Week in Review #21

  • Monday - Pulling into the close of our first sprint in the new territory. Minor success -- gotta take those where I can -- we are ordering more web cameras, so whenever we have meetings with remote people, customers, etc., we don't have to run around trying to find one of the two we have. Hooray.

    Meeting count: 4.5 hours. Had a headache by 10:30.
  • Tuesday - Two stand-ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, and wrestling with metrics reporting.

    Meeting count: 4.5 hours
  • Wednesday - Had a dr appointment in the morning. Ran from stand-up to retrospective to sprint planning, had a breather to work with the sprint report and have a couple of short conversations, then two more sprint planning meetings and a documentation meeting.

    Meeting count: 3.5 hours

    Put in an hour or so working on research for ANE. I haven't been keeping track of the time I spend for them, and I suppose I ought to.
  • Thursday - First thing in the morning a team member asks me to talk. I am not to escalate a problem that is affecting this individual alone on the team, because they don't trust my boss. I want to cry; I want to quit. One of the product owners wants the metrics report. I work on that. I talk to my boss about pulling out of one of my commitments, about communications problems, about asking for too much, too fast. I miss two standups. I tell my kanban team that I don't have time to work with them right now, so that will free up an hour or so every week. I finish a minimalist version of the sprint report, given that I have no idea who half of these teams are, where to find the data, or how to work with Excel at this level. I manage not to cry or quit.

    Meeting count: 1 hour
  • Friday- Finally, a relatively quiet day without intense conversations or crises. Spent time on a couple of small documentation projects. I have decided to revisit The Decision to Trust, a dry tome if ever I have seen one but very useful as a starting point for thinking about organizational communication, and to post my notes outside my cube as they accumulate. Our Web cameras arrived.

    Meeting count: 1.25 hours
This week managed to feel incredibly busy without being particularly productive. Spending nearly half of it in meetings might have contributed to that. Next week is the "off" week in terms of sprint ceremonies, so here's hoping for less running around and a bit more time to think.

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