today is quarterly planning meeting time with the IT folks, I wonder if you all get what I do with these folks...

The ringleader of the meeting is this project management woman who is very Kindergarten teacher with everyone. She talks to everyone like they are 5 years old with this 'mommy talk' like "Yaaaaay we're going to have a FAAAABulous meeting" and "Awwwwwwwww it's so great we have the BEST gang, Hooooraaaayyy" and I'm not overdoing it, she's super syrupy.

And if you worked with her, you'd know it's an act, she's quite the opposite in person and in smaller groups. It's like she's bi-polar. But the sweet spot of the meeting is it's more of a celebration of what has been done rather than what's coming. This group claims they are "agile" with their work and because they are "agile" they don't plan well.

To this group, planning out more than about 2 weeks is not something they communicate because they are agile. Which is so odd, being agile doesn't mean you can't plan for longer visions...but nobody is allowed to call them on this, if you do, you get labeled as 'difficult'. So it's 90 minutes of celebrating the work that they have done.

Any planning is high level like "we want a better experience" or "create great value".

Then the star of the show is a celebration of what has been finished and that's super fun. It's more vagueness built around how many tickets were opened, how many were closed and what a great effort the team has. Which is funny because doing 'good' work in my book is not the goal, it's all about what IT has decided: the number of tickets opened and closed

It's literally the 'game' - if they open 500 and close 500, that's the goal. So the people above see how good they are at closing tickets, nevermind they close almost all tickets opened within 2-4 weeks, regardless if it's fixed.

IT literally built a system they control with an iron fist and some new guy from the Mid-east just asked "What about Metrics/Measurement goals"? Which is saying 'can we track what happens on our site?' and our IT team dislikes having tagging in, it's complicated at times and they are simply not great at it. Metrics always was a thing they avoid.

They just said "it's really bad" from Europe too and now IT is like "oh lots of opportunity!" which is their way of saying they'll deal with it later and not get anything done. Sigh. I can't believe other IT teams are this insulated in their approach, right? You can't have so much control and then game the system to do so little, right?