Comments on: groovelily; regret

By: Marcia

Marcia — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 07:41:28 +0000

“No Room In Your Bag” was the song which, like a lightning flash, introduced me to GrooveLily. In November 2003 I was driving home and listening to our local public radio station. I had been divorced the previous summer and when Brendan sang (about his mom) “She had subjegated all of her desires for the good of the family unit and the betterment of the husband” I thought, “He’s singing about my life! I liked all the rest of the songs–Shannon, I think and others I don’t remember now. I was so impressed with this group that I immediately went to my computer when I arrived home, looked up http://www.groovelily.com and signed up on the spot to be on their street team. I have traveled to New York City three times, Kerrville, TX, Palo Alto, CA, Lincoln, NE and Aurora, NE to see GrooveLily perform. They really are that good. If they come anywhere close to your neck of the woods–GO!!! You will thank me later.

By: S Marks The Spot

S Marks The Spot — Mon, 14 May 2007 18:52:24 +0000

Retrospectives and Regret

David Carlton mentioned the Retrospective Prime Directive . I think the prime directive is a great idea. A retrospective is not a place to deal with firing of slackers or whatever. If somebody is truly neglecting their job, this problem should be dealt

By: david carlton

david carlton — Thu, 10 May 2007 04:33:05 +0000

Thanks for the elaboration!

By: George Dinwiddie

George Dinwiddie — Thu, 10 May 2007 03:25:12 +0000

Absolutely, David. There’s no need to fire someone because “they’re a slacker.” But it’s perfectly OK to fire them because they aren’t accomplishing what you need done.

But firing someone also doesn’t get the job done. It just means you need to look for someone else to do it. It’s more cost effective (as well as more humane) to try to solve the problem, first. If it’s a persistent problem in the environment, it may well cause the next person to fail, too. If it’s a problem with the other person, effective feedback might help them realize the problem and overcome it. If you don’t do some Root Cause Analysis, you’ll never know what it is. And if you get side-tracked in blaming, you’ll short circuit that analysis.

By: david carlton

david carlton — Tue, 08 May 2007 17:39:24 +0000

That’s pretty much the debate going on on the xp list right now. As I understand it, the prime directive response is: their context, including both external factors (e.g. team working norms) and internal factors (e.g. their ingrained work habits, but potentially also including, say, problems at home), isn’t allowing the slackers to work well. So then you ask: is there something about the context that you can change to improve the situation? If so, give that a try, and see if it works. If not, accept that this is the way that things are, look at your options, and seriously consider removing that person from the team.

Which may actually mean that the prime directive gets the person fired sooner rather than later. I think the point of the PD in this situation is to say that blaming the slacker may make you feel good, but blaming alone isn’t particularly likely to solve the problem, and blaming doesn’t add any value to an eventual solution.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Tue, 08 May 2007 13:47:51 +0000

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could [...]

Well, oookay. And just when do we actually fire people for slacking?