Weeknotes S02 E15: It’s not all about delivery
It turns out grand children have no respect for proper release planning.
Rather than waiting for her place in the next sprint, young Lilian Rose decided that the early hours of Sunday morning was a more appropriate time for delivery than her planned caesarean section 3 weeks from now.
I’m kind of glad she did (as she is actually perfect, and it was lovely to meet her) but it did get me thinking about the tensions between delivery and planning.
There were numerous times this week where there was a real push to move a new features into our immediate plans, but we had to push back and ensure that these were properly considered rather than just diving in and tackling something that we might want to do.
With resources always being finite, what we focus on and when we promote it in the release plan is always going to be a tension. As we’ll be delving into reassessing priorities soon I’m going to try spending time in the next few weeks assessing what we already have in our backlog and getting an idea in my own head where it feels we should focus next so I can contribute better to this discussion. The challenge will be keeping my own prejudices and preferences out of it.
Lunch and Learn
This week we had a go at trying something different with our customers.
With their numbers growing, and all of them essentially using the same software, we’ve been thinking about how we can get them more involved in talking to each other. We don’t hold the monopoly on knowledge and good ideas, and some of the things they’ve been working themselves we know would be of interest to each other.
This first session was about one aspect of the platform and how it’s evolved over the years. All of this pre-dates my time so I learned a bit too. The exciting bit was seeing what one of our lead developers had been doing towards the next steps of its evolution.
Next steps will be handing over the reins to one of them to lead a session for the others, but maybe after one or two more led by us.
New toys
Since attending the Liferay ‘Circle of Success’ (yuk) event last week I’ve become more and more obsessed with how the platform is evolving and how exciting this is going to be for us and customers.
The Lunch and Learn session showed off a new feature called Objects and how new front-end features will enable data from these applications to be surfaced with the minimum of coding, just as I’d seen in the Liferay session. It was like a lightbulb moment for me; I lost count how many times I brought it up in work conversations with others. This was further consolidated by our CTO building a proof of concept for a feature I’ve been wanting for a while, again just from these out-of-the-box front-end components.
As a frustrated non-coder (tried and given up many times) the idea of being able to just drag, drop and configure what I want to see on the page is what I’ve always wanted.
Bank non-holiday
It may sound stupid, but I’m working on Bank Holiday Monday and couldn’t be happier about it. Firstly, being a republican I don’t really feel I need a day to celebrate someone with a funny hat having a nice party.
Normally you don’t get a choice about these things, but since my colleagues work across a number of countries, national holidays are never the same for us all, so we get to re-use them another time if we want to.
I spent part of Friday tucking away a lovely bunch of tasks that I can work through undisturbed on Monday. Not one meeting — bliss!
Quick thoughts
- Booked up for the Product for the People Unconference at the end of June — time to stretch my agile learning a bit and mix with this new community I’m part of
- Friday night election results was the first time in 13 years I’ve felt like there was something to feel good about in politics
- Finally cracked planning our holiday in Germany for later in the year. It took a lot of conversation, and a break-through moment in a cafe using packets of sugar to illustrate rail journeys and stop overs. Maybe there’s a place for it in Agile planning?
Spot of the week
Since our lazy cat no longer seems interested in life off the chair, his position in Spot of the Week has been replaced by the neighbour’s cat and her new spot in our greenhouse. Shameless
