Re:The State of Agile Software in 2018
by Jtsummers on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @12:10PM
(#18293689)
This is why Lean and Agile are both failing in my place of employment.
Lean (on the production side) because they failed to take into account one of the most important concepts of lean: employee empowerment. Rather than letting workers improve their own processes (or identify improvements to be approved by engineers if they made sense, some shortcuts don't need to be taken), they had management, engineers (sometimes), and manpower specialists walk through the area and come back to the workers with a statement like: Put X here, and Y there, that'll shave off 200 round trips a day and save you 2 hours for the work. They may not be wrong, but they've intruded on the worker's area without really consulting with them. They also gave the impression that the freed up time would be used to cut staffing (because now they can do more with less), rather than take on more workload. This scared the employees.
Agile (on our software and services side) is failing for the same kind of reasons.
"I heard we should have daily standups, so everyone have a daily standup!" Some teams have used it effectively, others haven't. Their leads don't know what to do with the time.
Then we had people who insisted there's no planning in Agile (which is not true), and thought you could just throw things on the backlog and pull it off the queue and that'll be fine (they never go through the backlog and treat it correctly, prioritizing and grooming it). Which creates a bad result almost every time (surprise!). This leads to a bad impression amongst workers ("Agile doesn't work here.") and management ("Agile never works.") and customers ("We want you to lay out your 5-year detailed schedule because that 2-week at a time thing failed spectacularly.").
The two extremes of Agile Adherents are both present here. Those who mistake Agile for Scrum or SAFe and believe there's a one-true-way with heavyweight (but not Waterfall!) processes. And those who believe it's an anarchic free-for-all with no processes and no plans. Both have missed the point of it, and both have made my job and efforts much harder.
Lean (on the production side) because they failed to take into account one of the most important concepts of lean: employee empowerment. Rather than letting workers improve their own processes (or identify improvements to be approved by engineers if they made sense, some shortcuts don't need to be taken), they had management, engineers (sometimes), and manpower specialists walk through the area and come back to the workers with a statement like: Put X here, and Y there, that'll shave off 200 round trips a day and save you 2 hours for the work. They may not be wrong, but they've intruded on the worker's area without really consulting with them. They also gave the impression that the freed up time would be used to cut staffing (because now they can do more with less), rather than take on more workload. This scared the employees.
Agile (on our software and services side) is failing for the same kind of reasons.
"I heard we should have daily standups, so everyone have a daily standup!" Some teams have used it effectively, others haven't. Their leads don't know what to do with the time.
Then we had people who insisted there's no planning in Agile (which is not true), and thought you could just throw things on the backlog and pull it off the queue and that'll be fine (they never go through the backlog and treat it correctly, prioritizing and grooming it). Which creates a bad result almost every time (surprise!). This leads to a bad impression amongst workers ("Agile doesn't work here.") and management ("Agile never works.") and customers ("We want you to lay out your 5-year detailed schedule because that 2-week at a time thing failed spectacularly.").
The two extremes of Agile Adherents are both present here. Those who mistake Agile for Scrum or SAFe and believe there's a one-true-way with heavyweight (but not Waterfall!) processes. And those who believe it's an anarchic free-for-all with no processes and no plans. Both have missed the point of it, and both have made my job and efforts much harder.