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And then tells the employees to implement the consultants model. While the management continues in old ways and refuses to totally let go. Now the team is suppo

by fsloth 11y ago

And then tells the employees to implement the consultants model. While the management continues in old ways and refuses to totally let go. Now the team is supposed to be "self organizing" but actually the management uses the tools intended for teams self-organization, learning and communications as precision vehicles in employee evaluation. Which completely erodes the 1. requirement for succesfull 'agile' - trust. Also, goodbye honest communication.

ethbro 11y ago
IMHO, agile is a bad fit for a lot of legacy, heavily-employeed companies. Would it be incorrect in saying that agile has an implicit position of "if you don't trust this developer, fire them"? Which I think is much more of an option in a startup than some politicized offices.
- alistairSH 11y ago
  FWIW, my employer is a legacy, heavily-employed company (3000 employees, 20 physical offices worldwide). We use scrum or scrum-hybrid for most projects/teams. I do think it's incorrect to state "if you don't trust this developer, fire them." At least, it's no more true in an agile environment than any other.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    A couple of questions then: what's the long term result of a perpetual "I haven't done {thing X} because of {justification Y or Z}"? And related to that, do you encounter the "no one on the agile team is empowered to remove this blocker" (because it's too many departments away and that team has no stakeholder/ownership close enough to the agile team)? If so, how does that play?
    - alistairSH 11y ago
      1. Most of those can be avoided with enough coordination and planning. If you know thing X has a dependency, you need to plan for it (and make sure any other team knows about it). Weekly scrum-of-scrums, leadership meetings, etc. 2. No, we don't usually encounter that. That said, when we do run into long-running problems, we do need to escalate. One of our systems had some serious performance problems and it did take VP involvement (daily 15 minute standup with the players involved) to keep things moving towards a resolution. It's annoying when it happens, but I'm not sure it's completely avoidable in a large org. Perhaps I've been lucky, but management has always had my back - we def have a culture of servant-leadership, at least in my division.

by fsloth 11y ago

ethbro 11y ago

IMHO, agile is a bad fit for a lot of legacy, heavily-employeed companies. Would it be incorrect in saying that agile has an implicit position of "if you don't trust this developer, fire them"? Which I think is much more of an option in a startup than some politicized offices.

alistairSH 11y ago
FWIW, my employer is a legacy, heavily-employed company (3000 employees, 20 physical offices worldwide). We use scrum or scrum-hybrid for most projects/teams. I do think it's incorrect to state "if you don't trust this developer, fire them." At least, it's no more true in an agile environment than any other.
- ethbro 11y ago
  A couple of questions then: what's the long term result of a perpetual "I haven't done {thing X} because of {justification Y or Z}"? And related to that, do you encounter the "no one on the agile team is empowered to remove this blocker" (because it's too many departments away and that team has no stakeholder/ownership close enough to the agile team)? If so, how does that play?
  - alistairSH 11y ago
    1. Most of those can be avoided with enough coordination and planning. If you know thing X has a dependency, you need to plan for it (and make sure any other team knows about it). Weekly scrum-of-scrums, leadership meetings, etc. 2. No, we don't usually encounter that. That said, when we do run into long-running problems, we do need to escalate. One of our systems had some serious performance problems and it did take VP involvement (daily 15 minute standup with the players involved) to keep things moving towards a resolution. It's annoying when it happens, but I'm not sure it's completely avoidable in a large org. Perhaps I've been lucky, but management has always had my back - we def have a culture of servant-leadership, at least in my division.