Taarradhin

Our last couple of iterations have been challenging in that old issues are popping up again and some bad habits/coping mechanisms have snuck back in. I’m also realizing that there are times that we are very much an island in need of stronger, more solid connections with the other teams we depend so much on. Building connections when there isn’t trust, and where that lack of trust is based on years of difficulties, just isn’t easy.

Measuring

I’m still working on a deeper dive into reporting beyond burn down/up charts, looking for ways to better communicate status, risk and overall capabilities. I’ve gotten through some initial analysis on our velocity, spotted areas for further analysis and am working through what is important for me vs the team vs my boss and product owners. Another couple of weeks and I may get to a good place.

Product Owners

We’ve been on an interesting string of external projects where we haven’t been engaged at all with our local team of product owners. We have a lot of autonomy lately BUT that comes with the lack of engagement that we’re used to, customers that not only are detached from our process but are frankly apathetic about it. Not surprisingly, this makes our collective engagement wane some.

DevOps

The majority of our issues lately, both concerning my earlier island comment and bad habits, have stemmed from support issues with our systems team. It’s always been a contentious relationship, very much a tossing grenades back and forth, but for a long time now we’ve had an easy peace between the teams where we were able to work fairly well together. I’m not sure about the cause but lately we’ve had a breakdown in that support, a server turned over without any of the minimum requirements installed, checklists ignored, a frustrating level of back and forth and more than one support issue dropped because it was arbitrarily deemed unnecessary. Naturally this has caused some collateral damage with our projects, velocity, and progress on both. It also has reminded me that it can be incredibly difficult to have compassion for the struggles of other groups when you’re feeling that they aren’t holding up their end.

With all of that, the subject of DevOps came up as a really good solution to those challenges. Obviously, I’m totally on board with anything that supports Agile process and I was lucky enough to not only to discover an upcoming boot camp that teaches you how to implement DevOps AND my boss was completely on board with me going. SO I have some renewed energy for tackling this situation and an outlet for it – much more info on that in September.