1. Org of 1000+ engineers has no shared services. Each team does CICD themselves and in different ways. Each team has different patterns for sharing data. The SREs we do have only setup/monitor alerts, we have no automation and the engineering teams are responsible for their own infra.<p>2. My team is 90% contractors. They've been here for years, but constantly complain about the legacy codebase they've been working on. We fail to hit our estimates/deadlines and the response is "we don't understand the codebase".<p>3. PM complains about our velocity, but nothing changes when I mention that epics need full product requirements and designs so that we can architect things and actually improve the codebase.<p>4. Sprints are just buckets of random tickets. Sprint goals are for losers.<p>For 1, I've brought up to my boss that we need more enablement teams and pointed to issues across many different teams that they would solve. Their answer was "hiring freeze, talk with the other managers to solve this".<p>For 2, I can see how shit the codebase is. I get it. But I've been here half as long and have been explaining how things work to them. I'm exhausted from having to handhold people who are making no effort to learn. I also think there's a significant technical skill gap where these contractors don't know how to architect solutions, but just create code bandaids.<p>For 3, I've talked with them about it and things change in the near term, but the next feature we work on will be a surprise, dumped on us last minute in sprint planning.<p>For 4, I talk about focusing on feature delivery, but I guess scrum is just buckets of random tickets???<p>I'm a pretty experienced manager and I don't know what to do. I want to point to a weak team of contractors and shitty legacy code as reasons, but these things feel like areas I should be able to improve.
You are in a kobiyashi maru where you are being set up to fail. Your upper manager is indifferent to the situation, the fact your shop is 90% contractors means upper management is not willing to build a coherent group of dedicated people to who have skin in the game.<p>Switch from scrum to waterfall and force the PM to create a complete end-to-end soecification of how the damned thing is supposed to work. And don’t let PM prioritize what work is done first on the project.<p>Also, is product eventually being produced and successfully sold and money is made, and it’s just people bitching about velocity and story points?
Everything becomes easier with standardization and process improvement. One of the first things you can do is create a list of pain points which you sort of started. Follow up with thinking about a process you can put in to help address some of the pain points. Don’t fix everything. Also come up with some way to measure your improvement and pin points. An easier way to think about this is people, process, and tools.