> You can’t win horse races with pack mules, my dad (a basketball coach) used to say.
You can boil it down to saying that Scrum is either (a) micromanagement or (b) an admission that your developers and their managers suck.
Fix the problem, instead of slapping a bureaucratic band-aid on that's going to attrit any remaining quality developers.
I don’t think this is right. It’s like a sports team: your system, your philosophy, your approach matters. Like in basketball, you might utilize the flex motion offense or you might use the Tex Winters’ triangle.
Good teams can succeed with both, but depending on your personnel and what you’re up against, you might find one strategy works better than the others.
And I've seen it used exactly that way in practice at bad companies.
It's not a strawman if it's lived experience and professed corporate IT strategy at a lot of non-tech companies.
Sounds familiar.
Back in my consultant days, we would encounter companies that wanted to be “agile”. They’d always insist they were waterfall and that it wasn’t working.
Truth is, if they’d actually been doing waterfall they’d have been performing far better. Instead, they were just chaos, reacting to one fire after another with no plan to get out.
Additionally, many teams were simply staffed with poor managers and poor engineers. There’s no consulting-fu or process-fu that was going to overcome that. You can’t win horse races with pack mules, my dad (a basketball coach) used to say.