Leonardo de Campos Almeida

The Three Months We Stopped Pretending: A Kanban Story My team was doing Scrum because that’s what all the cool kids were doing. Then, on a Monday planning session we were struggling to fit a list of unrelated tickets into a 2 week planning, then I heard the infamous affirmation: “this ticket is a priority and needs to be delivered by Thursday”. I had heard it so many times before, but this time I had enough and I realised that this was no longer a Scrum process, it was a mix of a bullet list of objectives and wishful thinking. Looking from outside, it looked like a Scrum methodology, the planning was there, the review, the grooming, and retrospective were there, we meet daily to do stand-ups, but these had become just part of the week, without adding the value they should, and everybody was ok with it, nobody said anything. So I said it wasn’t working. ...

Using DISC to defuse team conflict (not resolve it) We’ve all been there, joined a new company, and a few months later are asked to fill a behavioral questionnaire with hundreds of questions. Then we get a very nice report about ourselves, some things match, some don’t. We read it, and go back to writing the next feature. I did the same, more than once. A few years later, in a big company that ironically didn’t have any of these questionnaires, I saw how useful it can be when managing different people. ...

What waterfall taught me about agile I worked for one of the largest banks in Brazil back in the day, with everything that entails, waterfall processes, PMBOK training, commercial proposals, weekend-long debugging, wearing a suit and tie. I’ve learned a lot, and don’t regret doing any of it. Nowadays, waterfall is used as a cautionary tale. It’s the project management process that we don’t speak about. Back when I was in the middle of figuring out long-running projects that ran inside of the banking system, for a bank with tens of millions of customers, it was just how things were done. PMBOK and waterfall are the way projects are executed in most businesses, so naturally a bank, whose main concern is about making sure that everyone’s money is secure will lean towards it. ...