WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

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WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Randy from Boise » Fri Jul 25, 2014 3:53 pm

My takeaway: the FY2014-15 plan for WMF calls for a necessary new layer of management as part of its expansion from 191 to 240 employees. Erik Möller has chosen to promote excellence from within.

That's my batting practice fast ball. Take it away, Vigilant...


From the Wikimedia-l list:
On July 24, 2014, VP of Engineering Erik Möller wrote: Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 14:54:20 -0700
From: Erik Moeller
To: wikimediaannounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Announcing Arthur Richards as Team Practices Manager
Message-ID: <CAEg6ZHnczNf9j_TamQuiS-wCwrmAeYmL_UqJytJkoUPdaVo9Mw@mail.gmail.com>



Hi folks,

It’s my great pleasure to announce Arthur Richards as Team Practices Manager for WMF. Arthur will lead a group of ScrumMasters and coaches to scale up our ability to support teams in developing robust processes for software delivery. In this new role, Arthur will report to the VP of Engineering (currently, me).

Arthur’s first engagement in this role will be with the MediaWiki core team in October. He’s also still transitioning responsibilities for the mobile web team to Kristen Lans, who just joined WMF as ScrumMaster. I am very excited about the work ahead. Please join me in congratulating Arthur and wishing him success in this new role. :-)

What follows is some more background about this new group and about Arthur’s leadership in case you’re interested (long):

Arthur joined WMF in June 2010 [1] to support fundraising tech. In the context of team process pains, this team was the first one to adopt an agile development process (specifically, Scrum), and Arthur was in the middle of it all. He took this experience with him when he joined the mobile development team under Tomasz Finc in 2012. The mobile team, too, would soon adopt Scrum, and Arthur took on the role of ScrumMaster later that year to be the "process owner" for the team.

What does that actually mean? It means facilitating the "rituals" that are part of an agile team’s work (e.g. the daily stand-ups, the sprint planning meetings, retrospectives, etc.) and continually facilitating the team’s discovery of improving the way they work. Say it turns out week after week that the team is introducing preventable regressions -- in a situation like this, the ScrumMaster will work with the team to better understand what’s going on and work towards a solution
(e.g. collaboration with QA, improved test coverage, etc.).

In my experience, every team benefits from process improvement, and the highest performing ones view this as a continuous part of the team’s work. Arthur embodies this and I've long viewed the mobile web team as the canonical example in our org that illustrates the benefits of agile development done right.

Throughout his experience as ScrumMaster, Arthur has always made a point of emphasizing the spirit of agile (continued iteration and improvement, problem solving from the bottom up) rather than sticking dogmatically to a specific methodology. He’s also led the development of new processes in the organization that reduce siloed development and improve coordination, e.g. the Scrum of Scrums.

Through most of this time we relied on external consultants to get other teams up to speed on agile development practices. While this has worked reasonably well, the ever-changing personal relationships (a new consultant for every project) and the lack of institutional memory has meant that it was hard to customize and scale the process to our needs.

When we spun up the Flow team last year, we had to make a decision: Will we continue to rely on external consultants, or will we start building internal capacity for this? We decided to experiment with the latter, and Arthur Richards and Tomasz Finc led a one-time agile workshop with the team which was universally well-received and didn't suffer from some of the false starts of consultant engagements.

So, in the budget planning cycle this year Tomasz and Arthur made a pitch to formalize this function in the organization: the Team Practices Group [2]. Given his experience, Arthur is perfectly positioned to lead this group. He’s demonstrated level-headedness, patience, and openness that you want from a coach, guiding teams gently and always focusing on improvements that will be carried forward by the team as a whole.

After consulting with multiple teams who were hungry for more support (e.g. a full-time ScrumMaster, or just agile process support), we decided that Arthur would initially bring on two full-time staffers.

It’s already become clear that this won’t be sufficient. For example, Analytics is expressing a strong need for a full-time ScrumMaster to support the growing team so that developers can focus on development. Whether this is always the right answer remains to be seen. Arthur will work with teams to find a good balance between custom tailored solutions and process consistency for the org.

Ultimately, this new group’s function will be similar to what in traditional organizational models would be a "Project Management Office" - except that, instead of having a group of Project Managers assign work, we want to facilitate self-organizing and increasingly fluid teams coming up with a process that works for them.

