Projects on CodeFest: How can a manager survive in an ever-changing world?

A 4.5 hour novel answers questions from CodeFest participants.

What is the most pressing topic in managing IT projects in 2019? The trick question. Depending on the size of the company, profile, history, for each answer will be different.

However, there are always several topics that are in the air. Remember the past years? Product thinking, soft skills, turquoise organizations, “Scrum, but ...”, Adizes, where Agile does not work, where Agile works, but what does he think of himself, this Agile! It seems that managers and companies are different, but there are topics that are on everyone’s lips.

For the Projects sectionon the future of CodeFest X, we tried to guess the main topic for PM in the IT model of the end of March 2019. Result: let's talk about how the manager survive in an ever-changing world. ScrumTrek, Avito, Dodo Pizza, CFT, Magora, ZephyrLab and #agileism will help uncover the topic.

What specifically will be discussed?

Speed ​​is a popular thing in the IT world. Time to decision, time to market, time to customer. We are obsessed with inflating these parameters with nothing to do. Technology is becoming easier to copy, competitors are pushing, users are instantly getting used to the good. All this directly affects managers. The world is changing, PMU needs to adapt.

We plan to unveil the central theme of the Projects section through three blocks of reports: competencies, metrics and Agile-2019.

Block 1: Manager Competencies

Old-timers talk about golden times when a manager could draw Gantt sausages for months, once in X years read a new PMbok (or pretend) and say to employees “You can do it better, remake”.

But the world has changed. Now you need to constantly learn something: engineering practice, then social. You need to run as fast just to stay in the same place.

What is useful to be able to manager in this world of high speeds?

Artyom Kalichkin from CFT will talk about servant leadership. Once Artyom fell into mobile development, in which he assessed his level as “not an alley”. People around him expected incomprehensible actions from him, spoke in an incomprehensible language. Artyom needed to learn fast. The cycle "Trust - Strong Team - Trust - Strong Team" with rules and restrictions helped out.


Roman Kvartalnov from ZephyrLab will tell you why managers mow . When PMA has overloads and affects - this is due to a deficit of some competencies. What did he miss? And when it burns out, then why? Perhaps the problem is not only in him, but in us, in the environment: who hires him, who works with him, and who expects him to come silently and fix everything? We will understand the report.

Offtop: Roma is the CodeFest record holder for the duration of the continuous discussion in the expert zone after the presentation. Once people asked him questions about the report for 4.5 hours , despite all our attempts to rescue him. This year, Roma promised to break his record. Check it out!


Ok, let's say we have agreed that it is useful to be able to do an IT manager. How to understand that this set of competencies really brings us closer to the goal? 2019 - time to make decisions in the style of data-driven. So, let's talk about numbers.

Block 2: metrics in the manager’s world

We admit, there are managerial topics that we try to talk about at CodeFest as carefully as possible. OKR is one of those. We tried everything, some succeed, everyone has questions. You’re just starting to discuss how it immediately becomes clear that the level of hype exceeds the permissible level for a constructive discussion. “And this is not the case with us,” and we slide into an endless debate.

Egor Tolstoy from Avito will talk about OKR without hype . Egor did a tricky trick: he collected statistics for 2.5 years of using OKR in the work of different teams, united by a single business context. It is convenient when you want to see universal patterns.


But the topic of metrics for PMa does not live solely with OKR.

Dmitry Nefyodov from Magora will talk about experiments in measuring the effectiveness of managers. The number of projects and people in teams, the ratio of effective and inefficient hours of production, the speed of daily operations, basic settings, motivators, correlation with the results of work. Dmitry and colleagues measured different parameters. As a result, we built a matrix of competencies and formulated grades for PMs. The tip: look at examples of artifacts from Dmitry's report, it’s interesting there.


So we talked about skills and metrics and got to the third, inevitable block of reports.

Block 3: Agile-2019

The adventures of Agile continue.

Anton Zotin from #agileism will talk about the reference Agile team . One that does not exist thanks to, but contrary to environmental conditions. The team that launches the right products is faster. One in which people and interactions are actually more important than processes and tools. A team with which you can and should take an example. The story of life.


Anton Bevzyuk from Dodo Pizza will talk about the practice of using LeSS. What size team do you imagine when you hear Agile scaling? We can definitely say for how many people in the team we were faced with the problem of desynchronization of processes - 10 people, and sometimes even less. In such cases, scaling frameworks such as LeSS come to the rescue. In theory. In practice, everything is more interesting. Anton will talk about the main thing in LeSS: the conditions of occurrence, the first steps and the limits of applicability. ScrumTrek


Anna Obukhova talks about energy levels for people at Agile. A story about the fundamental foundation for success or challenge in Agile Biology. What does it take to be an effective Scrum Master, Product Owner or Agile Coach? The correct way of thinking, equipment and breakthrough of luck - unconditionally. But also energy for that. Anna will tell you how not to get into a situation where Agile provokes resistance or a fundamental inability to achieve what people want “only” because we did not think about the energy levels of the participants.


How can a manager survive in an ever-changing world? Use the opportunities to compare benchmarks with colleagues, with top companies, the IT community in a broad sense. CodeFest will be such an opportunity for you, a synchronization point. For the tenth time in a row. This is a tradition.

Registration is required. Participation too. Until March 4, the price is lower.

Join , it will be awesome!

P. S. An attentive reader could notice that the topic blocks above suspiciously lack the topic of product management, and are silent about how to survive in a constantly changing world a special kind of manager - team leader. For these topics, we have created separate sections: Products and  Teamlead . A separate section - a separate announcement. Stay tuned!