This talk reviews the ups and downs, trials and tribulations of my time as a manager, with advice of mine that I took, advice that I threw away, and advice that I modified. In this talk you'll learn that even Agile Coaches are fallible! We examine common coaching topics and how well (or not!) the advice I had given others had worked for me when I had to actually apply it. The primary goal is to determine how to take what I learned and apply it in your organizations and business domain.

1. Tasty Dog Food!
Two Years of Taking My Own Advice

2. Um, who is this guy?
Dave Rooney
Old enough to be alive before colour was invented
30+ years in software development
In the XP & Agile world since the turn of the century
@daverooneyca on Twitter
https://www.linkedin.com/in/daverooneyagile/
https://medium.com/@daverooneyca

3. Retrospective Prime Directive
“Regardless of what we discover, we
understand and truly believe that
everyone did the best job they could,
given what they knew at the time, their
skills and abilities, the resources
available, and the situation at hand.”
-- Norm Kerth

4. What Went Well?

5. Retrospectives
Had been limited before my arrival
Worked with other managers to provide the tools for facilitating their own
Facilitated numerous release retrospectives
Helped raise awareness of system-wide issues

6. Getting My Hands Dirty
Scripted release build tooling to allow “one button” releases:
● Automated tagging in git
● Pushed artifacts to Google Drive
● Created pre-populated wiki page
● Cut release build times by order of magnitude and reduced errors to near zero
Actively developed with second team:
● New platform for all of us
● Learned a radically new architecture
● Was able to advocate for the team because I knew their pain!

7. Iterative and Incremental FTW!
New platform for everyone on the team
Built it out one capability at a time
Won over even our most vocal critics
Pure R&D effort - we didn’t know “if” it would work let alone “when”
Couldn’t apply “traditional” approaches, simply had to prioritize and go
Constant reflection on both technology and process

8. What was… challenging?

9. “We feel like we’re being
told what to do all the time”
The Team, April

10. “We don’t think you’re
providing enough direction”
The Same Team, August

11. “I really like your light
management approach”
A Very Different Team, December

12. “At the end of the day,
developers just don’t give a
shit about process”

13. Too Many Cooks… er, Managers
Managers between the Customer and team:
● Development manager (me!)
● Product manager
● Project manager for Product
● Project manager for Services
● Local account manager
● Two account managers at the client
Indicative of a distinct lack of trust
Mitigated with ridiculous transparency

14. Too Many Cooks… er, Managers
Internal demos of progress twice a week
Demo for Customer once a week
Eventually one internal demo, then none
Customer demo became a push to a pre-production environment so they could test

16. No plan survives first
contact with the enemy.

17. We have met the enemy
and he is us.

18. Planners will Plan
Senior management wanted certainty of what would ship and when -
predictability
Marketing & Sales wanted to be able to work from a known feature list
The team was asked to do the impossible - accurately predict the
delivery of features of unknown complexity on an immature platform
Was told to “get on board”

19. Just Say No!
We had a product roadmap with defined goals around cost reduction
Several feature requests would have compromised those goals
Pushed back constantly, explaining the roadmap each time
It cost me in terms of relationships with others in the company especially in the
Services group

20. Your Turn!
What have coaches said to you that just seemed
wrong for your circumstances?

21. Questions?