My job has a “scrum master”. She’s nice, I guess, but as far as I can tell her entire job is sharing her screen so we can look at tickets. Then people tell her what to click on and what text to change. It’s excruciating because it would just be faster for the person talking to change it, instead of being like “remove the second bullet point. No, not that one”
On top of that they have all these tasks for “unit testing” but they don’t actually do unit testing. Someone just said, in the distant past, we should do testing so it’s there.
This is just like PMs where I work. They are generic PMs with no background in the work we do, so they end up being spreadsheet updaters and meeting schedulers (which literally everyone can easily do themselves).
Key word here is ‘can’. People can update it themselves, but unless kept accountable for missing something bad, they don’t do it unless a PM drags it out of them. In a perfect world we’d all show enough accountability to share the info that could affect a project in a democratic and orderly way, but even when ignoring a lack of PM experience, people usually feel it’s bureaucratic and takes precious time away from their specialisation.
A PM with a good background will definitely have a chance to be better than a PM without, but being able to contact the right specialists at the right time and keeping the project flowing is what truly matters.
My job has a “scrum master”. She’s nice, I guess, but as far as I can tell her entire job is sharing her screen so we can look at tickets. Then people tell her what to click on and what text to change. It’s excruciating because it would just be faster for the person talking to change it, instead of being like “remove the second bullet point. No, not that one”
On top of that they have all these tasks for “unit testing” but they don’t actually do unit testing. Someone just said, in the distant past, we should do testing so it’s there.
This is just like PMs where I work. They are generic PMs with no background in the work we do, so they end up being spreadsheet updaters and meeting schedulers (which literally everyone can easily do themselves).
Key word here is ‘can’. People can update it themselves, but unless kept accountable for missing something bad, they don’t do it unless a PM drags it out of them. In a perfect world we’d all show enough accountability to share the info that could affect a project in a democratic and orderly way, but even when ignoring a lack of PM experience, people usually feel it’s bureaucratic and takes precious time away from their specialisation.
A PM with a good background will definitely have a chance to be better than a PM without, but being able to contact the right specialists at the right time and keeping the project flowing is what truly matters.