Friday, August 31, 2018

Management: We're concerned people aren't pulling their weight, and that about 3 people on each team are doing the...

Management: We're concerned people aren't pulling their weight, and that about 3 people on each team are doing the work.

Me: ....

Me, later to my boss: I trust every member of my team. I believe they are all pulling there weight. If anyone wasn't, I would escalate that until the problem was resolved.

11 comments:

  1. Do they have any basis for this assumption? Or are they just pushing their weight around because they don't understand what is going on?

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  2. People are pretty bad at assigning themselves subtasks, so our task board has a lot of unassigned items. Which means it looks like people aren't doing work because they aren't tracking it.

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  3. Oooooh man I have feelings about devs and tracking work. Short version, devs are typically very bad at it because, among other things, tracking the work seems like additional, unrelated, work.

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  4. So was “management” your boss? I had the impression (perhaps mistaken) that your boss was too self-aware to insult you in that way (at least accidentally).

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  5. Boss's boss, in a meeting with management plus scrum masters.

    My boss is much too aware to say something that dumb.

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  6. This company seems remarkably unfamiliar with its own internal politics. Has there been some massive internal disruption? Not to underestimate your trouble-making abilities, but this seems like more than just folks sussing out how to deal with you, personally .

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  7. I mean: I aim to misbehave. That's essentially true.

    But, yeah. I don't know WTF they are thinking.

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  8. William Nichols My guess is that they want the Dev teams to be more productive so they scare them into working faster and are planing to say afterwards, "See, you weren't working hard enough."

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  9. Plus, they don’t seem to know their own agile process. Like, at all.

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  10. So this feels like a communication issue - people aren't fully informed/aware of the work individuals are doing, perhaps because it's not being adequately tracked equally. So it seems like some people are doing more work than others.

    Perhaps reframe it as - I disagree and I don't feel that people aren't pulling their weight. Although I would be willing to individually communicate with team members to try to ensure that no one is feeling that way, and get the to the bottom of it is anyone is.

    But I would like to put forth the idea that perhaps the tasks and work people are doing isn't being accurately tracked, so it can seem like there's an unequal amount of work being done. Will you grant me some time to see if I can close that gap and try to get a more accurate assessment of everyone's efforts and make sure that's adequately accounted for?

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