Ok I'll be the contrarian. My team transitioned to agile about a year ago. The difference has been dramatic. We ship faster, are way more focused, able to prior

Ok I'll be the contrarian. My team transitioned to agile about a year ago. The difference has been dramatic. We ship faster, are way more focused, able to prioritize effectively, and don't burn out committing to unrealistic delivery dates. We don't have certified SCRUM masters or any of that silliness. We do have a PMO that knows what shes doing and that makes a huge difference IMO. The entire process is very fluid and we'll never go back. It took us a lot of work and iteration to find a working agreement that worked for us. I think maybe thats where a lot of co's go wrong implementing this stuff. You can't just cookie cutter it. It's a collaborative process with your teammates to find a way you collectively like to work together. And before anyone says that I don't know what it's like on the other side, know my team was following practices very close to that described in this post before switching. An EM decreed that we didn't need all the baggage of sprints etc and ditched it. Total disaster. Everything ended up being high priority (which means nothing was), fire fighting, heroics, burnout, the works. We shipped stuff but we struggled to prioritize larger initiatives such as architectural migrations etc. Really sucked. That EM was an idiot. Also that EM was me.