. There is seriously something wrong if product/application planner cannot realign the plan given the current situation.
5. No COO. There is not a single point person who can just put their foot down and just move forward. I do not how many times we spent more time "negotiating" with everyone when the worst plan was still faster than the "planning" of the changes.

Rant over