We draw lots of inspiration from other orgs (e.g. Spotify’s seminal Scaling Agile paper [3]) but also need to account for the unique requirements of our org (transparency, commitment to open source, etc.).

Working with Arthur is a privilege and a pleasure, and I’m thrilled that he’s agreed to take on this new role. If you're interested in being part of the ongoing conversation about process improvements, we have the public teampractices mailing [4] list for this purpose.

Warmly,

Erik


[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wi ... 00027.html
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedi ... ices_Group
[3] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/101 ... caling.pdf
[4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/lis ... mpractices

--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by HRIP7 » Fri Jul 25, 2014 4:39 pm

From Wikipedia's Scrum (software development) (T-H-L) article:
Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development. It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called "requirements churn"), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.
So let's see ... this means that a team of people work closely together to get the job done, taking any changes in customer requirements into account.

Gee, why didn't anybody ever think of that before!

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Vigilant » Fri Jul 25, 2014 4:54 pm

So, they made someone from inside a broken ass engineering team to hire other people who will, theoretically, transform existing broken ass process that consistently produces broken ass products into a whirlwind of efficiency and thoughtful development...

If their scrum masters are hired in the same manner as their engineers and managers then I'm pretty sure this will not turn out well.This person will hire two other broken, inexperienced people to change the processes that drive them to deliver utter shite like VisualEditor.

That they didn't think to hire someone from outside with actual success as a scrum master if the crux of their internal organizational problems.

Like pulling a silicon log to make wafers, you must start with a pure silicon seed to get eventual clean wafers that are fit for purpose.

At the WMF, they opted to use a pretty rock they found by the creek that matched their online girlfriend's eyes.


Edit:
If they had EVER had success with their old methods, then this would be unfair criticism.
However, the awful truth is that they have consistently hired very weak people on the flimsiest of reasons who have gone on to produce utter shit wherever they went in the WMF. They are led by people who have never successfully run an engineering organization and whose teams routinely produce garbage products that no customer asked for.

Now they're going to miraculously transform themselves with enterprise wide, homegrown scrum...by promoting someone with no verifiable track record and letting him hire two more people, ad naseum, in the usual manner.

This is not a formula for success.
It's a formula for self back patting and empire building.
Last edited by Vigilant on Fri Jul 25, 2014 4:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Hex » Fri Jul 25, 2014 4:54 pm

On July 24, 2014, VP of Engineering Erik Möller wrote: Arthur joined WMF in June 2010... in 2012... Arthur took on the role of ScrumMaster.... Throughout his experience as ScrumMaster, Arthur has always made a point of emphasizing the spirit of agile (continued iteration and improvement, problem solving from the bottom up) rather than sticking dogmatically to a specific methodology.
Translation: Arthur has no real world experience in any large organization with an established track record of using Scrum methods for software development, and has such a colossal ego that he thinks he can just make stuff up rather than follow established best practice from actual successful technology companies.

"Hey Scott," I hear you say, "stop being such a cynic! The guy's a Certified ScrumMaster®!" Oh right, that.
To earn your CSM certificate, you must take a CSM course from a Certified Scrum Trainer and demonstrate your progress through our online CSM test. ... Then attend a two-day CSM course taught by a Certified Scrum Trainer. After completing the course, you will need to pass the CSM test. To get a passing score, you must correctly answer 24 of the 35 questions.
Forget I said anything guyz, we're clearly in the rarified upper reaches of software development here. There can't be many people in this world who could successfully answer 24 questions after a two-day course.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by lilburne » Fri Jul 25, 2014 5:14 pm

defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.
Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.
Last edited by lilburne on Fri Jul 25, 2014 5:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Hex » Fri Jul 25, 2014 5:19 pm

lilburne wrote: Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.
I think you need to upgrade your vocabulary, because that was all pretty basic stuff.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by lilburne » Fri Jul 25, 2014 5:23 pm

Hex wrote:
lilburne wrote: Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.
I think you need to upgrade your vocabulary, because that was all pretty basic stuff.
parse
physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication
hmmm!
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Hex » Fri Jul 25, 2014 5:25 pm

lilburne wrote: parse
physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication
hmmm!
I'm not going to patronize you by repeating that quote with every word hyperlinked to a dictionary.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by lilburne » Fri Jul 25, 2014 5:32 pm

Hex wrote:
lilburne wrote: parse
physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication
hmmm!
I'm not going to patronize you by repeating that quote with every word hyperlinked to a dictionary.
Oh go on. That would result in a pelting of eggs and rotten fruit.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Randy from Boise » Fri Jul 25, 2014 5:40 pm

HRIP7 wrote:From Wikipedia's Scrum (software development) (T-H-L) article:
Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development. It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called "requirements churn"), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.
So let's see ... this means that a team of people work closely together to get the job done, taking any changes in customer requirements into account.

