Published on
September 27, 2009 in
Personal;
Recently, in our company there was a decision that everyone needs to fill out skillset spreadsheet, so we could better utilize our resources on internal and external projects. While the whole idea seems to be quite awesome from the manager point of view, I think standard skillset spreadsheets are mean to be faulty by design, because of at least few reasons. Here is my point of view:
There are no standard skills
In almost every business now, simply there are no standard skills. You can’t just say you know “Linux” because there’s a huge difference between knowing how to install required packages to set up a server and writing kernel patches to improve security, yet both require knowledge of “Linux”. Also, there’s huge difference between using Photoshop as a photo-editing tool and using it to do pre-printing fixes on the provided files. Tools we use have become so complex, it’s really hard to keep up with every possible feature they offer. And here we come naturally to my second reason…
Continue reading ‘Why standard skillset spreadsheets fail’
Published on
September 22, 2009 in
Personal;
As you probably noticed, the activity hasn’t increased a bit since my last post. I blame my graduation exams for that. But, since today, you can call me Master (in Computer Science). I’ll be getting my diploma later, but I had my final exam today and I aced it. Yay me?
As you probably know (and my sidebar stands), I am currently employed at the local Ruby web development company Lunar Logic Polska. Since our boss is an agile activist and certified scrum master, whole development process is adapted to the agile rules of project management. I like the way of the agile and lately I got really interested in trying to move agile rules of project leading to design projects.
Anyway, to the point – one of my internal assignments at the office lately was to design agile planning poker cards based on the branding that we already have. In case you don’t know what planning poker is, I’ll quote PlanningPoker.com on that:
The idea behind planning poker is simple. Individual stories are presented for estimation. After a period of discussion, each participant chooses from his own deck the numbered card that represents his estimate of how much work is involved in the story under discussion. All estimates are kept private until each participant has chosen a card. At that time, all estimates are revealed and discussion can begin again.
Continue reading ‘Project goes live: Planning Poker’
