Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

Scrum is about well-defined as Object-Oriented Programming, and people have strong and incompatible opinions about it. Discussing whether something is Scrum on the internet is pointless.

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#7

Post by goldcd » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 12:32 AM UTC

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.

Projects are something external to this procress, product management (i.e. me) need to deal with it - a spanner in the works of what we were all happily orchestrating.

"A project" is a demo we need to make next week, or a customer requirement the next release needs to address. It's something the product needs to deal with - and PM decides whether this should impact dev.

It's the job of PM to sort out the backlog/timeline of the product so it hits the new eternal "project" requirement. Dev shouldn't even have to be aware the project exists - they'll maybe see their backlog change and just have to deliver on that as normal.

Obviously the reality is that they're aware of the project once PM has accepted it, and you ask them to change their course - but dev shouldn't directly care.

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#8

Post by vngzs » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 12:35 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #5

Jensson wrote: post #2

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

It can not be Scrum. For instance if each milestone is a different length of time.

This is a good point. Scrum's sprint length inflexibility frequently means over or under-allocating time on projects, which messes up metrics (e.g., ticket completion per sprint) ... but is otherwise irrelevant to the work itself. This leads to organizations making sub-optimal choices that help with scrum, but don't help with work.

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#9

Post by goldcd » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 12:39 AM UTC

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…

I now just realize I'm describing Agile..

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#10

Post by kfarr » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #5

Jensson wrote: post #2

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

It can not be Scrum. For instance if each milestone is a different length of time.

Yes from experience over the past year working in PM, the sprint and milestones are very different things. Sprints are predictable and pre-scheduled. Milestones have an estimate but may easily slip from one sprint to another.