Situation

This will take a lot of explaining. There is a group that leads a project at a consulting company (CC) which works for another company (Client) this company, especially a big project. In this case, it’s about ten people, leading a group of about seventy consultants, interspersed with lots of client developers- at least one or two per team, and every team has more or less ten people on it- some bigger, some smaller.

Problem: Leadership lies

Not taking people off of projects to join this one
Many projects that people could go to, truth: scraped people off other projects, grabbed leads and pricimciplas, grabbed people who are not due they say that there are problems, and that these people will fix them. Do they? Not sure / no evidence / very skeptical

Problem: Leadership explains agile (wrong)

Problem: Why are you scared of hangover?

Problem: Not caring about business value

(cards, hangover)

Tiny chunks of waterfall

“We are doing kind of an XP-Scrum and this is the Way that is Is Done” (But WHY is it done, and is it right for us?)

sign up for all the points, start them all at once, two weeks, start dev, dev stories, all qa at the same time, we are professionals, how have we not noticed that this is inefficient? warterfall writ small?

publically yelled at and humilliated if you have problems with this.

do the waork, same velocity next iteration. Not a normal cycle of beginning middle end, qa, there’s not flow. Coming from kanban, it is hugely jarring. Everything hits at the same time, much franticness.

One QA, in pune. Pressured to qa, ginoff, the level of franticness and all hands on deck which in saner zones i reserved for urgent production bugs.

cant ignore a story if it doest have business value- must still do it. cant talk to subject matter experts and Must literally implement functionality that does not give business value, just because we said we would. commit to in the sprint.

why dont we fix this? CST is “no, that’s not how it goes.” But it IS. Not what it is on the ground. “Maybe you just misunderstood.”

Undertone of getting my PM and BA in trouble. So you feel bad about that…

recommended that the CST make it really obvious at an account meeting that a few months ago there was big pressure for getting your points done and not having overhanging points and having a really stirct velocity every single iteration. Make it super clear that it is OK if you need to reorganzie an iteration.

this makes me as a developer incredibly unhappy because

the client is play ing an arm and a leg for consultants that can deliver great stuff, but our hands are tied
filled with irritation, annoying, working around a system that is broken
comply with rules that made the company originally able to solve the problem in the forst place
set up to fail, it alarms me. all kinds of unhappy.

Why does this failure bother you? As long as I can see the trin reeck coming, and IM not getting people out of the way twith it, it will affect the company I can see my future self saying “we saw this coming, why didnt we do anythign about it.” We had the best time travel experince just now, and this is the itme to fix the shit. Why are we letting this happen Why are we letting the client dictate the way we do our jobs when they are paying us so much money to solve this problem, when this is hte problem that they have that they need us to solve that they are not letting us solve.

It appears that The client has give priorty to what they find most important, that we get things done in a certian iteration, that we have METRICS on things. Slow moving waternall. Chunky waterfall. All are top protury, all must be done, all are previously scoped out. None of this is what we are trying to teach as good practice to new TWers, or new later TWers (no TW reference)

All of this is a terrible idea, 73 people, all of them are learing bad practices and thinking that it is ok. This is going to affect our company for years to come, in horrible horrib el ways. I am very angry.

Lack of communication from CST to-from people on teams. So many people, need some sort of hierarchy to have s semblance of structure…. on the other hand… a lot of … all but two of the CST managers of which there are 10 or 12 are indian dudes who believe very strongly in things like hierarchy, and that they have made the best decision, and in giving a decision from on high, which makes having a conversation difficult.

There there are the people who have been here for a long time and say that things are much better now. In all caps,everything is MUCH BETTEr now. theyre tired, theyre tired of fighting for things. its just not on their radar any more. People who have th ability to do influences have their hands tied in other ways. Selim is amazzzzzzing. He also has a point, that he is really vocal about making changes for hte better, and its hard for him to be the only one saying… branded as the loud person who has a problem with everything0 which happened to the last BA-PM, who was the only link between the actual dev team and the CST, a lot of the team ended up - 10 ppl, 3 of them quit the company. Indicitice of communication problem, snot listening, being so fucking fed up with it.

Not branded as the perons making a fuss overwverything- because he already is.

Another perons who could have influence over things- Bill- does not manage up as well as he manages down. His reports think he is amazzzzzzzing but his bosses are like “??” It;s harder because he is bucking for a big promotion (which is overdue) when the people reviewing him dont see his awesomeness up close, dont want them to just hear “oh, he;s just causing problems over there.” this thing that he needs, for reasons…

Every one else is some cmbination of junior and/or apathetic, or has less of an idea of how to go about fixing any of this.

This is the biggest problem that my account has- the cards thing. The client has given us their preferences, and we said “yes, sure” but our job as consultants is to say “no, you should not put your hand in the flames; it goes badly” and we are not fucking doing our jobs

You hired us because you needed help. We are here, but we are not helping. tying the hands of your summoned rescuers. Preventing us from bringing in the tools that make us successful, and still expect the same results.

Ideas:

Coordinate attack? I dont know if there are people with whom to coordinate

Slack chats?

Srrengthen bonds in the team via tech talks

Posting to bigger mailing lists

Tell people leads. Have you TRIED?? “You realize our people are quitting, right?”

Getting Martin Fowler in to talk about Agile

Shaum

victoria hall toni chisa ugochi victoria ayo

prob=vable aud

Rich Hickey - get him in to do the five Why’s. Seven S’s? (head of GAP)