But what does it mean to "empower devs". Do you give them requirements and say I'll check in on deadline day in 6 months?
Presumably you would still use iterations to track progress, Epics/Features to break down requirements, some kind of estimation to track if you're ahead/behind schedule?
I certainly wouldn't go back to Waterfall days, but I suspect many current devs never experienced that.
- One on Ones to discuss roadblocks and thoughts every week.
- Issue tracking as a common place to describe what needs to be done and thoughts / details on how it is solved. Something lightweight like Trello is ideal
- A Kanban board so people have an organised way to pick up new issues when low on work
- A weekly showoff meeting where there are few 5 minute presentations and a 30 minute "I did something really cool or learned something really cool"
- 6 month task split into 1 month ish deliverables, with a flexible deadline for each. Presentation of finished work each deliverable.
This is basically how my team does it. I love it. My manager spends much of her time figuring out how to help remove our roadblocks and planning the 6 month to 1 year horizon (with our input). I lead the weekly meeting where we do the showing off, PSAs, or light brainstorming on issues with broad relevance.
Two scheduled meetings per week = tons of dev time and freedom to explore / innovate! (Ok, three weekly meetings if you count the product-wide meeting, which is usually a waste of N-5 people's time, and I usually have it on the background while I continue working.)
We are remote, so ideally there's also one in person gathering per year to do the big vision casting and major high level brainstorming.
We still have room to improve, especially in the area of ad-hoc dev-dev communication. Always interested to hear how others do it!
There’s a world of difference between checking back in 6 months and daily standup meetings + a host of weekly meetings.
If you don’t trust your team to be productive for 2 weeks without communication something is deeply wrong. Individuals should be in constant communication, but few things need to be said to everyone. Scrum style management may be useful for highly dysfunctional teams, but it frequently adds a great deal of unnecessary overhead.
Presumably you would still use iterations to track progress, Epics/Features to break down requirements, some kind of estimation to track if you're ahead/behind schedule?
I certainly wouldn't go back to Waterfall days, but I suspect many current devs never experienced that.