Andrew Michael Miller's Thought Backlog
Writer and working Agile professional. Author of Pancho's Fall.
Well, here we are. The first book of The Apostate Saint is now fully released on this site. I delivered a chapter once per week in a similar way to that of my first book - the novelization of The Oro Goro, that some of you may remember. I am happy with how the story is unfolding, and I am also pleased with the way that my writing structure has adapted to the weekly installments.
From the time I started as a Scrum Master, I have had the opportunity to personally witness several different organizations' Scrum implementations, and discussed with others their experience with Scrum at their organization. Every organization does it slightly different, but that's OK. Some have been outstanding, and have inspired me to try many new things to solve problems on my Scrum teams. But, for every great example of successful Scrum implementations I have experienced, I've heard of several others where I'm baffled about how loosely their implementation follows Scrum. In those cases, I often hear people suggest switching to Kanban as a solution because they just don't think Scrum is working. Let me be clear: Switching to Kanban because your Scrum implementation sucks is a lazy and bad solution.
So, I wanted to give a brief update on the progress being made toward the sequel to Pancho's Fall, as well as the current progress for trying to get the book out there to publishers. I just wanted to highlight the current state of everything and a few of my additional thoughts, in order to clue you in a bit on the process. And, as everything worth doing is, it's definitely a process. But through processes that work, we can achieve anything.
Change is inevitable. It’s a part of life that we cannot avoid, no matter how hard we try. It can be difficult to embrace, especially if it involves significant life changes like starting a new job, moving to a new city, or having a child. It's chaotic by nature. But, as Petyr Baelish in Game of Thrones famously said, "chaos is a ladder." Change forces us to adapt and overcome a certain amount of stress in order to reach a new equilibrium. Change is often hard to endure, but it can lead to positive outcomes, especially if you lean into it.
Five years ago today, we got the news. I was at work and just settling into my cubicle with my first cup of coffee when I received a call from my sister Jenny. Knowing that Jenny didn't call very often, especially when she knew I was working, I had a bad feeling in my gut that would be justified in the first seconds of answering the call. "Matt's dead."