Dear Project Manager ( but also Product Owner or Producer, depending on team and organisation),
I understand that your work is about planning, organising, estimating, finding a common ground between those grumpy developers and the ambitious visions and requests of stakeholders, clients and management.
My work though, is actually do the work you planned.
A goal without a plan is just a wish
is my mantra.
I spend each Sylvester's evening with my wife and kids writing new years resolutions and doing retrospectives on past year ones. I even use Trello for my family management.
I define my personal, sport and career goals very precisely in a SMART way.
- Specific: target a particular area for improvement
- Measurable: quantify or suggest progress metrics
- Attainable: ensure you can reasonably achieve your goals with the given resources
- Relevant: make sure your goals align with your values and long-term objectives
- Timely: highlight when your goal should be achieved
So believe me when i say that i am on your side when it comes to break down tasks, organise the team's work, plan ahead, be ready for the next steps, and last but not least, be really, literally, AGILE.
I understand that without a plan we won't get anywhere or we might get somewhere too late, but why not add some Serendipity in the recipe?
Jira, Trello, Asana...
Story, Task or Epic...
Confluence, Google Docs, Miro or Post-it...
Scrum or Kanban...
R&D, RPP or MVP...
Sprints and Roadmaps....
Guesstimates, Estimates, Poker planning, Accuracy, Precision, Uncertainty multipliers and Buffer...
Sprint planning, Backlog refinement, Sprint Review and Retrospectives..
Can we please start doing the work, instead of endlessly discussing how and when we are going to do it?
a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
We know where we want to go, and roughly when we need to be there. we also decided some stop-overs and what the main means of transportation will be. Can we please now lift our asses from the couch and step out our home's doorstep?
We are all seeking adventure, challenge and have big dreams, sometimes life gets in the way, sometimes priorities shift. Planning is necessary, but we must be open to unplanned opportunities and accept adversities. Let's see what happens on the way. We will all be surprised by how everything unfolds.
Let's not worry too much. Let's start this journey. The world work is out there waiting for us.
Kindly, your Tech Lead
Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash
Top comments (3)
Task estimation is probably on the biggest wastes of time I can imagine when it comes to the Agile approach, and planning in general. Most people know by now how hard it is to get a handle of the actual size of the work in terms of man hours and consequently how hard it is to execute on time.
The approach with Agile Kanban I've seen employed seems to make a lot of sense. The idea is to roughly task out work items that cover round about 8 hours of work and schedule these as per usual (prioritization).
Over the course of development with this fixed team, the velocity will be established with regards to certain categories of work items such that planning becomes more accurate as you move along.
That way the focus is on writing good stories/tasks and the planning will eventually become more accurate.
It is ironic how we tend to overcomplicate things and processes that should be simpler. With all the process of Agile/Scrum + other meetings whole days are taken from development time. Most of the time they are far from the objectives of the meeting perse.
Kudos for expressing the feeling in a educational and mature way.
I truly truly appreciate your patience on thinking this through and articulating this idea. Over planning, over use of tooling, control, word vomit of kpis in a medium that really needs none of that most of the time.. man.