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Christine is up early grading. I heard her mutter, "Wrong, wrong, wrong. Clueless, totally clueless."
I wanted to talk her down from the correction filled pages and then remembered my dad watching me grade labs back years ago. He pleaded for compassion for the students then. --
Christine just muttered with the most incredulous tone, "Really?"
-- I recognized my desire to plead for less pencil marks in the same wish to make everyone happy and successful. But i also recognize that it's not going to help anyone to pass just for effort. And so i just looked up the areas of Argentina and South America because many map projections distort area: Argentina is not 1/3 of South America.
As Christine sits here and grades, i recognized how years ago i imagined i would be the academic. There have been other times when she's been working late that i remember that i thought i'd be the one working late in the home office. I'm the "9-5" person though, and she's ended up in the academic universe. I am amused that some of those imagined incidents are coming true: just the roles switched.
--==∞==--
I had a moment this morning where Christine observed my heart racing. I've thought i've noticed it happening before, so it was useful to have someone notice. My Dad has had some sort of congenital heart irregularity; i wonder if i've inherited it. I am suddenly tickled at the thought of being able to watch 3D models of my heart. Surely by the time i'm his age, heart monitors will be very cool.
--==∞==--
This week we've been doing quarterly release planning. I am stunned: this agile transparency WORKS in managing the tensions between product and engineering. The product folks have been promising the world without involving me (which bugs me), and this was a dose of reality. Our product analyst is finally skilled enough that she can deliver prioritized stories, and we planned them out until we ran out of estimated time. That's that. No magic happens here. So no asking folks to just work harder, because the product folks know the team already works hard.
I am anxious because it worked too well; surely there will be uncomfortable words between myself and the product folks? But no, i think they really trust us.
I remain impressed by how optimistic we are as a team. We all think we can do much more work than we've proven we can do, and we all want to plan out more. But i stopped us after we'd planned 50% over proven capacity (because even i hope we can be more productive). We have so many extra unplanned support and troubleshooting tasks, it drives us nuts.
I wanted to talk her down from the correction filled pages and then remembered my dad watching me grade labs back years ago. He pleaded for compassion for the students then. --
Christine just muttered with the most incredulous tone, "Really?"
-- I recognized my desire to plead for less pencil marks in the same wish to make everyone happy and successful. But i also recognize that it's not going to help anyone to pass just for effort. And so i just looked up the areas of Argentina and South America because many map projections distort area: Argentina is not 1/3 of South America.
As Christine sits here and grades, i recognized how years ago i imagined i would be the academic. There have been other times when she's been working late that i remember that i thought i'd be the one working late in the home office. I'm the "9-5" person though, and she's ended up in the academic universe. I am amused that some of those imagined incidents are coming true: just the roles switched.
--==∞==--
I had a moment this morning where Christine observed my heart racing. I've thought i've noticed it happening before, so it was useful to have someone notice. My Dad has had some sort of congenital heart irregularity; i wonder if i've inherited it. I am suddenly tickled at the thought of being able to watch 3D models of my heart. Surely by the time i'm his age, heart monitors will be very cool.
--==∞==--
This week we've been doing quarterly release planning. I am stunned: this agile transparency WORKS in managing the tensions between product and engineering. The product folks have been promising the world without involving me (which bugs me), and this was a dose of reality. Our product analyst is finally skilled enough that she can deliver prioritized stories, and we planned them out until we ran out of estimated time. That's that. No magic happens here. So no asking folks to just work harder, because the product folks know the team already works hard.
I am anxious because it worked too well; surely there will be uncomfortable words between myself and the product folks? But no, i think they really trust us.
I remain impressed by how optimistic we are as a team. We all think we can do much more work than we've proven we can do, and we all want to plan out more. But i stopped us after we'd planned 50% over proven capacity (because even i hope we can be more productive). We have so many extra unplanned support and troubleshooting tasks, it drives us nuts.
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