rabbitheart

I am not a secretary, but like the author was raised in a similar environment: It was my mother who took me to work in her small, dark offices where she taught me to type and file as she worked. We couldn't afford daycare. I became a highly efficient mini-secretary. I took similar jobs in high school/college.

Although I work as a technical writer/sysadmin, I often find myself using the skills my mother taught me to organize, keep track of projects, etc. We're a small company, and I'm the only one with any decent office administration skills. Right now my main desire (and after-work project) is developing a system for internal information I can take to my boss and coworkers to hopefully improve productivity/prevent everyone from pinging everyone else with dumb questions. (I'm weighing my options. I'd enjoy something like a well-configured Confluence [at my last job Confluence died a lot -- but it was easy and effective from a user standpoint], and am looking at open-source alternatives I can use as a base.)

I don't think I would be able to look at the company I work for and figure out what we need in terms of "getting our shit together" if I didn't know secretary work, honestly.

I think the most frustrating part was that I explained we had tried Scrum and adapted it for our team's needs. We weren't anti-Scrum, we just found a way to make it work for us. I was then told "[Company] is a Scrum company. We all use Scrum as it is" and was brushed off. Same Scrum leader would yell at the operations team for failing to complete sprints in time when servers fell over, and other nastiness that becomes the priority when you work in a position where you prioritize server health and function over new builds and features.

The other Scrum leader we had was pretty great, but, unfortunately, was not the one assigned to my team.

Sorry if this borders on ranting. I really enjoyed working for that company, but it was a rough time toward the end of duration there. Apparently I have lingering frustrations, especially since I'm still friendly with many on the ops team. :)

The team I was previously on tried to use Scrum and seemed to naturally fall into a similar model to Kanban; we got rid of what helped, and stopped doing what didn't. It was an amazing relief, especially since Scrum sprints and the numbers just weren't working.

Sadly, our Scrumlessness was found out and it was implemented again shortly before I left. Morale was dropping steadily on the team already (unrelated reasons), reimplementing the parts we already knew didn't work was a bummer, and the Scrum leader talked down to me when I tried to advocate for the team.