Team-Management

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. ...