Gee, why didn't anybody ever think of that before!
Stop translating into simple English. You and your demystification....... We only speak Trendy Management Jargon here!

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Midsize Jake » Fri Jul 25, 2014 6:38 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:You and your demystification....... We only speak Trendy Management Jargon here!
I've never been directly involved in such an organization, but the general idea is that someone outside the team (who ideally is invested in the product in some way) sets the priorities, the team has to accept the priorities but is allowed to break up tasks into "sprints" that must last less than a month, and there are meetings every day, apparently so that everyone can feel good about themselves.

To some extent this may seem quite reasonable and even intuitive, but the reality is that in most product-development efforts, nobody sets any priorities at all, everyone takes on a task that they personally want (which could take anywhere from a few hours to several years), and there's all sorts of backstabbing and blame-shifting going on, usually coordinated by a sales manager because nobody else wants to do it.

What the WMF developers actually need is something in between those two scenarios, and assuming they make any effort at all in this area, that's probably what they'll end up with. Fixed methodologies are almost never strictly followed in actual practice unless the company has massive amounts of money to throw at implementing the methodology, and the WMF does have money... still, I'm not sure I would call it a "new layer of management" until we've seen how much more authority (if any) they give to the team leaders. (My guess would be "almost none.") But generally speaking, accountability is always good, especially in corporate cultures like the WMF/Wikipedia where "accountability" is mostly seen as a bad word, and something to be avoided at all costs.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by enwikibadscience » Fri Jul 25, 2014 6:52 pm

lilburne wrote:
defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.
Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.
Do disciplines have a face? :blink:

En.Wikipedia does well at challenging the traditional sequential approach to product development, essentially the horse is busy taking a dump--yes, this has meaning, Zoloft. Some things are sequential, there is a cart, the horse should be pulling it, but if you cannot identify sequentially what is going on, you have no idea that the cart is not a litter box and the horse is not a cat. Many ridiculous things come of en.Wikipedia development attempts because of this fundamental failure to identify what is.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by enwikibadscience » Fri Jul 25, 2014 6:54 pm

Midsize Jake wrote:
To some extent this may seem quite reasonable and even intuitive, but the reality is that in most product-development efforts, nobody sets any priorities at all, everyone takes on a task that they personally want (which could take anywhere from a few hours to several years), and there's all sorts of backstabbing and blame-shifting going on, usually coordinated by a sales manager because nobody else wants to do it.
Yes.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by HRIP7 » Fri Jul 25, 2014 8:41 pm

Vigilant wrote:It's a formula for self back patting and empire building.
Wikipedia in a nutshell.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by HRIP7 » Fri Jul 25, 2014 8:53 pm

Hex wrote:I'm not going to patronize you by repeating that quote with every word hyperlinked to a dictionary.
Buzzword.
1: an important-sounding usually technical word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen
2: a voguish word or phrase —called also buzz phrase

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by HRIP7 » Fri Jul 25, 2014 8:58 pm

Waffle.
to talk or write a lot without giving any useful information or any clear answers

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Poetlister » Fri Jul 25, 2014 9:42 pm

Hex wrote:
lilburne wrote: Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.
I think you need to upgrade your vocabulary, because that was all pretty basic stuff.
The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by SB_Johnny » Fri Jul 25, 2014 10:10 pm

Hex wrote:
lilburne wrote: parse
physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication
hmmm!
I'm not going to patronize you by repeating that quote with every word hyperlinked to a dictionary.
Nope, that's not plain English, though I think I understand it. He's really just saying that they should sit around long tables (rather than in cubicles), and spend a lot of the day talking to each other (either at the table or in meetings and meetings and meetings).

WMF's employees are selected for people who are happy to spend 8+ hours a day chatting away on IRC. I imagine the office might be rather like an IRC channel (where somebody is apt to get "pinged" far too often to get into the zone and actually focus on what they're obstensibly being paid to do).

