5 ms·

> you generally do not pivot I'm just going to grab this tiny part and focus on it. I've seen Agile fail many times for this exact reason. In start-up land, on

> you generally do not pivot I'm just going to grab this tiny part and focus on it. I've seen Agile fail many times for this exact reason. In start-up land, one might pivot and massively change an end goal. In corporate land that's a lot less off a thing. I've worked on some big projects in government and fortune 500, all of them pretended to be Agile and all of them had predefined scopes, deadlines and budgets. In all of those projects, Agile was more of a disturbing factor than anything else. The only flexible part was the scope of work, because of renewed insights or lack of specification while planning. This always ends with teams getting pressured to make deadlines (because those are never flexible), so they cut corners and work extra long hours. I think it would be much better for these types of projects (and the sanity of devs) not to pretend to be doing Agile, but just admit they want a more Prince2 led Waterfall approach. This won't happen though, because that puts the pressure with management in stead of the dev teams.

nicoburns 3y ago
I've done agile projects where the client was a big corporation. There was a fixed budget and deadline, but we specifically reserved some of that time/money for unspecified work at the start of the project. In the latter parts of the project we could then prioritise the work that was deemed most important by the client once they'd already seen the work in progress. I suspect it took quite a bit of work by our project team to convince them to work this way. But it's really great if you make it happen.
- donkeyd 3y ago
  > I suspect it took quite a bit of work by our project team to convince them to work this way. It probably did. I've seen a couple of organizations that did this well, but the majority did not, unfortunately. In the end the sales guy will usually have received their bonus far before the project is over. I'm mostly amazed that companies like this can keep running for decades, but they do.
chrisweekly 3y ago
> "predefined scopes, deadlines and budgets" That's all 3 legs of the "iron triangle" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle). At least one too many.

nicoburns 3y ago

I've done agile projects where the client was a big corporation. There was a fixed budget and deadline, but we specifically reserved some of that time/money for unspecified work at the start of the project. In the latter parts of the project we could then prioritise the work that was deemed most important by the client once they'd already seen the work in progress. I suspect it took quite a bit of work by our project team to convince them to work this way. But it's really great if you make it happen.

donkeyd 3y ago
> I suspect it took quite a bit of work by our project team to convince them to work this way. It probably did. I've seen a couple of organizations that did this well, but the majority did not, unfortunately. In the end the sales guy will usually have received their bonus far before the project is over. I'm mostly amazed that companies like this can keep running for decades, but they do.

chrisweekly 3y ago

> "predefined scopes, deadlines and budgets" That's all 3 legs of the "iron triangle" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle). At least one too many.