My manager asked me how the project is going. I was honest with him. I stated most of my concerns.
First of all, the teams aren’t well defined. We have some User Stories that seem like they would sit better with the team handling Authentication. We also have work that shouldn’t be much work on our side, as long as the UI Controls team have created the controls we need… but they haven’t – so that work has to be marked as “blocked”. Then you also have what I call “Team Duplicate” who are just duplicating our work.
I ask my manager what Team Duplicate is for, and why they just don’t merge with my team. He doesn’t give a straight answer, he just says:
“trust me, there is a difference”.
Line Manager
He is leading that team, and he can’t even explain their purpose.
I also said we don’t have many User Stories that are true User Stories. They have that name because they are from a User’s point of view. They should be defined like “As an admin user, I want to manage member’s privileges so they can access confidential records”. They shouldn’t be “As a menu, I want to provide options for the user to click”. Seriously, we do have some written like that.
My manager said my opinion was interesting, because someone else had said the same issues to him.
“Oh, so are you going to do something about it?”
Me
“No, it’s not my responsibility”
Line Manager
Brilliant. Multiple of his line reports are complaining about big problems but he won’t feed it back. Why can’t managers manage all of a sudden? They were fine last year. Now they have all given up and forgot their skills.
I could raise the issues myself I suppose, but it didn’t used to be this way. Also, part of my problem is the team he is managing, but he doesn’t agree there is a problem there.
Stranger Coding Tings 