Effectual Working » scrum

Project Manager, Developer, or Both?

Mike — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:26:22 +0000

I have been learning the hard way what it means to have multiple roles in your job. I am working to get back into software development while continuing to be a project manager. I have found that software project management is greatly aided when the project manager has some development responsibilities. Last Friday, I was caught off-guard by a problem with my role on a particular project.

My role, as I understood it, on the project that “got me” was as the project manager only. Because of this, I was reading the requirements through my project manager eyes. My developers were reading the requirements through their platform-specific eyes. The result? We completely overlooked an area of development that was sprinkled throughout the requirements.

It happened to be a platform on which I am doing development on for other projects, so I can easily see how it was missed. The assumption was that I would take care of that piece, only I didn’t make the same assumption. The problem showed up in a reported defect, so now I am scrambling to catch up. I must be certain to analyze the requirements more carefully so that as the project manager, I make sure that all the developer skills we need are on the team, whether the developer is me or someone else.

You might think that this problem was obvious and could have been avoided. I can tell you that it wasn’t obvious to all who were involved because it was missed in two sprint planning sessions. Yes, it wasn’t obvious, but I should have caught it.

Extra Push for Completion

Mike — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:36:07 +0000

We were having our scrum yesterday and the discussion turned to three, low-hour, tasks that one particular developer has left to complete. He also has another larger task remaining to complete. His choice was to postpone the small tasks in order to complete the larger task. It will only take a maximum of four hours to complete the small tasks.

The BA’s on our team came to me later and spoke to me why these small tasks were important. (They weren’t sure they could speak to the impact during the scrum.) The accuracy of a key calculation, which is being tested right now in another system, was at stake. I requested that the developer put aside the larger task and complete the small tasks today.

As scrum master, I was acting to remove an obsticle that a different team was encountering. I also wonder what could have happened differently so that I wouldn’t have had to intervene. Could it be that with just a little extra push, the developer could have completed this task earlier so it wouldn’t have become an issue? Could it be that the importance of this task been discovered earlier in our sprint?

What do you think?

Prep. Work

Mike — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:40:47 +0000

Today, I am concentrating on prep. work for three planning sessions I have scheduled for Wed., Fri., and Mon. The goal for these sessions is to identify the remaining tasks that we know of, for interfaces and forms, on our project. Next, we are going to prioritize and schedule these tasks into 4-week sprints. Once this is done, I will add any new tasks into the project plan.