No doubt there's probably some coders on the team who just ignore the social crap and get to work, but frankly they just need to fire the whole department and recruit from scratch if they want to change the culture. Not that they want to change the culture, of course.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by EricBarbour » Fri Jul 25, 2014 10:17 pm

SB_Johnny wrote:WMF's employees are selected for people who are happy to spend 8+ hours a day chatting away on IRC.
The worst possible place to try to "do useful work". Like Wikipedia itself, IRC is primarily a drug, and only peripherally a communications medium.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by lilburne » Fri Jul 25, 2014 10:30 pm

SB_Johnny wrote:
Hex wrote:
lilburne wrote: parse
physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication
hmmm!
I'm not going to patronize you by repeating that quote with every word hyperlinked to a dictionary.
Nope, that's not plain English, though I think I understand it. He's really just saying that they should sit around long tables (rather than in cubicles), and spend a lot of the day talking to each other (either at the table or in meetings and meetings and meetings).

The difficulty I have with it is how you have 'close online collaboration' where the parties are not co-locatory - perhaps they are skyping each other pr0n from adjacent toilet stalls? And isn't 'face to face communication' simply talking, or do they mean kissing?
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Hex » Fri Jul 25, 2014 10:32 pm

Poetlister wrote: The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.
Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Thracia » Fri Jul 25, 2014 11:18 pm

SB_Johnny wrote:He's really just saying that they should sit around long tables (rather than in cubicles), and spend a lot of the day talking to each other (either at the table or in meetings and meetings and meetings).
It's hard to visualise how dynamic and revolutionary this Daily Scrum®/Sprint™ Meeting stuff is without a picture (from Wikipedia's Scrum (software development) (T-H-L) article):
The picture caption in the article also helpfully points out that this is "a Daily Scrum meeting in the computing room. This choice of location lets the team start on time." (link)

I guess "facilitating the 'rituals' that are part of an agile team’s work" isn't as easy as it sounds.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Vigilant » Fri Jul 25, 2014 11:49 pm

Hex wrote:
Poetlister wrote: The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.
Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.
I call it buzzword bingo and its main intent is not to communicate but to impress the listener/reader with the depth of knowledge of the presenter.

In this, it has a paradoxical effect when attempting to deploy it on the competent.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Zoloft » Sat Jul 26, 2014 2:16 am

It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.
technobabble translator wrote:It is a flexible and complete product development strategy in which developers work as a closely-knit team with a clearly defined set of objectives. The team members are located physically in one area, or use telepresence to promote collaboration, including daily face-to-face meetings which involve all team members and leaders.
I cheated a bit. I returned the word 'It' to the beginning of the sentence.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Poetlister » Sat Jul 26, 2014 1:05 pm

Hex wrote:
Poetlister wrote: The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.
Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.
I know precisely what it means, thank you. Do you honestly believe that it gives useful insight into how to make the staff of an organisation work more productively and harmoniously?
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Randy from Boise » Sat Jul 26, 2014 3:10 pm

Well, hopefully we're done arguing over whether the Trendy Management Jargon is incoherent or translatable...

Here's really the thing to think about:
The Pointy Headed Boss wrote: A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called "requirements churn"), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.
Okay, the facile comment is that there would be less surprise about what the (cough, cough) "customers" need if WMF would convert its "community advocates" from PR flacks for bad products already released into survey takers attempting to intuit what the "customers" actually want.

Second: what the hell is "scrum"? It strikes me as a phoney-ass jargon term for the concept of giving small work teams sufficient autonomy to organize their own tasks — which in WMF's case is essential because judging by the Glass Door exit surveys we all saw a while back, the management team is probably incompetent to provide real direction and oversight.

Of course, now The Boss believes that these autonomous work groups need a formal bureaucratic overseer structure, it would seem...

Can any of you tech types who work or have worked in such engineering environments comment on how far off I am? What is "scrum," is it common, and does any of Mr. Möller's organizational shuffle make sense to you?

RfB

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Randy from Boise » Sat Jul 26, 2014 3:22 pm

And our new "Team Practices Manager" announces the first of his two new hires...

From the Wikimedia-l mailing list:
On July 25, 2014, Team Practices Manager Arthur Richards wrote: Please welcome Kristen Lans, ScrumMaster

Hi everyone,

I'm very pleased to welcome Kristen Lans to the Wikimedia Foundation, as the first ScrumMaster [1][2] hire into the newly formed Team Practices Group [3]. Kristen will be taking over ScrumMaster duties for the Mobile Web and Mobile Apps Engineering teams.

