3 ms·
In my many years of software, I've come to the following conclusion: The "worst" process followed consistently across all levels of a company will always outper
by snarf21 4y ago
In my many years of software, I've come to the following conclusion: The "worst" process followed consistently across all levels of a company will always outperform the "best" process followed haphazardly with no real buy-in.
The reason agile fails at so many companies is that Product and Leadership don't want to do the hard work of keeping an up to date rank ordered list of groomed and deconstructed work that provides the greatest value to the business. Agile is about progress and learning and using that new information to decide what to do next.
At my current company we are using SAFe, where you plan 3 months of work at a time which is the complete opposite of being agile. Again, it asks the wrong questions. It asks "What are we committing to during this PI?" instead of "What is the most important and business value adding tasks we should be working on?" Leadership only wants the answer to when it will be done but that is up to them. It will get done as soon as they make it the highest priority thing.
- nradov 4y agoSAFe doesn't require planning in 3-month program increments. The methodology is flexible and allows much shorter planning horizons when appropriate such as when the team is small and requirements are in rapid flux. I think everyone understands that running long program increments isn't ideal from an agile development perspective. However, sometimes it is the least bad option for the enterprise as a whole. There are often a variety of program stakeholders outside the core team who can provide valuable input but aren't always available. It's a lot more practical to pull in everyone for two days of focused PI planning than to try to chase them down and schedule meetings on demand.