“Yeah, we’re doing agile. Been doing it for some time now.”
Really?
I know it’s not good to doubt straight away but I’ve developed this skepticism when people say they are doing agile. It has come from speaking with different team members and senior management about their impression of ‘agile’. For sometime now agile has become an overloaded term that many don’t fully understand. I get into a situation when someone says those words I feel like they have to prove it! But proving it, even to ourselves, can help us evaluate if we have lost sight of an original goal. It’s so easy to get immersed in the usual routine that we forget to take a moment to stop and look up.
For the most part, I believe senior management or other stakeholders actually this think agile is being done correctly and this is where the problem lies! They… Continue reading
You only have to say “big bang release” to me and it causes my blood pressure to rise. Arrrgggghhhhhh!!!! Too many bad memories! I’ve been involved my fair share of painful big bang releases to know that they should be avoided, but we get into a cycle that’s hard to break! Almost as though we become anesthetized to the pain, all passion to improve is drained from us as we’ve accepted that “this is just the way it is”.
We’re in the software business because we enjoy being part of creating something, hopefully something we think is great! This is what we want to concentrate on, the more we firefight with releases the more team moral drops and people become disengaged. Some team members have never been the same since going through a number of these! The agonizing release process has taken its toll, the hunger to work for… Continue reading
Blogging has been on my mind for many years, if I wrote all the excuses I used down it would make an impressive list! We all have personal obstacles in our lives, some we create ourselves, as managers we not only need to tackle our own but help our team to tackle theirs. Identifying them is often the biggest challenge as we often put up a self denial barrier stopping it being considered. This blog is more about my own obstacles though than others.
What could I say that would really make a difference to anyone? I certainly don’t doubt my ability as a manager, but the little voice in my head says no one will care what you think. There are managers out there with popular blogs covering everything any manager would need to know. Look at Rands in his blog, what can I say on top of… Continue reading
…and post! First blog for stevesitton.com – check! Now to the list of everything else!
I had thought of starting a blog for sometime, now I’ve finally taken the step from thinking to doing. The first challenge came quickly – coming up with a name for the blog! I originally put the blog on geekymanager.com but since changed it this domain. What better than my name! There’s no hiding from the fact that I am a geek just didn’t want to define a particular theme to the blog.
Learning and self improvement are important part of my work ethic. Absorbing information from people around me in different roles throughout my career has taught me a great deal. Then there is a vast amount of good resources online which I try to digest when I can. There are always new ideas being formed or different ways to do existing processes that… Continue reading
