started good, now going bad
Yesterday was an interesting day. David woke up at 3:45AM with a leaky diaper. Since I was wide awake at 4AM, i just went into work about an hour early.
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I had the meeting with Mark in the afternoon. It was somewhat strained, but I thought that it went relatively well, all things considered. It started off by me commenting that I was getting the impression that Mark felt that support and his group could work better together. So Mark attempts to turn it around on me, and asked me how I felt. I told him there was room for improvement, but I really meant from his end, not mine. He then asked me what my understanding of the XP (extreme programming) development process was. I think he was hoping that I wouldn't have any clue, and he could use that against me. But I went ahead and summarized it, and he admitted that I was pretty accurate.<br />
So we spent the next 45 minutes going back and forth talking about things. His biggest gripe was over how Support keeps submitting what he called "tiny, unimportant feature requests" which occupied alot of his group's time, and didn't integrate well into the user stories that are central to his XP methodology. He even went so far as to state that it would save support time if we just collected similarly themed feature requests (like everything related to UI issues) into a long list, and then to schedule a meeting with him to discuss it all. Now I can see where Mark is going with all of this. His group decided, long ago, without any Support input, how processes would work, and Support is complicating matters by doing things in a way that doesn't mesh with his predetermined methods. So he wants to 'educate' Support on how to better do things his way, so that we'll be a better team. This has always been a problem for Mark, in that he's incredibly inflexible. Anything that requires him to deviate from his well established plan is painful, and he freaks out. Usually he freaks out by crying to his boss, who now also happens to be my boss, Colin. The problem for Mark now is that since we share a common boss now (unlike in the past) Colin (hopefully) can't just blindly take Mark's side. I'll get back to more on this in a a bit.<br />
So I tried to explain to Mark that Support doesn't have large blocks of uninterrupted time to develop groupings of feature requests that could become a coherent user story. We are 100% customer driven, and we have no means of predicting work load in advance in most cases, since we can go one day getting only 3 new issues, and then get 20 the next. Mark didn't seem to understand this concept at all, since he claimed to understand, but pushed back to wanting us to do things in a way that would make things easier for him, and continuing to claim that doing it his way would be easier for us. Largely I suspect he's going to want Support to write his user stories for him too, even though that is blatantly & clearly a responsible of product management. So I told him that we'd try to do it his way. Unlike Mark, I'm trying to be flexible, I'm trying to work as a team, I'm trying to find some common ground.<br />
Mark's definition of team work is apparently doing things in a way that causes him the least discomfort or hassle. My definition is working together for a common goal. Now I guess his definition is a valid one, if all parties involved agree beforehand on the process for attaining the goal. But he skips over that minor detail and just brands people as not being team players simply because they don't agree to do things his way to achive the common goal.<br />
This morning, just to drive his point home harder, Mark sent out a 3 page document to all of Support, and Engr management, summarizing his position. This was a purely political move so that he could then justify his behavior down the road when/if Support doesn't comply.<br />
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In other news, I uploaded a bunch of new pictures today. We also went to 99 Ranch this morning, and got an assortment of coconut milk, snap peas, miso soup packets, Pocky, soy sauce, and some sardines in chili sauce
