Week in Review #5

As expected, this week has been pretty challenging.
  • Monday - Got some unexpected news regarding career planning. That's going to take some thinking about. More candy contributions arrived! I'm happy to see this -- not because of the benefit to me (I would stock the stuff regardless), but because it indicates a level of consciousness about others' efforts that will hopefully manifest within their teams as well.
  • Tuesday - Sprint review and retrospective. I wasn't able to be involved in the individual team retrospectives this time, but one team member approached me to raise some concerns about communication on his (distributed) team. I have some ideas for a few of them, and will probably also discuss them with our coach. My Twitter feed was highlighted in a departmental mailing today, which was a little nerve-wracking to anticipate; however, while a few people responded with positive comments, on the whole it was a non-event. Lesson: Don't sweat.
  • Wednesday - Sent out the notes from yesterday's cross-team conversation. Velocity is down for two teams (way down for one), when it had finally stabilized for the previous few sprints. This is a concern. Sprint planning was frustrating; there was uncertainty over which stories were going into an upcoming release, and other stories had not been fleshed out well enough for the team to accept them.
  •  Thursday - A valuable lesson in how sometimes things work themselves out without me needing to pitch a fit about them. Not thrilled with how that new project is being organized, but we'll see how it goes. Communication remains a challenge with our distributed group.
  • Friday -  Coming to the end of a notebook, threw out a lot of notes that have passed their useful period, moved some items to a backlog.
Hopefully next week I'll have time to get back to reading and research. It hasn't been all bad, but I'm very tired.

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