I wish we could do that but apparently, because of our organizational layout, we can’t. At this place, the BA’s are in a separate division from the developers. I find it fascinating to see the impact that organizational arrangements have on workflow, due to politics that people probably should have foreseen, but didn’t.
Anyway, what we have is that the devs will finish the sprint and keep moving forward to the next one, coding to whatever they think the requirements might be, and when the BA’s finish requirements then we have to submit a change order. That’s the sound of my teeth grinding that you hear. I suspect they are being this aggressive in controlling the project schedules as a pendulum swing/knee jerk response to changing from waterfall, where WE drove the pace of things, to agile. And of course, we have no official project management; only one of the dev leads is assigned “project manager”.
But I actually have another peeve that brought me here to post:
Corporate America loves to talk about how efficient they’ve become over the last couple decades, and we all know of the love affair they have with open offices because it “promotes collaboration”. Well, another one of my big tasks is to work on a VERY collaborative documentation revision and review team. It’s hard for us to actually collaborate, though. Not because of our workspace arrangements. It’s because we are all working on 5 - 8 different projects simultaneously and can barely give each other the time of day. :mad:
Despite the fact that I always notify you immediately whenever there’s any developments on projects (to the point where you’ve actually said you don’t need the constant stream of information), this is the one time that I’m holding out on you.
I know that you’ve made it very clear that we are trying to make a fairly unreasonable deadline, and I know that I’ve told you that the third-party vendor we use moves at their own pace, but in reality, I’ve had the information you need to move forward for days now. I’m really just waiting for you to wear me down so I finally relinquish it to you.
You must know this, and that must be why you continually ask me if I’ve heard from them, if I have the information, etc., and I continually reply with the above-mentioned alibi / reason. So, while the first 50 times you’ve asked, I’ve responded in the negative, go ahead and try again.
You know, if I send you an update on something right before I go home, it’s a pretty safe bet that nothing will have changed before 6am the next day when you sent me that email asking for another update.
Dear Mr. Engineer Wannabe: When you’re talking about reducing the amplitude of a wave (sound waves, for example), the correct term is “damping,” not “dampening.” In effect, you just spent a conference call telling the vendor that we want to slightly moisten the waves represented on the customer’s chart.
the customer service reps at work are bad about this. one recently scolded me for answering her emails in a like manner. I told her in response to her previous email full of !!!???. she said she only did it because I had on the preceding one which was because her first email was like that. I gave up at that point.
I try to understand that they have to ask me the same stupid question over and over again as a part of due diligence, but damn I get tired of answering the same question over and over again.
CSR:"FedEx doesn’t show they have this box from 3 weeks ago, you must not have shipped it!!!Can you go find it on the dock and ship it out asap???
Me: " FedEx website is showing they have not scanned the box in question not that they don’t have it, our system show the box has been shipped. Once the shipment has been given to the carrier we have no further visibility until the carrier that has the shipment scans it or returns it."
CSR:" well cant you go out and search the dock just in case it might be out there!!!???"
Me: “Sorry, at any given time we have hundreds of boxes moving through the system and then stacked on trailers. We do not have the manpower to shut the system down and search for one box that is not likely to be out there since we clear the docks every night.”
Does the third-party vendor move at “their own pace” as an absolute condition, or have they ever demonstrated an ability to respond (favorably) when someone lights a fire under them?
Assuming the latter is the case, who has the authority to light a fire under them?
Might be someone trying to appear “on top of things” to their boss(es).
I worked with a guy that’d always think up something to email me about late at night… and sure nuff, he always cc’ed the Big Boss. I remember the first time he did that at midnight, and I thought “If he’s trying to look ‘like Junior Executive Material’ he’ll email another cc’ed question at 6 am.”
5:55 am *:: ping :: *
I wonder if anyone thinks they’re getting away with a fast one. If I were his boss, my first thought would be “How naïve does Brownie McNose think I am?”
My second thought would be “Put a note in Brownie McNose’s file: ‘Douchebag’.”
Ouch. Sounds like you’re in one of those workplaces that “agile” is on paper only.
For us, an agile team consists of the BA/Product owner, devs, qa folks and a team lead that does whatever project management work nobody else is doing as well as scrum master and all-around boss type. The team as a whole decides what to do each sprint, depending on what the BA has prepped, what tech stuff needs to happen, the overall state of things (do we need to deploy this week? did some other team change something we need to react to? did we get a new test server? etc).
I’m not sure how you’d do agile if the BAs aren’t even on the team. That just seems unworkable.
I just pulled eleven sheets out of the attendance book. And cried. Another gave notice this week and there are two others I know are interviewing. Such a fucking mess. So many good people gone.
After all the panic and fuss, after bringing more people on the team so we could handle the yuuuge work load, the tsunami of overwork was downsized to a trickle. I’m glad to not have to be at the office 36x8, but now I do not have enough to do. Another wave of overwork is two months out. Maybe. Again. Until the next schedule shift du jour. I’m tired of this crap, and am actively looking for other projects. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 400 times …
The next time somebody schedules a meeting with me and five other people to go over the awesome new spreadsheet dashboard thing they just put together that’s going to solve all of our organizational problems, I’m… going… to… fucking… send a sarcastic IM to one of my coworkers or something.
Well apparently the “grieving” period over my asshole micromanager’s departure has passed, because the trickle of criticism has begun to flow.
Apparently he was infamous for trying to take personal credit for our work. Had not heard that one before, but it fits the narcissism quite well.
And apparently he was openly lectured in management meetings about his “lack of trust” in his own people. When that sort of thing goes from backdoor discussions to open topic, you done fucked up. Of course, he was too into himself to listen…
One of the new subjects (I’m doing some graduate coursework on project management, because nobody gives a shit if you’ve got a ton of on-the-work experience unless you have a paper) is on MSProject.
Apparently the gist of the course is “MSProject is the best program ever and anybody who disagrees is talking out of his ass, never mind that one quarter of the students can’t even install it”. Even if it was the best thing since peanut butter, the teacher sounds waaaaay too much like he’s wanking to his Gantt charts…
My graduate PM class was kinda like that, except the instructor was an adjunct whose day job was the CIO of a major financial services firm. He obviously hadn’t touched MS Project in at least 15 years. It was pretty hilarious.
Still a pretty valuable class, since it was a chance to hang with a real live CIO for four hours a week.
User: “Hi, I need access to MostcommonDBA1 and MostcommonDBA2”
Co-worker: “Those don’t exist”
Me: :smack: “Of course they exist, that’s just a typo. 80% of our request are for MostCommonDB1 and 2. How can you not know this after a year on the job?”
Co-worker: “But MostcommonDBA1 doesn’t exist!”
Me: “Seriously?”
User: “I meant MostcommonDB1, that was a typo”
Co-worker: “I just wanted to verify what he wanted!”
Me: :smack: “You didn’t attempt to verify anything, you brushed him off.”
Since I walked off my job in January, I’ve been checking online job sites to see if my former employers were posting a job announcement. I finally found it last night, and had to laugh. It was written in ALL CAPS with **BOLDING AND UNDERLINING ** generously applied. How professional.