Questioning the Experts

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...

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...