Prior to joining WMF, Kristen worked for six years with the TED prize-winning Encyclopedia of Life project [4], a free, open resource that aims to provide access to knowledge about all life on Earth. Kristen helped to pilot and facilitate the Encyclopedia of Life organization's agile development and planning processes, and enjoyed working with the project's global community of contributors. Kristen is thrilled to be continuing to work towards open knowledge sharing for all at an even larger scale.

Kristen currently lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband and dog, and is planning to relocate to the Bay Area by the end of the year, and is looking forward to eating her way through the San Francisco's tasty restaurants and taking advantage of the amazing outdoor activities in the area.


--
Arthur Richards
Team Practices Manager
[[User:Awjrichards]]


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScrumMaster#Scrum_Master
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedi ... crummaster
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedi ... ices_Group
[4] http://eol.org

For the record, since the launching of his account in Sept. 2010, Mr. Richards has made 68 total edits, 36 of which are to mainspace. He has made exactly 2 edits in 2014.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Randy from Boise » Sat Jul 26, 2014 3:34 pm

Taking advantage of one of the footnotes above, we learn:
Wikipedia wrote: Scrum Master

Scrum is facilitated by a Scrum Master, who is accountable for removing impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the product goals and deliverables. The Scrum Master is not a traditional team lead or project manager, but acts as a buffer between the team and any distracting influences. The Scrum Master ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended. The Scrum Master is the enforcer of the rules of Scrum, often chairs key meetings, and challenges the team to improve. The role has also been referred to as a servant-leader to reinforce these dual perspectives.

The Scrum Master differs from a project manager in that the latter may have people management responsibilities unrelated to the role of Scrum Master. The Scrum Master role excludes any such additional people responsibilities. In fact, there is no role of project manager in Scrum at all, because none is needed. The traditional responsibilities of a project manager have been divided up and reassigned among the three Scrum roles, and mostly to the Development Team and the Product Owner, rather than to the Scrum Master. Practicing Scrum with the addition of a project manager indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of Scrum, and typically results in conflicting responsibilities, unclear authority, and sub-optimal results.[fn]

Footnote: Pete Deemer, Gabrielle Benefield, Craig Larman, and Bas Vodde, The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight Guide to the Theory and Practice of Scrum. (Version 2.0) InfoQ, 2012. http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/Scrum_Primer

link

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by lilburne » Sat Jul 26, 2014 3:48 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:And our new "Team Practices Manager" announces the first of his two new hires...

From the Wikimedia-l mailing list:
On July 25, 2014, Team Practices Manager Arthur Richards wrote: Kristen helped to pilot and facilitate the Encyclopedia of Life organization's agile development and planning processes, and enjoyed working with the project's global community of contributors.
I think you'll find that EOL is a totally different thing than WP. For one it acknowledges experts in their respective fields and doesn't allow any passing child that 'likes nature, and wants to be vet when all grown up' to edit its articles, and fuck with its categories.
They have been inserting little memes in everybody's mind
So Google's shills can shriek there whenever they're inclined

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by mac » Sat Jul 26, 2014 8:03 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:Taking advantage of one of the footnotes above, we learn:
Wikipedia wrote: Scrum Master

Scrum is facilitated by a Scrum Master, who is accountable for removing impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the product goals and deliverables. The Scrum Master is not a traditional team lead or project manager, but acts as a buffer between the team and any distracting influences. The Scrum Master ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended. The Scrum Master is the enforcer of the rules of Scrum, often chairs key meetings, and challenges the team to improve. The role has also been referred to as a servant-leader to reinforce these dual perspectives.

