With the current situation, I’m starting to see why so many companies are against remote work. For remote teams to work effectively, everyone has to understand their role and perform it properly. Unfortunately, that is not the case for many organizations. Often there are not enough people to cover specific roles, so management will pull someone from another area, someone without the skill to perform the job, to fill the spot. Sometimes there are too many people for a specific role, so some of those people are allocated to other areas, that they are not trained properly for. One of the most common cause for inadequacy, as well as dissatisfaction, in a position is promotion. Often people are promoted without any trial period. Once in the position, the person finds that they are unhappy or are unable to perform their duties properly. An old saying addresses this issue: “Rise to the level of ineptitude.”
This pandemic has caused many companies to rearrange their business model. The status quo is no longer possible, so it is necessary to learn a new way. There are bound to be struggles and pitfalls along the way, but some of things I have seen are far more than simple obstacles. I mentioned in Failure of Leadership that there are issues in the product department at my husband’s company. Most of those problems are at the C-level, but those problems trickle down and permeate the entire company. For example, because the company hires unqualified people to populate their product department, the product owner my husband works with has repeatedly had the developers write her stories for her. This costs the company money in several ways. The first is obvious, the company is paying a product owner to do something she is not doing. Next, developers cost more than product owners, yet they are doing the product owner’s job. Last, the extra time it takes for developers to someone else’s job cots money, too.
This product owner does not understand how to utilize the backlog. She adds stories in the middle of the iteration and ignores the scrum master. At one point, she argued with the developers about adding a feature to the the current release that had been scheduled for the next release. They repeatedly told her that the feature wasn’t ready, it had not been tested, and that it would not be ready until the next release. She then went behind their backs, enabled the feature anyway, thought that it worked, and sold it to a customer. From there, it became apparent that the feature was not ready, so she came back in a meeting to berate the developers. She claimed that their work was “crap” and that this feature “should have been ready”.
This kind of thing should never happen. C-suite executives need to stay in touch with their employees. If these executives keep current on the methods used in their company, and regularly walk through (or in the case of remote, sit in), they can see first hand if these kind of incompetencies are occurring. Many times issues like this are a simple matter of training. This particular PO is so close to retirement that training would probably be a waste.
In the end, this level of incompetency is a failure of management that effects the entire company. When this one product owner cannot see the product vision, and overloads her team and QA, that affects the overall quality of the product, as well as the overall moral of the company. Her incompetence can eventually lower productivity throughout the entire company. The only way to combat this kind of issue is to have management that is truly engaged and concerned with how the company is run.
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