What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
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What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
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Re: What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
#2"Agile is not always the answer"
This ^^ is the sign of a future good manager.
Re: What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
#3> Documentation is everything
What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years is that documentation is only good if the team can find it, if the team bothers to look for it, and if the team takes the time to read it. I can't tell you how many times I've linked pertinent documentation in Confluence from the Jira task, only to have the developer ignore it.
What black magic do you have to cast to get devs to look at the documentation?
Re: What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
#4> Documentation is everything What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years is that documentation is only good if the team can find it, if the team bothers to look for it, and if the team takes the time to read it. I can't tell you how many times I've linked pertinent documentation in Confluence from the Jira task, only to have the developer ignore it. What black magic do you have to cast to get devs to look…
> What black magic do you have to cast to get devs to look at the documentation?
README.md files in each repo, and code level documentation. The readme file can point to useful links, such as diagrams or stuffy documents where needed.
Re: What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
#5> Documentation is everything What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years is that documentation is only good if the team can find it, if the team bothers to look for it, and if the team takes the time to read it. I can't tell you how many times I've linked pertinent documentation in Confluence from the Jira task, only to have the developer ignore it. What black magic do you have to cast to get devs to look…
> What black magic do you have to cast to get devs to look at the documentation?
Not use Jira and Confluence?
More seriously, I have found that confluence is where documentation goes to die. Something about the tooling, the slowness, poor search, admin tools leading to overzealous compartmentalization, not-quite-good plain text format, awkward gui editing tools, versioning system, distance from the code[1]... something... just makes it not really great at being a repository for keeping documentation up to date, or easily usable.
[1]: eg. not using the same tools/editors to modify the documentation as you do the code
Re: What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
#6> Documentation is everything What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years is that documentation is only good if the team can find it, if the team bothers to look for it, and if the team takes the time to read it. I can't tell you how many times I've linked pertinent documentation in Confluence from the Jira task, only to have the developer ignore it. What black magic do you have to cast to get devs to look…
Not stuffing it into some horrible slow "enterprise" webapp would be a start.
Re: What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
#7"Agile is not always the answer" This ^^ is the sign of a future good manager.
The way it's typically applied these days, I'd go much farther. Capital A Agile is often not only not the answer, but the problem.
Re: What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
#8> Agile is not always the answer
can be generalised to: Agile is never the answer.
Re: What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
#9I've managed small-to-medium teams for a very long time.
Agile is very often not the answer, because on a small team you don't have all of the people and roles necessary to do agile "right". I tend to just do Kanban with frequent demos and milestones.
I agree on documentation. I try lead by example and document all the important bits to a "hit by a bus" level. Because on a small team losing one person means losing a big chunk of knowledge.
Re: What I learned after managing a small team for 2 years
#10> Agile is not always the answer can be generalised to: Agile is never the answer.
I can think of several facetious questions to which "Agile" is the answer /s
But on a serious note, like it or not Agile is sometimes the answer.