Thursday, July 19, 2007

That Feeling, Like When No One Remembers Your Birthday

While I haven't thought much about work during the first couple weeks of vacation, it did sadden me that the first anniversary of Agile came and went unmarked this past Tuesday. (We kicked off our Agile Feature Teams on July 17, 2006 in a big way.) I'd known I was going to be off when it rolled around, but I'd sent an e-mail to a group of executives about a month ago, in the hopes that something would be arranged, and had even promised to show up if anything was set up. Obviously there are bigger fish to fry for those folks than celebrating a silly milestone, but still it's a bit of a letdown.

I guess it's my fault, as had I been there, I could've made sure some sort of celebration was held. What kind of Agile Manager is on vacation for the first anniversary of going Agile, anyway? Oh wait, now I remember: the kind who didn't take any weeks off last summer because it was all starting up then! Oh well. Back to not thinking about work, I go.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congrats on 1 year of Agile....good time to reflect on the amazing accomplishments. Seriously, just no small feat to adopt such a new way of executing in a software development company.

Anonymous said...

Mike posted an item in the forum about the "agile-versary" that got some followups, and I was within earshot of a few people mentioning it in the halls and elevators. Not sure if it's any consolation, but I think the general feeling is that people are more concerned with being agile than thinking about being agile... which is probably a good thing, no?

Anonymous said...

By the way, we passed another milestone today, again without celebration or fanfare: changelist 300000.

Kimota94 aka Matt aka AgileMan said...

This is just one example of a time when I've felt like my role is more plate-spinner than anything else. That's the feeling you get when you're involved in a lot of things, and any one of them that you ignore, or just don't have time for over a short period of time, inevitably starts to fail/fall (hence, the image of a man constantly having to re-spin each of the plates in turn).

I guess since I wasn't there on the 1-year agileversary, that particular plate didn't get spun (although it's good to hear that Man from Mars at least acknowledged it via a work blog).