Logistics

This entry is very simple. It’s just a short list of pain points my team is experiencing. Pain points that we are finding difficult to solve primarily due to enterprise environmental factors. These difficulties are all related to logistics.

Pain Points

Here are our challenges:

• DevOps – By DevOps I mean activities like code deployments to test, UAT, and production servers; automated tests in all environments; continuous delivery of code; etc. We are working on these things but it’s an uphill battle. Server resources are limited in some ways. There is technical debt that needs to be addressed in order to enable more up to date deployment features.
• Internal Audit – This involves items such as management signoffs; release gateways; tedious documentation of manual code deployments steps; and more.
• Offshore Team Members – We have some team members who are on the opposite side of the world from our main team. This is sometimes a logistical nightmare when collaboration is needed. It makes significant collaboration impossible.
• Remote Onshore Team Members – We are also in a situation where one of our team members (ME!) is located nearly 100 miles from the office where the majority of the team works. At least I am in the same time zone. Plus we have online tools for collaboration. But this distance does hinder progress in some ways.

Improvements

The first two items on the list are mostly out of my control. I am involved with others in our larger organization to improve our DevOps situation. The audit stuff is entirely beyond my control and it’s become more burdensome.

As for remote and offshore workers, I personally think we could do much better by having team members co-located. Face-to-face, in-person interactions are so much more valuable than any form of teleconference. It would be helpful if our few offshore folks could be traded for one full time developer that could be present with the team in the office. Our offshore folks would be more valuable handling production support for the team. And I would replace myself with a resource who could be present with the team as well.

Since those decisions lie with others in our organization, I will continue to strive to do the best under the current circumstances.

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(The Scrum Diaries are accounts of my experiences with Scrum teams during an organizational Agile transformation. There have been, and continue to be, many bumps in the road along the way. We are learning and growing together as a team. I am a certified Scrum Master (PSM I) and a developer. I fill both of those roles on my team. These Diaries primarily address topics related to Agile and Scrum.)