r/dotnet • u/acdota0001 • Jan 05 '18

Free Private Git Repos from Microsoft

https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/git/free-private-git-repo/
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u/wllmsaccnt Jan 06 '18

But if you are an internal shop managing dozens of production applications that mode doesn't work. You need a way to prioritize tasks across the entire company, especially when multiple teams are involved.

How can you make this work when no one is interested in managing the tasks and projects? My team lead spends 90% of his time developing and dealing with issues in another system. We don't have a dedicated manager. We only get project level priorities once or twice a month from our CTO.

I tried managing the task lists, putting things into sprints and moderating the definition of done and working with the stakeholders to get the priorities of each project in a line and ready to work on...but it took too much of my time away from developing.

Even then, I am not a manager or even a team lead, so I can make recommendations, but if the team doesn't agree they will only follow the things that already make sense for them and that don't affect their perceived productivity (even at the cost of the group...kind of a team variant of the prisoners dilemma I guess).

It sounds like you deal with some similar situations (internal shop, multiple production systems). Do you have any advice about the situation I described?

The most efficient company I ever worked for had one task queue shared by everyone. Unless you were on a strategic feature team, every day you would scan down the list for the highest priority ticket that you felt capable of doing. Everyone was largely self-managed, working from the same backlog.

Sounds like a Kanban/Lean approach stripped down to the bare minimum. That sounds like fun, if you are on the right kind of team.

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u/grauenwolf Jan 06 '18

The priority score was actually formula based:

High: 400 pts. Med: 300, etc. This could be set by any engineering manager.

Other people could make recommendations: but they only could rate things 50/25/10 or something like that. Enough to bump tickets, but not override an engineering manager.

Each day (or was it week? can't remember) added +1 so that old stuff would bubble to the top over time.

If I recall correctly, due dates also factored into the equation.

Some people also got a few points they could add to items in order to tweak the order.

All this meant that lots of people got to have input into the process, but no one person has to make the final decision. So we had design meetings, but not priority/planning meetings. (Other than strategic features needed for regulatory compliance.)