Not My People (Work Shit)

[ayun]

We do this thing where at the end of every two week development iteration where we throw up some slides for each team - how much did you commit to doing, and how close did you come to meeting that target? To quantify things, we look at commitment versus fulfillment in terms of user stories and total story points for each team, each iteration. As

Comments

[cris]

One of my ex co-workers at this gig was also a big fan of the Wire, and we once had a memorable afternoon of digging into some database corruption issue, and realizing that we were lapsing into just saying nothing but f-bombs as we realized just how royally screwed this environment was. I miss that dude something fierce sometimes.

Without knowing your process, I can't comment on if there's another metric that would be more effective for you guys, but at the very least, the negotiation of what counts and what doesn't can be problematic. It's a little dick-ish, but sometimes being a hardliner on deadlines is good in that it compels discipline. If everything is negotiable then promises become vague and commitments aren't really commitments.

[ayun]

I've got some ideas on the metrics front. At minimum, I'm editing the slides so you can't see the absolute numbers (since there really isn't a way to do apples-to-apples comparisons across teams when it comes to story points - every group sizes differently).

And one of the people in the office did just today say she 'got a Veronica Mars vibe' off me, so that's nice. She's TWENTY-THREE, but whatever, I know I'm immature.

[_perihelion_]

Veronica Mars - competent and kind but ruthless. I like it. :)

[aliceinfinland]

UK higher education has lots of stats and targets and perverse incentives. I think of The Wire every day.