I'd say that organizing work for a team of 3+ is challenging. We have 2 week long sprints and so ensuring everyone has enough to work on in the next sprint is something that's a daily task. Also, breaking work down for a project for other developers is difficult as well and a skill in of itself you don't hear about much. Thinking in terms of work streams presents the biggest hurtle in that whole thing.
Hi, I'm Gregory Brown.
My goal is to help software developers get better at what they do, whether they've been at it for five weeks or fifty years.
(he/him)
Ah yes, I've had to do my share of planning out work for others over the years.
What I've found to work is to start accepting the idea that planning needs to happen at various levels of granularity over longer time scales, because constantly trying to groom the backlog on a two week cadence just doesn't work. This is especially the case when you run into unknowns, whether it is something being much easier than expected, much harder than expected, or just blocking because of some external issue outside of the team.
Have you seen the Shape Up process from Basecamp? It's something you'd probably need to adjust a bit to fit your situation, but it's full of interesting ideas that may help.
I'd say that organizing work for a team of 3+ is challenging. We have 2 week long sprints and so ensuring everyone has enough to work on in the next sprint is something that's a daily task. Also, breaking work down for a project for other developers is difficult as well and a skill in of itself you don't hear about much. Thinking in terms of work streams presents the biggest hurtle in that whole thing.
Ah yes, I've had to do my share of planning out work for others over the years.
What I've found to work is to start accepting the idea that planning needs to happen at various levels of granularity over longer time scales, because constantly trying to groom the backlog on a two week cadence just doesn't work. This is especially the case when you run into unknowns, whether it is something being much easier than expected, much harder than expected, or just blocking because of some external issue outside of the team.
Have you seen the Shape Up process from Basecamp? It's something you'd probably need to adjust a bit to fit your situation, but it's full of interesting ideas that may help.
Thanks for the suggestion about Shape Up, I'll definitely check it out.
Yeah moving planning to a more macro structure is definitely something I'm learning to do.