Very early on in my professional career as a young software developer I was working in the IT department of an office supplies company. Our department was a pretty open and accessible one. One time I got to chatting with someone in another department – it might have been accounting – about some rather tedious and time-consuming task that she had to do repeatedly.

I volunteered that I could write a script to automate a lot of that manual work. So I wrote the script, gave it to her to use, and was pretty happy to be of help.

However, when my manager found out about it, he was very upset with me. He made it very clear that he had not approved doing that work. I apologized and said it would not happen again.

Lesson learned:

I realized that managers are responsible for how their reports are spending their time. I had made the mistake of taking on something that he was not aware of and had not approved.

So it’s critical to keep communicating with your manager – and really, with everyone – about where you’re expending your attention and what you’re working on.

With where I am now as a scrum master and agilist, I see this as a good example of practicing the scrum pillar and kanban value of “transparency”.