Move slow and no things.
- Spending a day or more every quarter/half sorting out your roadmap, prioritising stakeholder needs, tech debt and enhancements
- Someone from senior leadership decides they want random thing they invented and blows the roadmap up
- Much wanted feature (X) or issue gets pushed back
- CEO makes a comment in a company wide meeting how they can’t understand why we simply can’t do X thing yet
- Everyone in Product scrambles to make X a priority
- Go to step 1
My company used to do SAFe, which is supposed to be “scalable agile”. By “scalable”, they mean you take up half a sprint every quarter to do a big waterfall plan.
Too many in management believed their jobs depended on keeping this system. We slowly whittled them away until we stopped doing it entirely. Whatever you might think about “Extreme Programming” or “Agile” being primarily a way to sell books and overpriced training seminars, SAFe is only that. It has no other purpose.
- it’s time for quarterly security training again where you learn not to open exe files attached to emails.
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
- quarterly 4-hour-long all-department meeting that could have been an email
- “incorporating” the latest tech buzzword into your process because that one manager has nothing better to do
- “celebrating” things like Company Culture Week™ and other BS stuff imagined up by people with nothing better to do
- waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
This is the bane of my existence. And of course IT locks us out of the UEFI so we can’t set the system to auto-boot 15 minutes before we show up to work.
I’m just happy I was able to remove OneDrive from the start-up applications. Now I don’t have to waste an hour each day waiting for files to sync
Having a team touch base, followed by a daily standup, followed by a quality initiative meeting, followed by a biweekly support touch base, followed by a demo for a tool your team will never use, followed by lunch and learn session over some AI tool you’ll be forced to use, followed by your biweekly 1:1 with the manager, followed by the department touch base, followed by the company all hands… Aaaaand done with meetings. Finally, some time to get some work done… then your downstream customer wants you to investigate why their counts don’t match yours… “could you run the totals again? Could you run them broken down by hour? By minute? By second? Can you get me a list of each record at these 6 timestamps? Can I get them in a different format? Oops, the problem was on our end.” Great. And it’s 5 o’clock. Scrum master gonna be up my ass about story points tomorrow.
As a project/portfolio manager, the first thing I try to do is eliminate everything except the customer part. That is really hard to fix, but at least there is more time?
All this is great if you’re working remote. At least you can be far away from a cubicle or even worse - an open office while doing all this nonsense.
My big company just did a full RTO mandate after 5 years full WFH since COVID started. It quickly swung from a good enjoyable job with plenty of work able to be done during all the bullshit meetings to an open office cubicle farm nightmare with harsh bright lights, tons of noise and distractions, and having to physically move from home to office and from desk to meeting room on different floors all the time eating up every last second of available time to do my ACTUAL job. And we are doing a bastardized version of Scrum and it’s miserable.
I got reprimanded one day because in our daily standup I simply said that I had not made any progress on my tasks since yesterday because I was in meetings all day. Apparently that wasn’t being a team player.
