Sharpies are important

When I decided to start this blog, my plan was to chronicle my experience as a member of middle management and my possible path further up the corporate ladder. I should have remembered that old saying about best-laid plans and what not, because a week after I created this blog and put up my first post my proverbial cheese got moved.

A lot.

Nothing bad, mind you. I didn’t lose my job or anything dramatic like that. I was asked to take on the role of Scrum Master/Agile Coach at my organization.

This wasn’t a complete surprise. It came up the first time about a year ago when I had a heart-to-heart with my boss about my status with the company. It was at the end of an 8 month boss-swap in which my boss swapped places with the head of another department, and I was frankly pretty miserable and unsure about my future with the company. The person who acted as my supervisor for nearly a year was very different from my actual supervisor, and he and I did not really mesh well at all. Not in a contentious manner, mind you. He’s not a bad person. He’s just got a completely different style of management that I was not accustomed to, and it led to some serious heartache on my part. While I was under his supervision I got my first written warning and my worst annual review in my entire career with the company. There was more than one occasion when I was fairly sure that I was going to go into the office and meet the firing squad in the front lobby. After one of these stressful mornings, having received the above mentioned horrible review near the end of this experiment, I went to see my actual boss in his temporary office. I was pretty frank (as I generally am) about how I was feeling and, most importantly, I had been told that I had let him down as well. I wanted to see if that was actually the case and get a real sense of where things stood between us.

Turns out I was fine. He told me to be patient, and that things would be back to normal in a few weeks. He also mentioned our long-standing desire to become Agile in the IT department, and he told me that he thought the Scrum Master role would be a good one for me. So when he approached me about taking the title officially a few months ago I wasn’t completely taken off guard, but it was a pretty big shift for me. I joked to him at the time that he hadn’t moved my cheese, he’d given me a different flavor and put it in another building.

A whole hell of a lot has changed for me since that happened. I no longer work from home except for on very rare occasions. Due to the nature of my job it’s important that I be in the office for face-to-face interactions with my team and other members of the organization. My two direct reports are going to be shifted to another manager at the beginning of the year, and I’m starting the long process of shifting my technical responsibilities (server maintenance, upgrades, etc…) to other employees. I have a list of projects that I need to complete as part of my transition, but once those are done I should will (in theory) no longer be responsible for coding/development. My entire job will be one of promoting Agile business practices within our organization.

Which, of course, led me to ask the question of what would happen to me if Agile didn’t take hold. My boss kind of blinked when I asked him that, then he laughed. “I hadn’t really thought about it, because I’m 100% committed to making sure that doesn’t happen.”

So I’ve got that going for me, I guess.

He went on to assure me that in the off-chance that it did he would make sure to find a way to work me back into the fold. He said I was too valuable of an employee to lose. That was nice to hear as well.

As terrifying as this whole thing has been, I have to admit that for the first time in many years I’m really excited to go to work every day. Don’t get me wrong – I loved my job prior to this, but after doing the same thing for twelve years some of the fire had definitely gone out of me. There wasn’t much of a challenge in it for me any more, and I definitely felt like I was kind of stagnating. It’s one of the reasons why I was thinking so much about trying to move up in the company. I wanted something new to do. Something exciting. I got that in spades, and the funny thing is that in some ways I did so by moving down. I didn’t in the classical sense (I still report to the Senior Vice President of Information Technology), but I’m not a manager any more. Now I’m what is known as a “Servant Leader”.

I suppose at some point I should probably get a grasp on what exactly that means.

Another interesting thing that has happened is that, for the first time, I have become an active participant in some of the local groups that support Agile. Something I never did as a developer, with very few exceptions (I went to one ColdFusion users group meeting and attended one local “un-conference” a few years ago). The two months in which I have been participating in these groups made me realize that I did myself a great disservice by not taking advantage of those resources. I have learned so much in such a short amount of time simply by networking with my peers, and I’ve made some fantastic contacts. Just being around other intelligent professionals in social settings has been a breath of fresh air in and of itself, and I’ve also re-established contact with an old friend of mine who is part of the local Agile scene.

Simply adopting Agile principles in my personal work world has also made me more efficient and productive, and things that have been hanging over my head for long periods of time are now getting done quickly and effectively. Tasks that I thought I was going to have a hard time completing or that would need to be rushed are getting done and I actually have the time to go back and refactor the code so that it’s done properly.

The one truly negative thing in all of this, outside of losing my ability to work from home, is losing my direct reports. I am sad that I will no longer be their supervisor, because I couldn’t have asked for two better employees. They were sad to lose me as well, and really tried their best to convince my boss and I to let them continue reporting to me. We compromised by giving them a say in to who their new supervisor would be, and when they ultimately told me who it was and their reasons for doing so I think they made the right call. I have made assurances to them that my door will always be open for them, and I meant that.

Well, ok. Not my door. Did I mention I lost my office, too? I’m in a cube with my Scrum team now. That was another really big adjustment I had to make. Fortunately they were willing to buy me a really nice set of wireless headphones.

All told, though, I’m happy with how things have played out, and I’m really excited about continuing to push Agile principles in our organization. This change has been professionally invigorating, and coupled with my continued work on my Masters Degree I think it means a lot for me in terms of my future career path.

But I’m not going to make the mistake of ever thinking I know for sure what that path will be again.