Week in Review #3

Busy week! No wonder I'm tired.
  • Agile Coffee podcast, which happened to be a panel discussion from a recent conference about... how to start a podcast. Not sure if that's something I would ever be interested in. I was disappointed to observe that the entire panel was composed of men. 
  • Also listened to a recent meta-cast on Kanban (a topic about which I know little) and Agile for Humans 012. I have heard Woody Zuill's name, but this is the first time I've listened to him speaking about agile topics. I started 013 but haven't had a chance to listen to the whole thing. 
  • Re-reading The Coaching Habit, which is a decent little book with some good advice (I think).
  • Snapped at someone, apologized, figured out a new schedule that met most needs, punted some additional problems he raised to our coach. If any follow-up discussion happened, I wasn't around to be brought in. This happens, we all move around a lot and seldom schedule things formally. 
  • Sprint review. We had a non-team member show up! And he asked some questions! We are very excited. 
  • Retrospectives are the most exhausting part of this job (at least for introverts?). I have a half dozen things I have promised to follow up on, plus parts of our process the teams would like to experiment with.  
  • I brought in cookies on Tuesday, and at least a half dozen people expressed appreciation. I'm noting that to remind myself that while it sometimes feels thankless, it isn't really. 
  • I followed up on one of the things the team asked about (our "awesomeness survey"). Still have a lot to do.
  • Coincidentally enough, our HR team send out their own survey intended to measure employee engagement. The way they define "engagement" hinges on whether employees are basically just showing up (passively disengaged) or actively working against the company somehow (actively disengaged). I am not comfortable with those definitions, not least because they leave me out. Is being angry at the status quo a form of engagement? 
  • Tried not to spend too much time on Twitter. 
  • Scheduled and held a conversation with our dev manager about team alignment. I think it went well? Came across like he was trying to pitch his priorities over the PO's, contradicting the sprint plan we had just made the previous day, and that he’s micromanaging how they go about their tasks.
In non-agile work, I am continuing my project to break up the Web service documentation into more easily maintained chunks (some of the topics are so long and table-stuffed that they crash the software), learning Python on codeacademy.com, and meeting with a developer to see if I can take over a bit of routine mechanical work he's often tasked with. 

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