+ (July 2020) A piece of work got sliced too thin. The whole piece got assigned to 4 different developers. They estimated the integration cost to be too high and decided to swarm on the piece. One typed, all collaborated. Peer Review was quick, everyone knew what’s coming. Cross-training went through the roof, everyone knows the code. The work got delivered on time. It converted a skeptic of peer programming into a believer.
– (May 2020) The team has big-time buy-in from PO to break some critical silos. The PO consumes the slightly increased cost of cross-training. The team leader decides to assign a humongous piece of sub-system to the newbie. Yes, the silo is eventually broken. But the work gets delayed by *a lot*. Lesson: when breaking someone into a new domain, introduce the new lessons gradually, perhaps some low priority maintenance or some supervised enhancement work. Breaking knowledge silos in teams is a careful art and a balancing act.
+ (Sometime in 2020) Got schooled in “learning mindset” and “art of communication”…. PMO is getting ready to roll out a program assessment. The assessment criteria have some open questions and unknowns.
- Speaker 1: “Are we ready to roll it out?”
- Speaker 2: “We are ready to roll out the experiment.”
+ (Apr 2019) The Product Owner prioritizing work in a sprint to focus on value-driven delivery and de-prioritized a “seemingly urgent” maintenance work (“Don’t worry about that study. It’s delayed on their end for so much, we have enough to fix it our end later. Let’s not get distracted.”)
+ (Apr 2019) The Delivery Team organically demanding Integration Environment (“You found a bug in production. We fixed it. We have a medium story around it to prove the fix works. How do we know our code fixes the bug IN PRODUCTION?”
+ (Mar 2019) Team swarming to close an epic. Case in point: Full team working to close a single Epic that has been worked on over
– (Mar 2019) Team Lead needs to identify true blocking situations and how to decouple works so they can progress in parallel. Case in point: The email sending mechanism is in flux, can we deliver value by just dumping the email in a flat file that’d validate the rest of the pipeline.
+ (Jan 2019) Delivery Team pushed back on product owner during estimation to do better work on story slicing. Case in point: All estimation came out as “21” or, “no clue”.