Week in Review #26

  • Monday - Half a year of these posts. I'm feeling blue today (still sick), and even more so as further "tweaking" of team rosters appears to be in the offing. In the spirit of taking whatever victories you can get, I am happy to report that I have pretty much gotten used to Win10 already. The start menu is stupid, but that's my only real complaint... well, that and the fact that it blue-screens twice a day (so far). Oh, and I went out to David's Tea and stocked up on breakfast blend and their lemon black tea. 
  • Tuesday - Ran a great retro for my old Kanban team -- their first one. The group has a lot of challenges -- their biggest issue is despair, the sense that they're struggling under a weight of problems that will forever prevent anything from changing. It would be good to see a success story here. Interviewed a candidate. Good conversation on organizational dysfunctions. All of that = I don't feel useless today.   
  • Wednesday - Started the day with a request from a team I have not worked with previously, asking if I might attend their retrospective today. (Of course I would.) It was very different from yesterday's! This group was attending remotely and used FunRetro to track items for discussion. The initial request made to me was to help them "streamline" the process -- I keep running into this, and it's kind of interesting. Is an hour a week too much time to spend thinking actively about what you're doing? An hour every two weeks? -- and also seemed concerned that they were doing the retrospective "correctly" in terms of process, which again says to me that these groups have not been exposed to much by way of agile training. I tried to keep back and let the team discussions do their thing, offered a couple of suggestions. 
  • Thursday - Feeling physically better (finally). Spent much of the day being frustrated with our main tech writing tool and with my laptop, which continued to suffer a bluescreen several times each day. Had a discussion about how to get some of our teams basic agile training (they were not included in the big '16 rollout because Reasons), which will hopefully result in getting them what they need.
  • Friday - Finally finished some documentation tasks that spent most of the week in the Doing column. I can weekend with a clear conscience now.

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