The Scrum Master differs from a project manager in that the latter may have people management responsibilities unrelated to the role of Scrum Master. The Scrum Master role excludes any such additional people responsibilities. In fact, there is no role of project manager in Scrum at all, because none is needed. The traditional responsibilities of a project manager have been divided up and reassigned among the three Scrum roles, and mostly to the Development Team and the Product Owner, rather than to the Scrum Master. Practicing Scrum with the addition of a project manager indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of Scrum, and typically results in conflicting responsibilities, unclear authority, and sub-optimal results.[fn]

Footnote: Pete Deemer, Gabrielle Benefield, Craig Larman, and Bas Vodde, The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight Guide to the Theory and Practice of Scrum. (Version 2.0) InfoQ, 2012. http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/Scrum_Primer

link
Jorm won't care for that wording: link
And there you're wrong, and this may be why you seem to have difficulty communicating. Let me disabuse you of a notion: We are not your servants and never have been. --Jorm (WMF) (talk) 01:09, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
(emphases added)

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Kelly Martin » Sat Jul 26, 2014 11:11 pm

Randy from Boise wrote:Second: what the hell is "scrum"? It strikes me as a phoney-ass jargon term for the concept of giving small work teams sufficient autonomy to organize their own tasks — which in WMF's case is essential because judging by the Glass Door exit surveys we all saw a while back, the management team is probably incompetent to provide real direction and oversight.
Scrum is yet another pointless software engineering management strategy intended to hide the fact that no amount of management can make up for the fact that your engineering staff is incompetent.

The ability to competently engineer software is a fairly rare skill, and it's a skill that is fairly difficult to predict, and even recognizing that another person has it is a moderate rare skill as well. This makes putting together an effective software team difficult. Furthermore, the sorts of controls that are required to prevent low-talent and mid-talent developers from completely fucking over your project will tend to significantly degrade the productivity of high-talent developers.

Traditional software engineering deals with this by making the high-talent developers managers, which often fails to work well because high-talent developers are rarely good at being managers, and the time spent managing their mid- and low-talents takes away from the time they could be developing; it's not a very good solution and tends to lead to long development cycles due to overall poor development efficiency.

More modern "agile" development strategies amount to treating everyone like a high-talent developer. This works great when you have EXACTLY ONE high-talent developer, who does all the hard work and makes everything happen; everyone else just sorts putzes about doing things like writing unit tests for accessor methods and other unimportant dumb-shit stuff that doesn't actually matter in the end. When you have TWO OR MORE high-talent developers, though, you end up with them conflicting with one another, requiring a referee to broker the dispute, which can be problematic if there's no single person that all of the high-talents respect enough to do that. The other problem arises when you have NO high-talent developers; in this environment, nobody really knows what they're doing and the project wanders around producing garbage code that works barely, if at all. The latter situation appears to describe Wikimedia Engineering. In general, successful agile shops generally have one (or a handful) of high-talent developers and a gaggle of untested talent that are being evaluated to find out if they're worth keeping or not; the ones that show real talent get kept (often as the seed of a new team) and the ones that don't get pushed out the door, or onto teams that are more traditionally managed (where their relative lack of talent is overall less problematic). These strategies only work if you're ruthless in weeding out low-talent developers, which requires management with the will to fire people and the ability to evaluate developer talent.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Kumioko » Sat Jul 26, 2014 11:51 pm

I totally agree, not only is the WMF engineering team completely incompetent, the WMF has no desire to eliminate those that aren't pulling their weight and more often than not, justify their failure to produce results. What this is likely to do is completely demoralize anyone in the engineering section, create rifts between sections and animosity between individuals. I see this failing in a dramatic way and I wouldn't be surprised if folks like Jorm hit the road (which may not be a bad thing in itself).

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by eagle » Sun Jul 27, 2014 12:15 am

Randy from Boise wrote:Taking advantage of one of the footnotes above, we learn:
Wikipedia wrote: Scrum Master

Scrum is facilitated by a Scrum Master, who is accountable for removing impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the product goals and deliverables. The Scrum Master is not a traditional team lead or project manager, but acts as a buffer between the team and any distracting influences. The Scrum Master ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended. The Scrum Master is the enforcer of the rules of Scrum, often chairs key meetings, and challenges the team to improve. The role has also been referred to as a servant-leader to reinforce these dual perspectives.

The Scrum Master differs from a project manager in that the latter may have people management responsibilities unrelated to the role of Scrum Master. The Scrum Master role excludes any such additional people responsibilities. In fact, there is no role of project manager in Scrum at all, because none is needed. The traditional responsibilities of a project manager have been divided up and reassigned among the three Scrum roles, and mostly to the Development Team and the Product Owner, rather than to the Scrum Master. Practicing Scrum with the addition of a project manager indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of Scrum, and typically results in conflicting responsibilities, unclear authority, and sub-optimal results.[fn]

Footnote: Pete Deemer, Gabrielle Benefield, Craig Larman, and Bas Vodde, The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight Guide to the Theory and Practice of Scrum. (Version 2.0) InfoQ, 2012. http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/Scrum_Primer

link
I will pay $5 to the paypal account of anyone who successfully ports this article over to Simple English Wikipedia.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Randy from Boise » Sun Jul 27, 2014 1:24 am

I actually downloaded that stupid "The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight's Guide" or whatever the title is, cited by Mr. Möller.

