Post Ahr57XonAch2CPIV04 by natevw@toot.cafe
 (DIR) More posts by natevw@toot.cafe
 (DIR) Post #Ahr57Vp4abjI0hPhA0 by aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place
       2024-04-16T23:01:00Z
       
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       I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it is inappropriate for bug trackers to be used as high level project management tools and vice versa.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ahr57WjnBj6EqbwzZI by aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place
       2024-04-16T23:21:17Z
       
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       If we take the "the purpose of a system is what it does" angle, a lot of "agile" process ceremony is very appealing in the absence of any real measurable concrete goals when your job is to measure the high level progress of a company for the benefit of stakeholders who don't really know what happens on the ground floor.  In really bad situations, it's a great way to crowd source cooking the books or manufacturing artificial KPIs to be used to lay people off.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ahr57XJF3vSKcYXIp6 by aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place
       2024-04-16T23:26:11Z
       
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       So, if you manage a team of people, you owe it to your team to be critical of these processes and spot when they exist to make your team more productive vs when they just throw more sand in the gears or foist excessive busy work onto people who really do have more important things to be doing.  Your team will be at their best if you can figure out how to insulate them from the worst of it.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ahr57XonAch2CPIV04 by natevw@toot.cafe
       2024-04-16T23:31:57Z
       
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       @aeva endorse!one of my best-managed clients literally "just" maintains two copies of the TODO lists — issue tracker for the devs, checklists in some wysiwyg webapp for the stakeholders. I suspect it must be a lot of work for the PM to constantly translate/sync everything between the two. But what **valuable** work, for me as a dev, for our upstream client, and I suspect for him to keep tabs on it all as well!
       
 (DIR) Post #Ahr57YOF2p37yLsoFs by aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place
       2024-04-16T23:34:53Z
       
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       @natevw no doubt it's a lot of work, but hopefully that PM is able to take satisfaction from knowing that their hard work benefits everyone involved.  It's probably a lot more satisfying than implementing a ton of process that everyone is suspicious of and may actually be bullshit.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ahr57YvZ2vhjdhTQC8 by natevw@toot.cafe
       2024-04-16T23:56:39Z
       
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       @aeva /me realizes he has never hugged his very non-BS PMand that's probably just fine by him 😆 but I've certainly been taking his work less and less for granted the more of it I end up only *attempting* to emulate elsewhere. I think it must help him stay engaged and empowered to keep the deliverables on track too!
       
 (DIR) Post #Ahr57YwcyyYTgzyGqu by aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place
       2024-04-17T00:46:41Z
       
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       One of these days I'm probably going to write a manifesto on project management and it'll just be bunch of examples of that one trope where a villain is shown being a good boss to their lackeys as a comedy bit.
       
 (DIR) Post #AhrhvMTxO7snmJjXlI by kwramm@mastodon.gamedev.place
       2024-04-17T01:14:58Z
       
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       @aeva if your team is bigger than 10 people and doesn't work on tasks that require cooperation then it's in 99.9% of cases not working. Which pretty much rules out anything that's game-dev... I could get away with it in a tools project (6 people) and honestly it was the best time ever. But I doubt I'll ever see that again in my lifetime
       
 (DIR) Post #AhtHrT7sXFhcjXoG7k by natevw@toot.cafe
       2024-04-16T23:37:01Z
       
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       @aeva and the beautiful irony of "agile" is that "We value individuals and interactions" of course got immediately turned into something that could be forced over a team as processes and tools.https://agilemanifesto.org/
       
 (DIR) Post #AhtHrTwvTSXHHrh1gu by aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place
       2024-04-17T00:15:09Z
       
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       @natevw I like how the background image of that page is a noisy photograph of a bunch of older white guys in polo shirts and jeans standing around a white board.  You can't satire this shit
       
 (DIR) Post #AhwsRu00HMzgKNg69Q by aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place
       2024-04-17T00:05:03Z
       
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       @natevw I bet it would make his day if you told him how much you appreciate what he does