In an ironic follow up to Do You Have Your Sticky Buddy?, Darren Davis, the development manager who coordinates resourcing on our sustaining engineering efforts and runs the daily standup for sustaining, was caught out recently. He decided to take a day out of the office to spend with his family. Unfortunately for Darren he'd assigned two change requests to himself. At the standup the next day, run in his absence by another of my managers, questions came up about both of those requests. The team asked, "Where's Darren?" "He's out of the office." "Who's his sticky buddy?" But guess what? Darren had forgotten to appoint one.

In a gentle revenge for this the team took this photograph, that features our "Darren Doll" (Yes! Darren actually supplied us with his alter ego, originally found in a store by his kids who thought it looked just like dad), trying to place a pink "blocking issue" sticky note that says "Darren is out on vacation." The picture is now pasted to the whiteboard with the caption "Who's Your Sticky Buddy?" as a reminder to every one that the team relies on accurate information on the board and folks leaving for vacation need to remember to appoint a proxy who can answer questions and resolve issues.

I continue to be impressed with the collaboration and camaraderie that exists around our Lean working approach and how that plays out in gentle peer pressure when someone forgets to play by the rules. It's a self-regulating system that doesn't need heavy-handed management intervention or supervision. That's all part of the Zen of Agile Management. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering