Juggling

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Well, now I've gone to the trouble of setting this little blog up... I presume it would be terribly rude not to post anything on it!
 

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Juggling has been a huge part of my role over the past few months, mainly because of the need to be hands on in my role and secondly the requirement to manage a very large set of developments in parallel. 

We are 3 teams of about 6 technologists each working on a set of epics, 2 week iteration by 2 week iteration, and continuously integrating... we have now come into quite a large transition phase which includes very late in the day integration and certification with partners and 3rd parties, all is on track but only through grit and determination (and quite practiced juggling).

I'm not sure if this was just an oversight or just a "suck it and see" exercise... fail fast is not a bad thing.

So we have failed fast a few times so far each including a cycle of reaction, consensus and implementation of new ideas. My belief is that there is only so long you can work with this model if you are up against a deadline and soon enough if your not careful... that deadline will pass and well the story is pretty much evident for all to see!

Lessons learnt so far during "Transition Phase":

• Only "test" technologists have been dedicated to this phase
• "dev" technologists have been called upon by an allocation of "dev monkey" 
• Issues found go back into the "current iteration cycle" across all 3 teams:
• Technologist on the team that picks up the issue has a huge context switch
• The issue is often not given the priority that it needs
• Transition phase is often fixed, due to stricter schedules at partners/3rd party venues, environments, tools etc.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but gives me a clear direction of what really needs to happen next.

Next step, to get a dedicated team of technologists (QA, DEV, BA, IS) and treat it in a similar fashion as one of our business as usual iterations.  *Wish me luck!*

Closing thought/comment:

If one person is juggling in a technology team, that uses Scrum, XP and Kanban, then something is fundamentally wrong... we are not exercising our true values of what we set out to do in the first place.

Another thought that I will pick up at an undetermined time in the future:

Thinking on ones feet and being a "reactive-ist" (a made up word which I hope you understand is called for!)... these are qualities I respect, however sometimes is it better to draw a line in the sand and try and get a head of the game? Now I don't know the answer and hindsight is a wonderful thing...