I've got no tech background, but I know a bullshit job when I see it. "The Scrum Master is a coach and teacher" (emphasis in the original, pg. 5.) Ummm, yeah, right, pay me to do that, will you?

So we need a new coordinator of these coaches and teachers...

They also claim there to be no "Project Manager" in the world of Scrums — instead it's a "Product Owner."

I haven't found any reference to magical crystals yet, but there are daily meetings and big meetings lasting multiple hours every two weeks or so.

I don't envy those of you stuck in the lunatic world of big business...


RfB

FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT:

The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight's Guide (or whatever) : link

A 20 page pamphlet co-written by four people, who probably did it in a two week "Sprint" following a four hour "Sprint Planning" session...

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Kumioko » Sun Jul 27, 2014 2:42 am

Randy from Boise wrote:I actually downloaded that stupid "The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight's Guide" or whatever the title is, cited by Mr. Möller.

I've got no tech background, but I know a bullshit job when I see it. "The Scrum Master is a coach and teacher" (emphasis in the original, pg. 5.) Ummm, yeah, right, pay me to do that, will you?

So we need a new coordinator of these coaches and teachers...

They also claim there to be no "Project Manager" in the world of Scrums — instead it's a "Product Owner."

I haven't found any reference to magical crystals yet, but there are daily meetings and big meetings lasting multiple hours every two weeks or so.

I don't envy those of you stuck in the lunatic world of big business...


RfB

FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT:

The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight's Guide (or whatever) : link

A 20 page pamphlet co-written by four people, who probably did it in a two week "Sprint" following a four hour "Sprint Planning" session...
Yeah this Scrum initiative by the WMF is just another typical poorly executed and thought out product/idea that we have come to expect from them. It would have been far better to use a Lean Six Sigma approach instead of this Scrum crap. Its still not perfect and probably wouldn't work in the WMF environment, but it would at least be better.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Vigilant » Sun Jul 27, 2014 4:51 am

Kumioko wrote:
Randy from Boise wrote:I actually downloaded that stupid "The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight's Guide" or whatever the title is, cited by Mr. Möller.

I've got no tech background, but I know a bullshit job when I see it. "The Scrum Master is a coach and teacher" (emphasis in the original, pg. 5.) Ummm, yeah, right, pay me to do that, will you?

So we need a new coordinator of these coaches and teachers...

They also claim there to be no "Project Manager" in the world of Scrums — instead it's a "Product Owner."

I haven't found any reference to magical crystals yet, but there are daily meetings and big meetings lasting multiple hours every two weeks or so.

I don't envy those of you stuck in the lunatic world of big business...


RfB

FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT:

The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight's Guide (or whatever) : link

A 20 page pamphlet co-written by four people, who probably did it in a two week "Sprint" following a four hour "Sprint Planning" session...
Yeah this Scrum initiative by the WMF is just another typical poorly executed and thought out product/idea that we have come to expect from them. It would have been far better to use a Lean Six Sigma approach instead of this Scrum crap. Its still not perfect and probably wouldn't work in the WMF environment, but it would at least be better.
Makes me wonder why they didn't hire Wil Sinclair to be the Team Practices Manager.

I look forward to WMF engineering going over the falls without a paddle once again.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by enwikibadscience » Sun Jul 27, 2014 11:11 am

Poetlister wrote:
Hex wrote:
lilburne wrote: Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.
I think you need to upgrade your vocabulary, because that was all pretty basic stuff.
The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.
+1

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by enwikibadscience » Sun Jul 27, 2014 11:13 am

Hex wrote:
Poetlister wrote: The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.
Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.
Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Hex » Sun Jul 27, 2014 11:28 am

enwikibadscience wrote:
Hex wrote: Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.
Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.
Tell me when you've retrained as a programmer. Until then, I'll write off biology stuff that I don't understand as "without meaning", and you can tell me to retrain as a biologist.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Notvelty » Sun Jul 27, 2014 12:27 pm

