| > we had a sprint review where some "Senior Project Manager" That wasn't really affiliated with our project but was some manager higher up was mad that us opening up new tickets mid sprint and closing them was ruining the org level burn down charts and expected delivery. This is giving me flashbacks of a company I worked for (for a very short period of time). For some reason, they decided that planning accuracy was the most important metric for the software organization. This was the headline metric they talked about in executive meetings and it was primarily how the program managers' bonus structure was determined. So everything in the company revolved around planning accuracy. Opening new tickets within a sprint was strongly discouraged. Doing work from the next sprint was heavily discouraged. Trying to take on big projects within a sprint was heavily discouraged, because if you couldn't 100% guarantee that it would be done by the end of the sprint it posed an existential threat to the Program Managers' charts, and therefore their bonuses. Program Managers wouldn't come out and say any of this, of course. They knew the situation was at odds with delivering software quickly. However, if you deviated from the plan they would pull you into meeting after meeting for hours and hours to try to keep you in line. If you opened a new ticket mid-sprint, you'd get pulled into meetings with Program Managers to justify it. They'd argue and debate and cajole you into deleting the ticket and rolling it into something halfway related. They'd CC your manager on 5 different e-mails and check in multiple times a day to make sure you'd fallen in line. It was hell. Weirdest part to me was how many people around me seemed to enjoy that structure. They recognized the game and gladly played along, delivering a couple hours of work each day and then sitting in meetings to talk about it for the rest of the time. It all came crashing down about 18 months in, when management brought in someone who actually understood software development and started actually looking into what people were doing. I was gone by then, but they went slash and burn on the remaining department. They cut it down to 1/5th of the size and started delivering, as far as I can tell, the same amount of work. |