Bill Elafros

Software Delivery Team

Implement Kanban as high as you can organizationally

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Welcome back! Here with another article today and to discuss some of the problems with isolated team level kanban and why you should aim to go as high as possible in the organization. I’ll discuss some of my experiences and go into the downsides of isolated team level kanban vs the organization level. This article isn’t here to downplay the impacts of Kanban and lean principles but show some of the downsides when you’re alone without support. For full context, I think Kanban and Lean are great and have shaped a lot of the background of what I do today.

Lengthy manual deployments and calls are risky business

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Have you ever worked somewhere where they deployed once a quarter? I have. It sucks and it’s super risky. On the other hand, I’ve been at places where we push to production over 1000+ times a week. “But we have 75 people on the call and they’re all paying attention”. Yeah, OK. I’ve been on these and I’ve heard people sleeping. Midnight calls suck and sleep deprived people who are deploying large amounts of code with a lot of steps manually is RIPE for error. Making mistakes happen and “short deployments” turn into hours and you get delayed even further.

What is a TPM?

What is a technical program manager?

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There’s a lot of confusion on what a technical program manager is and isn’t. It also varies wildly by each organization. Some are really technical whereas others aren’t as technical but have a lot more soft skills. I’ll get into my experiences on what the role likely is, how to get into it and where paths might go. What is a technical program manager? Most don’t really understand what a TPM is and isn’t. I see fairly generic postings confusing the role with a project manager or a scrum master or some sort of delivery manager on the team level.