Hex wrote:
enwikibadscience wrote:
Hex wrote: Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.
Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.
Tell me when you've retrained as a programmer. Until then, I'll write off biology stuff that I don't understand as "without meaning", and you can tell me to retrain as a biologist.
Scott, it's a load of garbage. If it means something to you, perhaps you've been spending too much time writing government RFTs.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Hex » Sun Jul 27, 2014 12:36 pm

Notvelty wrote: Scott, it's a load of garbage. If it means something to you, perhaps you've been spending too much time writing government RFTs.
I have no idea what an RFT is, and you're talking out of your arsehole.
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Notvelty » Sun Jul 27, 2014 12:42 pm

Hex wrote:
Notvelty wrote: Scott, it's a load of garbage. If it means something to you, perhaps you've been spending too much time writing government RFTs.
I have no idea what an RFT is, and you're talking out of your arsehole.
Request For Tender

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Hex » Sun Jul 27, 2014 12:45 pm

Notvelty wrote:
Hex wrote:
Notvelty wrote: Scott, it's a load of garbage. If it means something to you, perhaps you've been spending too much time writing government RFTs.
I have no idea what an RFT is, and you're talking out of your arsehole.
Request For Tender

And if you don't know that, it does rather deprecate your experience here.
Funny, I don't recall using agile methods in a programming workplace ever involving "requests for tender", and I've actually spent a while doing it in a successful organization. Have you?
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by HRIP7 » Sun Jul 27, 2014 12:52 pm

I would respectfully suggest that we may have exhausted the topic of language use in the management of software development and that further discussion of this aspect may yield diminishing benefits to us.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Hex » Sun Jul 27, 2014 12:56 pm

+1
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Zoloft » Sun Jul 27, 2014 9:54 pm

Now you see, that was a scrum!

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by SB_Johnny » Sun Jul 27, 2014 10:02 pm

HRIP7 wrote:I would respectfully suggest that we may have exhausted the topic of language use in the management of software development and that further discussion of this aspect may yield diminishing benefits to us.
FWIW I found the discussion at least slightly enlightening, similar to how I find "Dilbert" enlightening (I've never worn a tie to work outside of table serving gigs, and have never sat down for a motivational speaker). I doubt I'd learn any more from further discussion though, so "+1".

OTOH, it's certainly no surprise that the WMF is building a bigger bureaucracy. That's what donation money is for, after all!
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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by enwikibadscience » Sun Jul 27, 2014 11:00 pm

Hex wrote:
enwikibadscience wrote:
Hex wrote: Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.
Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.
Tell me when you've retrained as a programmer. Until then, I'll write off biology stuff that I don't understand as "without meaning", and you can tell me to retrain as a biologist.
I am a programmer. It's boring. There is no secret deep meaning to it. Retraining is not needed. You may write off biology if you please. A trade that forces me to engage in meaningless babble or you write off life. A whatever moment if there ever was one. Go for it.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Stierlitz » Sun Jul 27, 2014 11:04 pm

enwikibadscience wrote:
Hex wrote:
enwikibadscience wrote:
Hex wrote: Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.
Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.
Tell me when you've retrained as a programmer. Until then, I'll write off biology stuff that I don't understand as "without meaning", and you can tell me to retrain as a biologist.
I am a programmer. It's boring. There is no secret deep meaning to it. Retraining is not needed. You may write off biology if you please. A trade that forces me to engage in meaningless babble or you write off life. A whatever moment if there ever was one. Go for it.
Rimshot.

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Re: WMF adds a new layer of management — huzzah!

Unread post by Randy from Boise » Mon Jul 28, 2014 1:31 am

Stierlitz wrote:
enwikibadscience wrote:
Hex wrote:
enwikibadscience wrote:
Hex wrote: Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.
Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.
Tell me when you've retrained as a programmer. Until then, I'll write off biology stuff that I don't understand as "without meaning", and you can tell me to retrain as a biologist.
I am a programmer. It's boring. There is no secret deep meaning to it. Retraining is not needed. You may write off biology if you please. A trade that forces me to engage in meaningless babble or you write off life. A whatever moment if there ever was one. Go for it.
Rimshot.
That's actually a five stroke roll ending in a muted cymbal crash, but who's counting.

Seriously, let's call this a draw about whether the trendy management babble was inane or meaningful if one reads it slowly and move along....

RfB

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