Alright, let me tell you about this whole Xaiver Wade thing I bumped into a while back. It wasn’t something I went looking for, you know? It kind of landed on my plate at work.
Getting Started (Or Dragged In)
So, things were ticking along okay on my team. We had our way of doing things, getting projects out the door. Wasn’t perfect, but it worked for us. Then management got this idea, heard about this Xaiver Wade guy, or maybe his philosophy, I don’t know. Suddenly, he was the expert we all needed to listen to.
First thing I did was attend the mandatory introductory meeting. Sat there for a couple of hours. Lots of fancy slides, big words. Felt a bit like being back in school, honestly. He talked about synergy, disruption, all that jazz. I tried to take notes, figure out how this applied to our actual tasks, the stuff we did day-to-day.
Trying to Make it Work
After the big intro, they gave us some documents. Supposedly his ‘framework’. I spent a good afternoon trying to read through them. Honestly, it felt pretty vague. Lots of diagrams that looked impressive but didn’t connect clearly to writing code or fixing bugs.
My next step was trying to apply it to a small part of our current project. We had this feature development going on. I thought, okay, let’s try mapping it out using his suggested ‘value stream’ or whatever he called it.
- I grabbed a whiteboard.
- I tried drawing the boxes and arrows like in his examples.
- I attempted to fit our simple process into his complex model.
It was tough going. Felt like I was forcing a square peg into a round hole. Our process was simple: get task, code task, test task, merge task. His model seemed to want ten extra steps, involving stakeholders I didn’t even know we had.
We even had a follow-up session, a workshop. More talking. I specifically asked how this method handles urgent bug fixes. The answer was… well, it involved scheduling another meeting. Not exactly helpful when something’s broken right now.
What Happened in the End
After a few weeks of trying to shoehorn our work into this Xaiver Wade structure, we kind of… quietly stopped. It wasn’t a big announcement. We just drifted back to our old ways because, frankly, we needed to get stuff done. The fancy charts got wiped off the whiteboard. The documents gathered digital dust.
Looking back, it felt like one of those management trends that sweeps through now and then. Someone reads a book or goes to a conference, gets excited, and tries to impose it on everyone without really understanding if it fits. We spent time in meetings, tried to follow along, but ultimately, it just added overhead without much benefit that I could see. Just another thing that came and went. We went back to what worked, messy as it sometimes was.
