“Hey, Johnny, what’s Sheryl doing? She’s been in meetings the last week. She’s only come out for our one-on-ones. I’ve been trying to catch her. I need to ask her some questions about how to give feedback to Cathy about this problem.” Terry pointed to his architecture picture. “I know this architecture is not going […]
“Sally, I need you to stop testing on this project and move over to Dan’s project.” “Are you serious, Ben? I just got here a month ago. I just started to learn what’s going on. I finally have the trust of the team. I haven’t worked with these guys before. I found a nice, juicy
Josiah, the VP of engineering, called his directors meeting to order. “First on our agenda is my plan for the reorganization of our department,” he said. The directors looked at each other, puzzled. “I’ve noticed that several of the project teams are having trouble working together, so I’ve decided that we need a reorganization back
Dave, the CIO, strode down the hall to Sarah’s office. Sarah’s the delivery services manager. He walked in, carefully closed the door, and sat down. “Sarah, we need to talk. I don’t like the ship you’re running here. Everyone leaves between 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. They just walk out! How can you expect to
Janet hesitated before going down the hall to David’s office. She turned around and sat back down and sighed. Steve stopped by her cubicle and said, “What’s wrong?” “I have this problem and I need to ask David a question. I’m really stumped. But he’s going to tell me, ‘Don’t bring me a problem without
“Juliet, I really screwed up big time. What am I going to do?” Romeo moaned as he plunked himself down in his VP’s office. “I can tell you, but I can’t admit it to my people. They will never respect me again.” “If they discover what you did—and they will—they will never forgive you if
“I need a little breathing room in my group,” Carl said to Steve. “I have fifteen people reporting directly to me, and you and I both know that’s way too many. I need to promote somebody, but I’m having a little trouble deciding who to promote.” Carl shook his head as he looked at his
Note: I wrote this article in 2011. It was published in 2012. I hope at some point this article will be wrong. I hear all the time from people that “Agile has crossed the chasm. Agile is everywhere. Agile has made inroads to every organization, to every industry, yes, to every type of software development.
“We have mandatory all-hands meeting this afternoon. I’m going to have a stomachache then,” David said. “What do you mean?” Jenny asked. “You haven’t even had lunch yet. How do you know? What are you talking about?” “Look, you know what our wonderful division head, Martin, is going to say. He’s not going to take
“It’s time for our annual management meeting to rank everyone in engineering,” Don, the VP started to explain to his three directors. “Hold on a minute,” interrupted Dave, the development director. “We didn’t do this last year, because we explained we can’t be objective and it makes no sense. We thought we eliminated this nonsense.”