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Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

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Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#11

Post by ec109685 »

goldcd wrote: post #7

I'm not disagreeing with the article, I'm just wondering what painful 'project' oritentated piece of work the writer has had to endure when it crashed into their life. To my mind there are products and milestones as maybe a point releases within a product - Agile/Scrum. I've suffered many systems over the years, but this is the one that makes the most sense - and maybe most importantly demarcates responsibilities. Pr…

Hiding things like “projects” from devs and keeping them isolated and working through their backlog blissfully unaware of the travails of the PM seems awfully top down.

A PM should bring the team together, collaboratively work on what should be in the backlog, and provide enough context to the whole team so they can self organize and holistically deliver maximum value to the consumer. 10 heads are far better than a single godlike PM sorting everything out.

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#12

Post by XorNot »

Projects are things that are easy to put on my resume.

Milestones, unless they look "project like" are a harder (though not impossible) sell. They complicate the narrative.

When I'm moving on, the thing I want to be able to talk about is what I accomplished or helped accomplished that delivered value.

At the end of the day when you're being hired you're basically selling one of two possibilities: things will get done and you will profit, or I will keep things earning you profit.

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#13

Post by qwertyuiop_ »

If we stick to strict Project Management definitions, milestones are within a project.

A program (representing a strategic goal) can contain multiple projects big and small. Perhaps the author wants to convey programs which map to company or divisions strategic initiatives.

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#14

Post by throwaway984393 »

ProfMeowsworth wrote: post #4
Jensson wrote: post #2

Isn't this just scrum? Scrum is very popular.

Came here to say that. The author spends a lot of effort to basically describe working in sprints.

It's very similar to Scrum, with some nuanced differences. He mentions "do not work on incremental changes" and "do not focus on user stories", and instead "do construct small goals that achieve more general yet still concrete outcomes", and "do prioritize those goals".

I think his advice suffers from the same problem Scrum does, which is that it's simultaneously too generic and too constricting for anyone to perform it correctly and get good value out of it unless they just happen to be really excellent at their jobs or have a great team leader.

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#15

Post by civilized »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #14
ProfMeowsworth wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say that. The author spends a lot of effort to basically describe working in sprints.

It's very similar to Scrum, with some nuanced differences. He mentions "do not work on incremental changes" and "do not focus on user stories", and instead "do construct small goals that achieve more general yet still concrete outcomes", and "do prioritize those goals". I think his advice suffers from the same problem Scrum does, which is that it's simultaneously too generic and too constricting for anyone to perform…

Seems like this field is very preoccupied with attempts to distill excellence into a formula. But the skill you need to do this approach well is "identifying doable tasks that make meaningful progress towards the overall goal", which basically just the entire skill of project management.

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#16

Post by goldcd »

ec109685 wrote: post #11
goldcd wrote: post #7

I'm not disagreeing with the article, I'm just wondering what painful 'project' oritentated piece of work the writer has had to endure when it crashed into their life. To my mind there are products and milestones as maybe a point releases within a product - Agile/Scrum. I've suffered many systems over the years, but this is the one that makes the most sense - and maybe most importantly demarcates responsibilities. Pr…

Hiding things like “projects” from devs and keeping them isolated and working through their backlog blissfully unaware of the travails of the PM seems awfully top down. A PM should bring the team together, collaboratively work on what should be in the backlog, and provide enough context to the whole team so they can self organize and holistically deliver maximum value to the consumer. 10 heads are far better than a s…

Sorry, definitely wasn't saying "hide projects from devs"

As PdO I see my job (and also that of my partner Dev Manager) as sheltering dev from the shit churning shit above and my sole purpose as providing backlog/semi-coherent guidance. My downward job is to make sure every 2 weeks some contiguous stories get created and I sign off on their completion on the way back up - and if my requests match what I get back, I have the joy of absorbing any corporate wrath. I'm a "shit-umbrella"

Positive part of the job is when something hits me I can't deflect, I can cash in a few of my 'hopefully not-a-cunt' credits from the team, explain why I'm changing backlog mid-sprint, throw myself at their mercy, explain the issue etc etc - and collectively provide a better result than'agile' could officially provide.

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#20

Post by bmitc »

Jensson wrote: post #2

Isn't this just scrum? Scrum is very popular.

In my experience, scrum isn't used to focus on milestones. The focus has always been on "how long is this going to take?" and just uses supposedly well-defined, small tasks as pawns to get there. There may be milestones implicit there, but the entire focus is totally on when features will be done.
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