I have to push back against the 'process' too often to care to count. The idea of the self managed team shatters against the rocks of: there is no card on the board for this so I can't do it, which produces boards filled with cards that have no user value in them. We twist ourselves in knots explaining that 'yeah, implementing the CI/CD pipeline brings value to the user because we are faster at delivering software'.

  It boils down to the idea that the 'user stories' are just metric collection tools, so if you haven't delivered a story, you implicitly have done nothing.

  And the 'placeholders for a conversation' have become mini requirement docs, because we don't trust our development team to pick up a card and investigate, communicate and plan their work. So refinement meetings become long debates on the minutia of the story, litanies of acceptance criteria that read like contract agreements of years past.

  You begin to see hierarchical structure form in supposed teams of peers, where someone will casually ask: "Hey X - can you put a story on the board with this?"

  "Agile" is no longer a adjective of how our practices are, but a label on a set of processes that some board has certified as such.

  PS: Can anyone tell me why when I write in my iPad all my comments look like code blocks? I know it's annoying too others, but not as much as it is to me!