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No Answers

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Attending a career fair hosted by a conglomerate with a local office provided an opportunity to learn more about that organization.  It provided great information and insight into the culture of both the employees and potential applicants.  This post will focus on the company, as one interaction with a job seeker deserves its own. Conversations during initial mingling provided the first important bits of information.  The company was two years into a transformation implementing S_Fe (Scaled "A"gile Framework) with Scrum Alliance based inaccuracies.  The fact that it was part of a four-year plan, exposes that the mindset remains inline with the PMI and traditional schedule-based approaches.  Their new work was more-of-the-same, highly scheduled, phase-based attempt to analyze and determine next actions which were phrased as four different words beginning with the letter r. The person in charge of the transformation provided more details in their opening rem...
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Mature Scrum

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It's not uncommon to hear managers at many companies state they use the "Agile Method" or they have a "Mature Scrum" implementation.  It's perhaps the biggest red flag that an organization is misinformed or ignorant about the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and the Scrum framework .  As one asks probing questions and they elaborate further, it quickly becomes clear that it simply another rebranding of a traditional, phase-gated, schedule-driven, Taylor-based process characterized by people working in silos with limited communication and a focus on output over outcomes. At one company it was expressed that they rarely had a complete, possibly releasable Increment at the end of a Sprint.  Rather they were focused on completing all the tasks in the release road map.  Testing was executed on a separate cadence after development work was completed and handed off to another group, external to the company, which often resulted in rework interrupting the...
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Cowardace

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Mike Cohn is perhaps the best example of the worst coach in the agile product development space. After I commented on a blog post with my concerns, another individual prompted me regarding my thoughts on improvement.  (Assuming positive intent here.)  I had to create another account to reply because my primary one was being blocked as spam which I mentioned in my response. Mike responded.  I began a response but was unable to post it because he deleted it while I was composing.  Why did he delete it?  Was it because he is so busy?  Positive intent was assumed but after reading his statements I did some data gathering and analysis.  That became the center of my response: http://disq.us/p/1nsxccm Giving up on attempting to have a meaningful conversation with Mike, I returned after comments were locked.  However another user had pointed out the probability that Mike really was not too busy and that I had probably hit the nail on the head: http...
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Transparency

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Upper and middle management (chiefs, executives, directors, and whatnot) often prefer to refer to themselves as leadership and have others do the same.  These individuals often chase buzzwords.  They do not always dig deeply enough to understand the concepts, systems, and processes they are choosing.  Wanting to "use Agile" is a common scenario. One of the core competencies of teams that want to be agile in their product development is the ability to inspect and adapt.  In order to effectively improve, transparency needs to exist.  Transparency sounds great when the assumption it is that is serves the top-down.  When the reality of the need for transparency from the top is realized, then that excitement disappears.
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My Agile Journey: Part 2

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Eventually a Scrum Master was hired, actually he was a SAFe Program Consultant.  He said all the right things in the interview.  After a few Sprints it became apparent that it was part of his ability to read people and give them the answers that they wanted to hear.  Sprint Retrospectives became about metrics to please the hierarchy. The micromanagement continued to grow out of control.  Due to time zone differences between us and the parent company, the Daily Scrum was to be recorded and emailed to management every day.  The discussion of each Sprint Retrospective was to be documented and reported in detail.  Sprint Planning was required to schedule all team members to complete capacity.  Sprint Reviews were traditional project progress reporting meetings. Another discussion with the Director, Agile Trainer, and management was attempted.  The difference between management and leadership was not understood.  Citing how their mentality and...
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