Ping Darsy: is you certified yet?

I is.

I enjoyed the course, knew quite a lot of it but picked up some good
tips. (Mike Cohn was the trainer).

Bit of a racket to keep the 'certification'.

 

I think I hinted that if I ever met Mike Cohn in person I'd have to
kill him slowly with a machete[0]

bit of an expensive racket all round, IMO. I think I'll do MSP instead
- at least Sue Vowler isn't a total arse (in fact, according to my SO
who's vaguely chummy with Sue, she's a very nice lady).

Anyway, back to that Cohn.

It would appear from his book, that he, and every other "Agile
Evangelist" is a patronising, lying, smarmy, dickweedian
bucket-****-slurping dweeb of the highest order. And that's being
generous to dweebs.

I was just re-reading bit of the book earlier, because I wanted to
check I hadn't mis-remembered something, and there was a quote from
some "Agile Evangelist" from Google[1]

It said - I'm paraphrasing here - something like "it took a while, but
after some time and effort, we eventually found that Scrum became
self-fulfilling"

Cohn - brazenly, in a way I'd never have got past a sub-ed in my
writing days - in the /very next paragraph/ after this quote managed
to summarize the phrase "a while, but after some time and effort, we
eventually" into the single word "soon".


[0] this isn't a metaphore, Mike, I mean, like really cutting small
bits off you with a large but deadly-sharp blade over an extended
period[2] of of time until the /end/
[1] and - don't misunderstand me when I say this, but from every quote
I've read from /anyone/ involved with Google, they *all* come across
as sad-sack-no-life-self-justifying-and-incorrectly-smug cunts, but
that's by the by.
[2] not /sprinting/ you understand[3]
[3] intended[4] post[4]-implementation[4] review:

darsy : "you dead yet?"
Cohn :

[4] not that there is any "intention" or "post" (or in many cases
"implementation" with Scrum of course, as it's a /continuous/
improvement[5]
[5] this of course implies that all properly run Scrum projects will
eventually discover the secret of eternal life, how to do
non-time-cone-restricted FTL, cheap and easy quantum computing for
all, tasty goat's cheese pizzas that don't make you fat, free beer, a
better way of playing bass guitar than Jaco Pastorius, etc. etc.
etc.[6]
[6] note to Paul Corfield re: multiple footnotes: **** off already
(again) I've been doing this shit since at least 2001 - It's not
"because" I've gone mad.

 

On 22/03/2010 14:56, darsy wrote:

<snip stuff>

Tell us what you really think.

I guess I won't forward your post to him as a potential future trainee
then

 

On 22/03/2010 14:56, darsy wrote:
snip

<fx:Shelley Duvall Screaming>

HERE'S DARSY !

 

that might result in legal action[1]

Oh, i still might, but AFAICS, becoming a "certified ScrumMaster" is
just a box to tick in order to get past job agents/HR scum, rather
than anything offering actually useful. I mean, it's not as if Scrum
is in any way difficult, is it?[3] It's just fucking around doing the
same old shit as if there were no adults watching or no regulations to
comply with or no business plan that can't be "ad revenue funded". Oh,
and you don't have "task forces", 'cos that'd imply "tasks" which by
definition can't exist in a system that has no defined goals or end
state. It's telling that most of the examples Cohn gives of "Scrum
success stories" are from the likes of Google, Yahoo! or
Salesforce.com.

[1] funnily enough, and I never did find out why[2] but I had the
Babylon ring my doorbell last night around 03:30 or so (I looked out
the window whilst scrambling into my bathrobe[1a] so I knew who'd
rung)

[1a] just in case any of you need putting off their dinner, it's to be
noted that I normally sleep naked, and I don't think answering the
front door to the police (even at 03:30) in the morning would be
received favourably.

[2] by the time I'd got downstairs, put on the hall light and opened
the door, he was just getting back into his crappy silver Astra, gave
me a bit of stare, pulled a u-turn and sped back up the road towards
Enfield Town nick - I can only imagine a call concerning donut
shortages came through on the radio that was more important than
waking me up in the middle of the fucking night.

[3] unless you happen to have some actual, real, organised and well
documented project management training, in which case a lot of stuff
about Scrum makes you want to punch people, hard, right in the fucking
smug face, if they use the words "agile" or "pair programming"[4] one
more time.

[4] "Pair programming" is only "of use" if one of the "pair" is an
untrained idiot newb, in which case the correct responce to the
situation is not "pair programming" but "P45".

 

who doesn't?

 

hmmm. Cynicism alert. Well, 'tasks' are allowed. There were quite a few
folk from banking and other regulated industries on the course, sounded
like quite a few of them were well along using it.

It's deffo this month's buzzword for sure though.

From what I can see it has potential in the right environment,
especially as you say when no one really knows what the final product
might look like. IME people are pretty shoddy at describing what they
want from start to finish, without making some pretty expensive mistakes
alonng the way. I was in a company that blew $20M on a multi-year
development, only to end up with something that was completely and
utterly unsaleable/unusable at the end of it. Could 'proper' project
management have saved that? Possibly, but unlikely in that particular case.

<snip increasingly common
multi-levelled-too-hard-to-read-at-this-time-of-day footnotes>

 

people who need to wear incontinance pants.

 

yes. One only needs to remember one of the golden rules of PMing:
"cancellation isn't failure".

 

How about "it isn't late if you realigned the schedules and deadlines
and then met them"?

 

only OK if you haven't already over-run your budget, and the
stakeholders are still, well, holding their stakes. And someone still
/needs/ the end product of the project.

Otherwise, cancel the motherfucker and move on. I mean it - right of
millions of euros on this year's balance sheet if it'll save the
company more than that in a few years more.

Telling clients "no" is the strongest skill any PM can utilise, if
they have the cojones to do it, and explain /why/ they're doing it.
But, as I've remarked before, if it makes other PMs on the project
look bad, you could end up like me - **** who cares if the company's
balance sheet is looking good...

 

A good number of UKRMers, then. Twats.

 

Give me a contact address and I'll forward it.

That was top class and it needs sharing.

 

I stopped sleeping naked when I'm in a hotel after I opened the wrong
door and ended up in the corridor instead of the bathroom.

 

I've wondered about that, especially as I'm spending 4 days a week in
hotels for the next 18 months. But I'm such a deep sleeper (and,
evidently, have such a capacious bladder) that I never wake up in the
night for a piss. The minute the alarm goes off, I'm fucking busting,
though.

 

It's always a good idea to sleep with the small light over the mirror
left on in the bathroom. For one thing it means you've got a homing
beacon if you do wake up needing a piss and for another it means
you'll never take a shit in the bidet.

 

Genuine lol.

I just hope the aforementioned gentleman doesn't google himself too often.

 

No worries, the first 150 entries contained all his own ego-driven shit
and not a critical thing to be seen.

 

me too.

but when the doorbell went last night at 3:11 (apparently this was the
time it was callled in rather than the 3:30 as shown on my clock) when
you're trying to get yourself decent enough to answer the door to the
fillth, for some reason you also find yourself in might need of a
piss.

 

hahah - you would probably love to see the email I received 1/2 an
hour ago[1].

People who ego-surf have to take the rough with the smooth - that's
what I say.

[1] though a tad harsh, it was nothing nearly as venomous as the one I
got from Jon Courtney Greenwood about 8 years ago - that was hilarious
"not seeing the funny side" in tone, language etc.